Whittling a reciever from a block of steel with only hand powered tools can certainly be done. The question is; why would someone do it today. Economics? Certainly not using machines at all doesn't increase the quality. And hand filing a hingepin round to fit in a hand drilled hole in the reciever seems to be a difficult, if not a method of questionable quality, way of doing a job like that since the industrial revolution.
Now if these guys have little hand powered lathes and jigboring machines, that aint exactly purely "handmade".
