doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DIY Gunsmithing @ doublegunshop.com MAC SXS Shotgun - manufacture nat. d'armes de chat

Of course you can cut your rough profile ahead of time on the lathe too when working with W1/silver steel.

Unfortunately, I pretty much have to buy all of my metal from metal vendors.

Both fortunately, and unfortunately I have lots of broken carbide end mills in a bucket for making tools out of.

I do have a project I want to make that is a nice small scale practice analog. A common mold type I make is hinged at one end for casting low temperature melt alloys. Usually I do all the complicated machining on one of the CNC Mills, and then I do basic stuff like drill and tap for handles and drill for the hinge pins on one of the manual milling machines. The hinge pins generally take three drills. The friction size, the free slip size, and a chamfer. The bosses that form the hinge have a uniform thickness size and a multi diameter drill might be faster than sticking three different drills in a chuck on both sides of the mold. Ideally it would be a twist drill, but a d-bit might still be marginally faster than stopping the spindle and changing drills three times for each side of the mold. If it works out at all I might get ahold of rogue .systems Inc and ask them to make me some custom split point drills in carbide.