In the last post I showed you some of the parts that had been made for the 06, this time we will chat about the o5 and do a little more detail about the making of it.

The life of the 05 starts out like any other pressing as a water jet cut flat. The initial flat were made with my band saw and file until it is some what close to what I need. Then they were stamped and checked.

Then drawings are made up based upon our findings and 10 flats are water jetted out. They are pressed and cut to determine if the metal is moving properly in the die. The final pressings are checked and measured to see if it correct. Then the drawings are again changed and 10 more flats ordered and re-stamped and the process is started all over again. Some where between the 8th and 12th time we finally have a product that we want. Once we have the flats are correct and we feel that they are ready I determine the number that I am going to make. In the case of the 05 I want to make 50 complete rifles with the possibility of making 100 total if they sell. So I order 120 flats. In theory that should make 60 receivers. However, if truth be know I am hoping to get 50 complete rifles at of that number. With each step that we take, fixtures have to be made, milling has to completed, welding set ups need to be design and tested so by the time I get to the final product a certain number of them will be reduced to scrap.

In this picture you can see one of the test sets that we stamped a year ago. This is  3 out of 4 receivers that we made. All of them have problems of one sort or another. On the center one the cut for the mag housing was to far back and the lower on has a similar problem but to close to the mag housing. There was also a tearing problem on them as well. the top of the mad well was not pressing correctly and we changed the design and dimensions of the front angle piece. At the end of this process we though we had a correct design, that was not to be correct.

These 5 receiver flat are the latest batch of test pieces that we made. This group came after doing a series of test pieces were we changed the flat design and the stamping dies. There are also major problems with every one of the flats. All but the last one tore and they all had problems with the upper corner of the magazine housing.

This picture shows the tearing.

Another problem was the design of the flat.

This one shows that the flat design was not correct and would have to be changed as it left to much metal up close to the barrel extension.

In addition to the visible problems we have to cut a few of them to check metal thickness after stamping.

The dies were changed again to insure the proper metal thickness.

A few more pictures of the same stampings before and after modifying the dies.

So now with the stampings checked and re-checked we are ready to stamp out the right side receiver. From start to finish the process has taken about a year and over 100 bad stampings have been made. The good news is with the right side completed we can now used that knowledge to reduce the number of bad stampings on the left side of the receiver. Until next time.