A few days ago a friend left one of those Automags on my work bench.

“Just needs the broken safety lever replaced and doesn’t eject properly.”

He supplied a new safety lever and two springs and bearing balls (BB) each.

Ok, first thing I always do is [...]]]> AMT Automag II – replace safety lever

A few days ago a friend left one of those Automags on my work bench.

“Just needs the broken safety lever replaced and doesn’t eject properly.”

He supplied a new safety lever and two springs and bearing balls (BB) each.

Ok, first thing I always do is checking online to see if anybody posted some info on this.

There was a promising video headlined “AMT Automag II Full Disassembly”.

Sadly it leaves the disassembly part for the slide completely out because it’s “a PITA”.

Well, somebody built it so somebody can take it apart.

First you have to punch out the roll pin that serves as axis for the rear sight.

Since I’m German pins get pushed in from the right side and out from the left.

Of course this didn’t work. Trying from the right side worked hassle-free though.

Heck, these things were made in California so everything is possible.

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After removal of the roll pin turn the elevation screw on the rear sight to max elevation.

The rear sight should come off now. Make sure you don’t lose those both tiny springs underneath.

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Now you can push out the firing pin retaining pin from below. It doesn’t need to go out all the way.

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Now pull out the firing pin. Shaking out the remains of the broken safety lever and ready to go!

Put the safety lever detent spring in the corresponding hole. Now try to place the 2.36mm dia. BB on top of it… It won’t stay there – guaranteed.

To avoid endless searching for the BB that fell on the floor to be gone forever, you clamp the pistol slide inside a plastic bag. This way the BB is landing in the bag and we are happy.

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To keep the BB in place and being able to push it down in the detent spring hole you’ll need a fixture.

Since I’m not planning on doing this ever again (!!!), a simple piece of round wood I found in my trash can was used. Needs a cutout about the diameter of the BB and slightly off center since that matches the location of the detent spring hole in the slide.

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Then clamp the slide in the bench vise slightly canted to the left side so the BB will stay in position.

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BEFORE you continue make sure the BB is going all the way in the detent spring hole!

Both springs provided were either too long or the hole too short. Remember – made in CA!

So I slightly shortened the spring (flattened end towards BB) till the BB was clearing the hole for the safety lever.

With the fixture in place (press fit to the safety hole) the BB has no other way to go when you push it down with a punch.

My friend who dropped that project on my table just showed up and told me: “You need new punches, they suck!”

I guess he grabbed the one I had modified for this exercise and hadn’t been changed back to normal so far.

You have to push down the BB at a slight angle approaching from the cutout for the hammer.

So it helps if you angle the tip of the punch accordingly. Using this specialized tool on something else might become a lil frustrating I can imagine…

While keeping the BB pushed down, you pull out the fixture and (try to) push the safety lever (pointing in the 12 o’clock position) in.

You still will have a hard time to get it in so a slight chamfer on the safety lever as pictured helps a lot.

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Once I got the safety lever in it worked nicely – so far…

BUT after installing the firing pin the safety lever was only rotating about two thirds!

The cutout for the firing pin was not radiused so the safety could not properly rotate under the firing pin and was off center same as the chamfered area on the rear of the safety!

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That required some grinding and fitting on the safety lever – after removing it from the slide!

So BEFORE installing the detent spring and BB, test the interaction between safety lever and firing pin! Saves you the trouble to do it all again.

BTW – it can never hurt to have a large reference collection at hand where you can simply pull a similar gun for comparison!

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Word of caution – NEVER let the hammer fall against the engaged safety at full force!

That’s very likely the reason for the broken safety on this gun.

Engage the safety, pull the hammer slightly back, then pull the trigger and gently lower the hammer.

The safety on this gun doesn’t offer a decocking function. But even with other guns that feature that, I always keep the hammer back and lower it slowly after engaging the safety.

I have experienced damage to the safety at the Walther PP/PPK and P.38/P1 if you just let the hammer drop.

The only gun with slide mounted decocking safety that seems to withstand permanent hammer dropping is the Beretta M9. On the other side I don’t know what the maintenance schedule on these guns is with precautionary replacement of the safety lever.

The only pistols where the decocking function is properly desgined IMO are the SIG 220 series guns and the Sauer & Sohn 1938H of course which was their inspiration. Here the hammer is actually gently lowered against the force of your thumb pressing down the decocking lever.

This is NOT the case with some other guns with similar decocking levers like Astra 80/90/100 or Taurus 92/99.

Finally the test firing to see about the “ejection issue”.

With some random .22 WMR ammo it worked right from the start.

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Happens all the time when people show me guns that don’t cycle properly.

Self-loading guns  esp. recoil operated ones (with the lone exception of inertia systems) need to be firmly supported (hand/shoulder) to cycle and eject/feed.

Time to wrap this gun up and hope to never touch one of those again!

This is his project: Starting with one of the old, [...]]]> With all the Mauser rifles that I picked up something needed to be done with them. I gave a couple to a friend of mine to do some playing around with. At the same time he asked for a couple of single stack AK magazines.

This is his project: Starting with one of the old, rusty Mauser rifles

We cut one of them apart to have a closer look at the condition of the inside of the receiver.

The locking lug area looked to be in good condition

The reason for cutting this particular rifle was the crack in the rear of the receiver

His is one of the Chinese Mauser receivers with fake FN markings but it cleaned up with minimal work.

He cut down the rusted barrel and threaded the inside to take a SKS barrel that did not have the gas port drilled in it.

Then he modified the magazine housing to accept a single stack AK magazine

He drilled and tapped the rear of the magazine housing to accept the magazine release lever spring and guide

and a single stack AK magazine was fitted to feed properly

A little work had to be done to the AK magazine for proper fit up due to the tolerances in the magazine.

The feeding and extraction was tested with dummy rounds.

Now he just needs to find an old sporterised Mauser stock to finish his project.

There are plenty of more Mauser projects here.

A comment from John D.,a friend of gun lab, concerning Chinese Mauser’s.

Chinese Mauser actions should always be proof tested before being used. Mukden (Shenyang) Arsenal was the only Chinese Mauser manufacturer that actually knew what it was doing and had stable processes (regardless of who was in charge) over their entire existence. Mukden was also colocated with the An Shang steel mill, the best in China during the Mauser era. The rest of Chinese Mauser producers were plagued by the vicissitudes of warlord culture. Mukden never used counterfeit identifications on their weapons to the best of my knowledge. A Mukden Model 1935 Mauser rifle compares well with the best from Europe.

Always was a fan of the classic .22 Ruger MK series pistols. Just didn’t like the disassembly/reassembly procedure.

How it all started…

Right after coming over to Arizona I found a few Ruger Mk 1 grip frames at a gun show for $20 each!

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So I had a [...]]]> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSRqPorFM0o&feature=youtu.beBabyRuger Mk 1

Always was a fan of the classic .22 Ruger MK series pistols. Just didn’t like the disassembly/reassembly procedure.

How it all started…

Right after coming over to Arizona I found a few Ruger Mk 1 grip frames at a gun show for $20 each!

PIC 1

So I had a starting point for one of my long time want to do projects – a Baby Ruger.

There are Baby Lugers out there but I couldn’t find a single Baby Ruger. Given the fact that the Ruger MK series is probably one of the most customized and tuned .22 pistols that was quite surprising to me.

Anyway – here at Gun Lab we do what we like to do…

Since there first was the idea to have a grip safety – just for the looks though, having some hump protruding from the rear of the grip – there was no way to use the original way to keep the rear end of the receiver held down on the grip frame.

So I added a tube section to the grip frame, somehow mimicking the contour of the Luger pistol.

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Next step was cutting down the grip frame by half an inch.

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After that the original hammer spring housing needed to replaced.

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Hammer spring assembly had to get a different layout as well.

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Inbetween, when you get stuck with some technical issue you can handle other stuff that needs to be done anyway – like them grip panels.

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Next thing was to cut down the barrel to 88mm. Why exactly that length? Just for the looks! Minimum for reliable function without changes to recoil spring and bolt mass I considered to be 78mm.

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Got that receiver/barrel assy at gunbroker. I was looking at all the gun shows for some ugly, rusted but still functioning  pistol. Of course found it only after I was done with this one…

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Maybe I will do something to it some day. Can’t do just-for-the-fun-of-it  projects all day long!

The front sight was welded from 3 different parts. My first idea was to drill out the original front sight from the cut off barrel, but it didn’t fit (visually) to the shorter barrel. After searching for a while in the huge stockpile of gun parts here I finally decided to make it from scratch.

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If you assemble all the separate parts you were working on all the time there will be some minor adjustments necessary for the gun to work properly. So the magazine needed to sit a trifle lower since the bolt was slightly rubbing against it. The bolt stop pin needed some fitting – it didn’t wanna go all the way in with the recoil spring assembled.

The idea of the grip safety got dropped in the process of building that baby. There was no technical need for it right from the start – just that visual thingy. And there is simply not enough space for adding that feature. The simplified disassembly/assembly method connected with that initial idea survived though.

So after quite a bit of work there you get your piece of gun porn…

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Here is a video on the pistol.

With the cost of everything these days [...]]]> This is kind of an after action report on the 1919A6 barrel that was involved in the accident. The last post on the damage to the 1919A4 due to some Turkish ammo showed a barrel that had a case stuck in it that the base was sheared off.

With the cost of everything these days there was no way to not try and get that barrel back into operation.

The first step was to use a broken shell extractor. I have one or two of them

The ones we tried that acted like they might work.They did in small way. I was able to remove the neck and shoulder of the case with them.

With the neck removed I used my chambering reamer to slowly remove the brass case. After about 20 minutes of running the reamer in then cleaning it I was able to remove the remaining part of the brass case.

The barrel is as good as new and ready to be used again.

It must be stated up front that Pete is licensed to manufacture weapons [...]]]> In previous post we showed the process of machining out a MP-44 trunnion. To test that our trunnions are correct Pete, a friend of gun lab and owner of the trunnions, has started a project of rebuilding a badly torched cut receiver.

It must be stated up front that Pete is licensed to manufacture weapons up to  and including machine guns. This rifle however is being made as a semi auto only and not a machine gun.

This article is a number of posts as the work required to rebuild this rifle is extensive. You can see from the Photo’s just how badly it was destroyed.

By most peoples standard this would be just junk.

However, to a master metal man this is just a challenge.

A great deal of fitting and fixturing is required to assemble this receiver.

A fixture is made for everything

In the next installment we will discuss making the new back piece.

If you have not been to the rifleshooter site you are missing some great stuff. This is his post, you should check [...]]]> I was just over at one of the sites that I try and get to daily and he posted a very good article on

“Turning a sporter contour rifle barrel from a blank”

If you have not been to the rifleshooter site you are missing some great stuff. This is his post, you should check it out.

http://rifleshooter.com/2016/01/turning-a-sporter-contour-rifle-barrel-from-a-blank/

http://www.finegunmaking.com/page56/page56.html

Stock making and rust bluing are two topics that he touches on [...]]]> I was doing research on rust bluing for a up coming project that I need t finish when I came across this site. It is not a how to site per say but there is a great deal of interesting information there.

http://www.finegunmaking.com/page56/page56.html

Stock making and rust bluing are two topics that he touches on that are very interesting.