GunLab

The new spot welder in the shop

I went to an auction a few weeks back and bought a series 30 spot welded that the company had taken off the line.

I have not had much time to play with it so this weekend it was on the project list. I wired the shop for the spot welder a few weeks back and now it was time to test it out. I put a new plug on the welder and ran an air line to it and hoped for the best. Nothing happened. Air pressure was good, there was power on the plug but nothing happened. It was time to start trouble shooting the controls and hoped that nothing major was wrong. The welder not working was the reason that it probably went to auction. The good news was that I did not pay much for it, in fact the copper in it was worth more then I paid for it.

After about 30 minutes I traced the problem down to a broken wire in the control box.

You can see the red wire that we found under the mess of wires to the left of the picture. This is part of the control circuit that operates the air operated solenoid. Once it was hooked up this welder works like a champ.

The controls allow a much finer control and the welds are great.

Here is a short video on the spot welder.

Cut away CZ-58

Our friend ,Axel, in Germany was nice enough to send this series on cut away pictures of the CZ-58 rifle.

A couple of top views

Some great cut away pictures of the bolt group

One more of the side of the receiver

Thank you Axel, a friend of Gun Lab.

If any one else has pictures of cut away weapons please feel free to contact me for posting.

Life around Gun Lab

Here are more up dates on the going on around here at Gun Lab. All the material was finally received for the new MP-44 and has been machined to size to start the whole process.

We are waiting for the tooling to start the next phase.

The spot welder arms need a little modification to continue the VG1-5 project. It has been milled to the proper dimension and the next step is to cut in the cooling flow paths.

We found a site that does an up-grade to Mach 3 and allows the use of touch off probes. This will be the next major programing improvement to the cnc router.

https://www.youtube.com/user/CVIMSM/videos

We received some really interesting cut away pictures from our friend, Axel, in Germany and will post them soon. Thanks Axel.

All for now.

Playing with the cnc router

Most of Saturday morning was spent with trying to get a feel of how to use the cnc router. The operating system is Mach 3 which is totally different then any other system in the shop. A number of items were learned during this operating time. The first thing was the e-stop is wired in wrong and needs to be fixed. The program would not single block, once the program was started it ran until the end. This problem has to be determined and fixed. The most important improvement has to be a better way to hold down material while machining. I am thinking of making a vacuum table to solve this problem. For our test run I design a basic part that involved no surfacing, still having a little trouble with that in Del-cam. This is the drawing in solid works.

Basically the program that was written to bring the stock to size and radius the corners, ten face it to reduce the thickness and finally cut two pockets one round at a depth of .250 and one square at a depth of .100.

Here is the video of the operation as it was performed.

As a first test run things went well. There is still a lot to learn about Mach 3 as well as fixing some of the glitches we came across.

There was no good way to locate the part in relation to X and Y so the laser edge finder was used.

The MDF board has not been mounted yet so temporary clamps were used. Working on that.

The final product does not look half bad. Del-Cam does not have a wood setting. The next part we will manually program that in.

In the long run this will be a very useful piece of equipment in the shop for making stocks and grips as well as making patterns for metal casting.

Weekend update for 5-18-15

Well it started raining on Friday and continue through Saturday morning. With everything being so muddy it was time for another game plan. I spent the first few hours doing solid works and taking pictures. Then it was out to the wood shop and spend some time with the cnc router. It was noon before we got the problems sorted out with the router, a post for tomorrow. By this time it had started to dry out and out I went for some fun in the fab shop. By the end of the day the cherry picker was back up and running.

Then both Star pistols had new firing pins and had been test fired and the third star was found to use a different size firing pin. Started working on getting the Model 1930 pistols back together, but did not finish that project, I will complete it next weekend. Sunday it was time to have fun pouring more concrete and the slab for the A/C unit was completed. But first the pad had to be prepped and the rest of the rebar set.

Then 9 80# bags later this was the finished result.

Went to the fab shop next. I needed to set up a place for my metal casting furnaces.

So more footers were dug.

Enough fun and I am done for the day.

Sunday Answer 5-17-15

The pictures from yesterday’s post.

Are from a AR-180B rifle. This part is the bolt hold open device.

You can see the difference between the AR-180B and the AR-180 with this next picture.

With The AR-180B some additional parts are required.

Looking at this next set of pictures you can see the difference between the two lower receivers.

The AR-180B was design to use as many AR-15 parts as possible. It was also a plastic injected molded receiver with a metal insert to act as usable surfaces for pins and wear points.

Here a few general picture of the rifle.

A close up of the upper and lower receiver. This picture showers the plastic molded lower and lack of a dust cover in the stamped upper.

What is it Saturday 5-16-15

Video on making the FAL by DSA

There are some real good segments in the video. One showing the stamping of magazines.

Cut away CZ 75

This series of pictures is from a CZ-75 cut away in my collection. I really enjoy cut away weapons. It is a way to study the operation and fit up of a particular weapon. Enjoy the pictures.

Your opinion of the pictures. I really am trying to improve the quality of them on the site.

If anyone has any pictures of cut away weapons please drop me a line so I can share them with everyone. Thanks Chuck

Gun Lab update

Not a big post for today, just an update on the projects we are working on.

First and most important is the VG1-5 project. I received a call this afternoon late that the firing pins can be picked up from the heat treating firm. With this last piece we can send the second rifle to the ATFE for final testing. The second item on the VG project is that all the receiver flats are in the spot welding room and as soon as we modify the spot welders they will be on the line to finish. That will be this week.

The drawings for the MP-44 trunnions are solid modeled and material is ordered so we can finish that project.

The Japanese type 96 and 99 magazines have taken a step back. The first two stamping dies did not work as planed and we needed to send the magazines back. They are still on the drawing board as I need them for my own guns.

The AR-16 is still being solid modeled. We are getting closer but still more time is needed to finish this project. I only work on it when I have spare time and we know how that goes.

A member of our family here at Gun Lab located me an isolation transformer and with that I hope to get the wire edm powered up.

We have been doing a reverse engineering project on a German WW2 machine gun which is coming along nicely and I hope to have drawings in the near future and a solid model shortly after that. This project has been a real ball buster, but with the use of the schools cmm we are getting close now.

I am currently work on a few write ups for the site. Part 2 of the Winchester self loaders should be dome this week, a friend , O.H., is sending me some interesting photo’s and scan’s on a few weapons to post and the third installment on the Bushmaster pistol is in final editing.

This should answer all the questions that have shown up in my in basket. If there are any other question please feel free to drop me a line.

I do need help with a project though. I need manuals for the wire EDM. I am concerned that the batteries have died in the controller and I am going to have to reset the parameters. This machine came with no manuals at all. Here are a few pictures of the panels and model numbers.

Xerox copies are fine. I just need to learn about the parameters and set up of this machine. Thanks everyone for helping.

With nothing else going on I am going to hit the rack, tomorrow is another fun filled day for me.

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