What manufacturing processes are used by small gun companies?

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>>35170894
Well its going to be 3d printing really soon. Bonus points because liberals think that criminals will ever learn to 3D print guns.

Not today ATF

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Will bump with neat /k/ related images

>>35170894
>actually necessary
A manual lathe, a manual mill, and a fistful of bits and accessories for both. That's it.

That's still at the low end $60,000 worth of tools (and that's if you buy used, Chinese off-brands).

>>35171571

>$60,000

if you are buying brand new top shelf shit maybe, but you can build a completely acceptable and serviceable shop for well under half that.

>>35170938
Big fat NEWP. Not happening.

>>35170894
Wrought bar stock and/or plates, then machined. CNC for production after prototyping, many places don't even do their own machining. Tool machine shops help for R&D work and prototype work.

A moderate CNC mill setup with tooling can be had for roughly $60K.

>>35171571
Bridgeport and a decent lathe (manual) can be had for $6K each roughly, and put another $500-2000 into tooling and you can be up and running.

>>35171632

you can get a nice tormach for under 10 grand. not necessarily the highest output machine, but a lot of guys i know run them with excellent results.

>>35171671
Find me a Bridgeport that isn't totally clapped out for under $10k. You won't, the cheapest you'll find is $12k, it'll be clapped out and missing its chuck ($200) and its bed will need to be re-milled ($800), and it wont have a machinist vise on it. And obviously it will be 40+ years old so no DRO, not that a DRO is really necessary.

Yes, you can get something like a Grizzly 14x40 for around $3000 used. They're not great, but as long as you're not trying to build F-class rifles they'll be good enough.

>>35171628
>brand new top shelf shit
>$60,000
Nigger you can't even sniff the shipping crate of a new Bridgeport CNC mill for less than a million.

>>35171736
>being so brain dead that you think you need a CNC to make a gun

>>35171786
>thinking anything manual is "top shelf shit"

>>35171736

>bridgeport
>one million dollars

sure it is sweetheart. go spend 50 grand on a top tier haas with tooling and laugh your way to the bank.

>>35170938
Unlikely for many years. The plastics used just aren't up to handling common chamber pressures, especially in rifles. There's some shit going around about a similar process that uses metal, but it's still nowhere near strong enough or resilient enough to handle most popular cartridges that can reliably kill anything bigger than a rat.

>>35171821
not for a barrel

someone already 3d printed a metal framed 1911

sintering sucks though

>>35171571
>>35171628
>>35171632
So from the sounds of it stamped sheet metal is still the simplest way for a small shop to make guns? Not polymers of any kind?

>>35170894

Lathes, milling machines, and zamak casting/injection molding

>>35171883
Absolutely. You can make a stamped receiver with a dremel and a hydraulic press.

>>35171821
I think you're referring to DLMS and it has been used to create some neat suppressors that can obviously take the beating no problem. I think its how Brevis makes their shit.

It wont be long until this becomes more common and subsidized.

>>35171821

>What is solid concepts 1911: the post
You are now aware that a fully 3d printed 1911 exists that has fired several thousand rounds without failure.

>>35171736
You have no idea what you are talking about you child.

>>35171883

Yes and no. A machine to melt and put the plastic in the mold isn't hard to build if you can't afford to buy one, but if you can't cut your own molds you're out five digits minimum by the time you have a good functional mold. Do you expect to make and sell enough to make that worth it?

Stampings can be done too, but keep in mind you'll still be machining forms and jigs (which might be as massive and almost as annoying to make as a mold), and you will need a spot welder at minimum.

Going into production isn't easy or cheap a lot of times.

>>35171883
Id ask hi-point. They supposedly make their guns with machines and techniques designed for producing auto parts.

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>>35172079
So all my questions have been answered. The Boberg, Hudson 9 and other pistols are still using aluminum and steel when everything else is polymer, not because they necessarily want to but because they can't afford polymer. Interesting.

>>35172079
>>35172202

Friend works for a company that produces industrial brewing equipment. By far one of their largest expenditures is the prototyping and outsourcing of plastic molds. The cost to produce when they are finished is next to nothing, but the costs incurred to get there are no joke.

By that same token all their aluminum machining is done in house at a rate 1000x that of producing stuff out of finished molds, but still hasn't come close to their initial molding setup phase lifetime costs and they have been around for a decade.

>>35170938
>implying niggers can even use a computer
>implying cholos can learn CAD
printing ABS or PLA won't yield more than a functional single part, good luck making an assembly. Not worth the time or money for people who want guns for illegal shit without casting the parts afterwards

>>35171821
November 2013, old timer.

https://www.stratasysdirect.com/blog/how-its-made-3d-printed-1911-pistol

>>35173693
proof of concept ≠ commercially viable product

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I'll bump again, this is the first intelligent discussion I've read here in a while

>>35171632
>>35171821
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ZYKMBDm4M

Grain strength is fine to take it from all directions.

now that you have seen this, both of you, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U18EuNN2D0

>>35170894
I'm not a machinist, but I do know that a few complicated parts that you can't make yourself you can contract to other places for less than the investment if you plan on building less that 10k units or so.

>>35170938
DMLS has properties equivalent to cast, will be the "MIM is shit" meme 2.0

>>35170894
basic machinine tooling

The barrel/chamber is the only hard part

>>35171883
You could actually make lots of gun parts out of wood.

>>35174723
Rifling a barrel is the only hard part. You can chamber a barrel blank on a lathe easily.

>>35170894
Lathe
Mill
Are the bare minimum.


A good shop will have
Multi axis cnc
Cnc lathe
Wire edm machine
Heat treat capability ( at least for small parts, large parts can be sent out)
Gun barrel lathe/drilk of they are doing their own rifling.
Coating booth, or tanks as needed.


A production shop will have multipul of the above as well as injection molding machines. Test equipment, ect.

>>35174738
>Rifling a barrel is the only hard part
this.

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>>35174737

>small time manufacturers
>not casting everything possible
Poorfags were a mistake

>Bridgeport
Man fuck that place

Could you make a stamped steel revolver? They're all so expensive compared to glockoffs.

>>35174737
Like the stock?

>>35175526
Many parts could be made of stamped steel, it might even be practical for the frame to be stamped. But the cylinder and barrel have to be machined. However, that isn't too far off from SMGs with every component stamped except the barrel and bolt.

>>35171722
My step brother got a Bridgeport for $500

>>35175604
Neat. Guess it makes sense, hell the Barrett .50 is stamped.

>>35171883
stamping sheet metal is good for high production, but its actually harder to make prototypes stamped. A stamping machine can churn out a shitload of parts once its set up but that setup takes a while, meanwhile a milling machine can mill fucking anything if you have blueprints for it but will take longer for production. This is why AK-47s were originally milled while the more prevalent AKMs were stamped. the small production runs of the original AK-47 were done on mills due to lack of resources.

>>35174737
i think someone made a pine wood ar lower once
http://weaponeer.net/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=8035&PN=1&TPN=1

>>35174738
>>35174766
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D43ZeYu9dnM

>>35172023
You are now required to post proof

>>35171722
Wherever you live has a weird market for machine tools. My neighbor bought every machine in his shop for it's scrap iron weight. It's not uncommon locally for factories to simply dispose of lathes and mills by dumping them in a field and torching them apart. A clean Bridgeport around here is about 2-4k.

Speaking of small company gun production.. What happened to the Pepe rifle or whatever it was? The poorfag /k/ rifle that some autist was dead set on making some months back.

>>35176081
failed horribly, anon never revealed his Sooper Sekrit trigger mechanism, built a nonfunctional piperifle prototype

>>35176099
A bit of a shame because something like that would actually be pretty handy, but as expected. I imagine he never released his super sekrit rifling technique either.

>>35173729

Except that's not true, faggot. It's no less viable than any other 3d printed part, which is to say "it's a shit method for producing 100,000 of X ASAP" ...but this is due to 3d printing taking a fuckoff long time to get anything done. You could make up for it just by having absolute shittons of printers, but 1. Why and 2. Are we talking about small shops or a 30 acre factory?

>>35174720
Just wait, ruger will get into it and it will be the next "Lol can your reloads blow this up?" gun.

>>35175891
You dumb nigger video of the thing firing has already been posted.

>>35176122
it already exists and its called the hi point 995

If you aren't bothered with not being able to produce large quantities of guns, I'd say the starting point for being able to make one in a decent amount of time would be: a good set of files and other basic tools, hydraulic press, bench drill and a vise. Parts are not going to be particularly high quality, but you can probably make a fully rifled gun without pulling your hairs out, given enough patience and
willingness to learn. You can probably get all of that for a couple thousand.

Obviously improvements to this include getting a lathe (as a replacement to using a bench drill to make the barrel), mill (way easier to process the parts), then CNC of all that. That creeps you upwards towards the high prices other anons are talking about.

Optionally, on the low end you could add a 3D printer to the mix. It could work for certain components, but obviously you shouldn't rely on it (though nylon at 100% infill can be pretty good), not to mention it would be really useful to dry-fit parts to check them.

Obviously, a small gun company would be willing to go at least to the investment of a good manual lathe and mill.

>>35175203
>I don't know anything- the post

>>35174615
>he tries to tell a metallurgical engineer
Yes, it is "fine" in the sense of it can fire. No, it is not fine from the sense of equipment cost, operation cost, mechanical properties, corrosion properties, and time to produce.

Additive manufacturing is pretty much a meme in the mechanical and metallurgical world. It is solely good for prototyping and it is severely limited in even that application.

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>>35171821
>The plastics used just aren't up to handling common chamber pressures
Even if its only 22 it will be good enough for criminals and once they figure this out its game over and the police state will have its excuse to go full totalitarian.. especially in europe where its only a matter of time till criminals get smart enough

>>35171632
>Big fat NEWP. Not happening.
It is literally only a matter of time.

>>35172281
Underestimating your opponent is unadvised and it literally is only a matter of time. Once one of the criminals figures it out in their community and spreads their knowledge to others it is full on game over.
Guys I know youre not ready to hear it but we need to implement some sort of online circle of trust which allows us to trust eachother without intervention from the state kind of like how bitcoin allows people to trust value, but we need to do it with guns. In the future a lone pyscho will have access to machines which will be able to print drones which are almost like a mini cruise missile and if we dont have a decentralized system which allows us to trust eachother the police state will go patriotact 9.999 and force us to live in a totalitarian system.

>>35174720
Thats current metal 3d printers but when they figure out how to go t-1000 it will be future.

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>>35175891
Here's a follow-up one they made for shiggles.
Manufacturing this with subtractive manufacturing would be a fucking nightmare, btw.

>>35170938
Maybe for low stress components: lowers and whatnot. Everything else will still have to be made the old fashioned way.

>>35175526
Thing about revolvers is that they have to be fitted by hand. The actual manufacturing is neither particularly complicated nor necessarily expensive. Timing the little bastards, on the other hand, has to be done by an actual person. That's what you wind up paying extra for.

>>35180718
Why do you have to time it? Wouldn't precise machined parts make that unnecessary?

>>35181235
Nope. "Precise" doesn't mean perfect, it means "close enough that we won't get sued". With modern autoloaders this doesn't matter. As long as the part is within acceptable tolerances, there's really not much to fuck up. The slide racks back, the cartridge feeds forward, the gun goes boom. While it does look like there's a lot going on, the chamber, the most important part, never changes position relative to the rest of the gun. Revolvers are the exact opposite in that the chamber is always in motion, and to work properly must always index perfectly (for an acceptable level of perfect) with both a static barrel and firing pin, while at the same time suffering constant abuse by the user swinging the gate out then slamming it shut. Sure, precise machining can and does take a lot of the work out of the finishing, but it still has to be completed by an actual human.

>>35174723
Rifling is

Also pistol barrels fucking suck

Our brand new NTY3s all take about 8 minutes to machine from a rifled blank

>>35174760
Forgetting Swiss lathes for smaller shit

>>35181461
You know the metal additive printed 1911s were precise as to be perfect?

https://www.stratasysdirect.com/blog/worlds-first-3d-printed-metal-gun

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>want to start up a gun company
>don't have a hundred grand to drop on this shit
FUCK why couldn't I just be passionate about cheap plastic toys or something

>>35181946
So the people who made the gun stated in their own personal blog that the gun, which they made, is perfect? Wow. You are correct and I am forever shamed, anon.

On a completely different subject, have you ever considered entering the rarified world of bridge ownership? It's not as expensive as you might think.

>>35170894
Not everything needs to be in-house. In fact, none of it needs to be in-house.

>>35182087
Sure, and then middlemen make your product uncompetitive.

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>tfw designing pistol
>tfw frame will be cast and slide will be stamped
>tfw it'll take on the hi point and hopefully come out on top

i don't know whether to be worried about production costs or not. the frame'll be cast out of zinc alloy cuz i can do that in my fucking backyard but stamping will be tougher

>>35182442
Stamping is only really viable if you have a very high production volume, you're embossing features into it (like ribs) or other features you can't just do on a press brake.

MOST sheet metal components can easily be made on a laser/plasma/water jet cutter and then just bent to spec. Fair warning, though: Angular tolerances are SHIT and the dimensions of the part after a bend will vary pretty significantly if there's any variation in the material thickness, so always measure the thickness of the sheets you buy.

>>35170938
>oh look it's 3D printing again
No, just fucking no, stop this nonsense. Nobody is going to print anything in large volumes because that's stupid, just stop. It's neat for a home shop, it's not on a manufacturing floor. You might as well have some rather skilled retard hand-make everything, because in the end you're going to have the same rate of production.

>>35171883
Polymers can be done, but they're special. >>35172079 is right, but he leaves out that you can possibly alter your design to make it more easily molded. That can mean anything, by the way, if you alter your design to use slices of rolled polymer glued together then you don't really need to have anything except a way to make those slices. Stamps, cutting, what have you are going to be your friends.

If you don't have a lot of money, build a cutting machine yourself that does exactly what you need it to and no more. I understand that it might be tempting to use a CNC device and you absolutely can build one, but a cutter relying on mechanical guidance (a hand-cut template perhaps) will be cheap and quick with little to go wrong.

>>35182442
You're going to want to have at least five grand for a big press build if you're doing it in a small shop, >>35182496 is right that it only gets viable in large numbers.

If that's too hard/expensive do as I suggested above and use thin slices and bonding to make your frame. Your slide might be a pain in the ass, maybe try forging?

>>35182567
I'm curious. Do you think that 3D printing could open an avenue for making significantly cheaper polymer molds?

>>35182567
what if i cast the slide as well as the frame? the slide will essentially be mostly empty save for some pin holes as the bolt is a separate machined block

>>35182321
Uncompetitive to what? Your little pet project isn't going to be winning contracts and there's no point racing to the bottom to sell to poorfags.

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>>35182573
Not him, but yes.
Have you ever looked at the texture of, say, a car's plastic dash board? It's rough, right? That's because when you machine the mold, especially if it has a very "organic" shape and isn't just a bunch of sharp angles, you're always going to be able to see marks from the toolpath. When you move the cutter through material, it deflects away from the direction you're cutting.

Here's a really crude and exaggerated image to show you what I mean.
In reality, it'll be just a tiny, tiny amount, but it'll be enough that you can SEE the small circular pattern along the entire tool path and you can bet your ass that any object made in a mold with visible machining marks is going to have the same marks mirrored onto its surface. In order to solve this, companies blast the inner surface of the mold with some sort of media to purposefully rough it up.

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>>35182573
>>35182658 (cont.)
One of the major advantages that even our current processes have is that you can control the coarseness of the surface finish. One of the first major applications for this was medical implants because purposefully giving it a rough surface allows for osseointegration. The bones grow around and into the implants. They effectively become PART of the bones.

>>35171571
Dude fucking mountain chinks in the filipines build 1911 out of mud and clay, they're not spendin 60$k

>>35182676
Funny that you mention that. I work for a company that manufactures shoulder implants. I don't have anything to do with manufacturing though. I just make sure we get paid.

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>>35182573
>>35182658
>>35182676 (cont.)
So yeah, even if you can't get a perfect mirror-like surface, you have to admit that what we're getting already in terms of surface finishes are absolutely adequate for most applications.

Also, for what it's worth, when you get into machining huge fucking molds, it can take literally DAYS to just do the initial machining, let alone all the aforementioned post-processing, so the amount of time it takes to print it won't be too substantially different in many cases.

>>35182684
Cool beans, Anon. Shit changes people's lives.

>>35182573
Doubt it. You can already make cheap tooling in aluminium, the problem is it doesn't last. Any printed tooling is also going to be soft as shite.

>>35182717
>Titanium Cobalt alloys
>soft as shite
You're soft in the head.

>>35182730
If you're spending that much money why not just machine a nice set of tooling instead?

>>35182742
If you're spending that much money, you're going to spend that much money anyway.

>>35182745
Yeah, but it's going to last a lot longer and be much easier to alter if needed.

>>35182750
>Last longer
Citation required.
>Easier to alter
If you're modifying an existing mold, you've already fucked up royally.

>>35182758
>Citation required
I'm personally aware of injection tooling that's 30 years old, and if you're making a whole new set instead of updating an old one, you've got more money than sense.

>paying for business expenses with your own money
Failed from the start. Form an LLC and take out a small business loan. If youre trying to start a business where you have to buy a bunch of tooling, do it right.
>but I don’t have any business skills, machining talent, a business plan, product, connections or any required skill to be successful
Then why are you thinking about buying a bunch of expensive shit? Become a gunsmith apprentice first.

>>35182777
I've seen decades-old molds as well, but the only modifications made to them were repairs, not changing the geometry of the mold cavities themselves.

>>35182802
Changing logos is pretty common. Personally if anyone I worked with sent an order to some meme printing operation for serious tooling I'd have them fucking shot. Might be worth playing around with for some non-critical low volume part if they get costs down to ally mould levels though, marketing would like it at the very least.

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>>35182573
3D printing injection molding tooling is already a thing. Formlabs should have some info on it if you're interested. It is my understanding that 3D printed tooling is suited for bridging the gap between RTV casting and aluminum tooling for relatively small production runs.

>>35182658
>Have you ever looked at the texture of, say, a car's plastic dash board? It's rough, right? That's because when you machine the mold, especially if it has a very "organic" shape and isn't just a bunch of sharp angles, you're always going to be able to see marks from the toolpath.

You probably shouldn't listen to this guy. Like at all. Texture on a cosmetic surface of a professionally produced part is going to be a texture that is specifically applied to the surfaces of the mold after primary machining is done. There are companies like Mold Tech that specialize in textures and texture application. You will almost never see machining marks in an injection molded part simply because of the time and expense it takes to create the tooling.

>>35182758
Depends entirely on what sort of modifications you are making. Pretty much every tool will require some modifications after the first shots to dial it in for production, which is why it helps to design the part to be steel safe (it's easier to remove material for the tool than to add it).

>>35182886
That was my entire fucking point. It's done via post-process.

>>35182918
No, you're still wrong because it is entirely possible to get a polished surface even on a very organic shaped tool. Texture is used for many reasons but "necessity" isn't one of them.

>>35182717
Basic bitch ABS molds in an aluminum housing can produce a hundred or so parts before it starts to go.

Whether it's a wise investment for a shop to get a printer just to prototype for slightly cheaper is a whole other matter.

>ctrl+f
>"Philippines"
>0

The illegal trades in the Philippines still do a lot of work by hand. There are some guys who do it alone in their back yard, ffs. But take a look at this video, it seems to be a pretty accurate depiction of the bare minimum for manufacturing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4qwK1KgL_s