Very, very true.
After the hearing, NCA deputy director for investigations Chris
Farrimond said: "It is the first time that a fully-functioning firearms factory creating firearms from scratch has been discovered, to our
knowledge, in the UK.
"It was producing handguns, copies of a
Browning pistol, from absolute scratch - from the nuts and bolts and
producing fully functioning lethal firearms at the other end of it, with
the bullets to go with it."
No way of telling whether they were actually manufacturing ammo, or reloading cases, but either is possible.
I'll bet there are others. I've read that during WWII Sten subguns were produced in bicycle shops in the UK, so making something similar now wouldn't be difficult. But they still think they can make them go away...
There's a site called Impro Guns that tracks information about such, the post links notes
that this guy did manufacture the ammo for at least one of the guns he made.
1 comment:
I don't see how a bicycle shop would have the equipment to make the cheap stamped sheet metal parts for the Sten, or the American M3 "greasegun" (unless they meant a bicycle _factory_, which might have presses to stamp out fenders and chain guards.) Most likely, the bike shops were just doing the assembly work, which may have included some filing to fit.
But any machine shop with a lathe and mill can produce the better-quality gun designs with a milled receiver. Rifle barrels might require specialized machine tools to accurately bore with such a high depth to diameter ratio, but short barrels for pistols, subguns, and short-barreled shotguns don't sound challenging.
After you get the barrel bored, if you need rifling there's a rifling tool that's just a cutting bit mounted at an angle on a metal rod. You push it through the barrel several times, making sure to start the second and following passes in the existing groove. In the video I watched, it's more work than using a lathe that's built and has gears to cut rifling, but not too much work for small-scale manufacturing. You don't have to buy that tool; even I could grind the bit from tool steel, and there are millions that could braze the bit to the rod.
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