A week's worth of shooting related machine work

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Most of last week's production was shooting and reloading related work. The first photo is our finished work shelf. The three boxes on the left contain the parts for 15 barrel rests and 15 butt rests for shotguns that are used in spot/beef/money shoots. A mutual friend got us together. I am not selling his product, just showing this stuff as an example of our machine work. I will post pictures of the assembled products if he sends me some.

Finished products shelf
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Barrel rest and butt rest parts
gunstuff3.jpg

The right hand box is knobs and jam nuts. The CNC lathe was tied up so I did all the turning and knurling on a manual lathe and the drilling and tapping on a CNC mill. The knobs in front have a flat top, the ones in back have a domed top and were cut with a hand ground form tool. All are made from 1-1/4" 6061 Al round stock.

Knobs and jam nuts
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The last two photos are our own products, one is Lee type dies (we ran 100) and other is Lyman/RCBS type top punches. We didn't count how many we got, we just made forty feet of them.

Lee type dies
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Forty feet of top punch blanks
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Next week we plan to run some Saeco type dies as well as some Star/Magma type dies.
 

Brad

Benevolent Overlord and site owner
Staff member
I love the unit of measure- 40 ft of top punch blanks.

Any of you guys with a lathe need to try the Lee blanks from Keith. Saves me a good 30-45 minutes of cutting threads and getting other dimensions right. They machine like a breeze and finish to size very well.

Get more than you think, you will soon be making the in a variety of sizes just because they are so easy.
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
Since we improved our tool holding setup on our CNC lathe we are getting even better results than the last batch. Scott has become the Master of the lathe, he gets into a Zen-like state and becomes one with the machine and just pumps out perfect parts w/o seeming to even try very hard. He is especially good at threading now.
 

smokeywolf

Well-Known Member
he gets into a Zen-like state and becomes one with the machine and just pumps out perfect parts w/o seeming to even try very hard.
Had a 15" Cincinnati Hydrashift (manual machine) in the Deluxe Motion Picture Film Laboratory that I did that with. I could bore small bearing pockets in film rollers all day long and keep them to +.0000/-.0001 on the ID.
 
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KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
My customer/friend sent me some photos of the shotgun barrel and butt rests that we make for him attached to his shotgun(s). Spot shoots are a big thing in this area and the competition is fierce. The barrel rest clamps to a 1-1/4" diameter barrel shroud (which another customer/friend makes for sale) and the butt rest is screwed to the butt of the gun. The three boxes of parts in the second photo of post #1 is all the parts needed to make 15 of each type of rest.

We also make the threaded adapter fitting for our other client that adapts his barrel shroud to various brands of shotguns.

Assembled barrel rests.
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Butt rest attached to shotgun. Note domed adjuster knob,
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Another view of barrel rest
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Butt rest attached to custom stock
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Barrel and butt rests on shotgun. Note the length of the shroud - 5' !!!
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We make almost all the parts including the knobs. The threaded rod, levelers, screws, etc are of course purchased items.
 
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Missionary

Well-Known Member
If you add a 36" of tubing to a 20 gauge single shot it makes for a very quiet garden dispatcher with sub sonic 3/4 ounce loads.
A 5 foot tube would be very quiet.
 

KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
I don't know much about the shooting game these things are used for. (We often don't know what/how the parts we make are being used. We just make stuff to spec and hope people pay us for the end result...) It is for some kind of spot shooting, around here they call them turkey shoots, beef shoots, spot shoots, etc.

My customer says that with a 5 foot tube and the generic low powered shotshells they provide at the matches the resulting report is more of a bloop than a boom.