Old school Machining vs. "Printing" your own Liberator

The idea behind the Liberator was that it would supplied to insurgents/resistance fighters who would use it mainly to relieve an enemy soldier of his weapon and equipment. In the ETO the Sten Gun usually filled that role.
I recall articles in the gun magazines over the years, one said a Colonial gunsmith proved his guns by lashing them to a tree, firing them with a long rope, nowadays a tire does nicely as a proving stand.
Drawing on my 45+ years of shooting experience-and rudimentary knowledge
of gun engineering-it seems to me that if the barrel and chamber are sufficient to contain reasonable pressures-say 22LR, 32ACP, 38 S&W or low end 38 Specials-not .357 or 44 Magnum and the breechface is rigid enough, then a "zip" gun would be safe enough, I would worry more about it firing when it was supposed to. I recall reading that most of the metal in the chamber of a rifle or pistol barrel is there for rigidity rather than to contain pressure.
 
A lot of the metal in a rifle barrel is to give weight to the rifle. With today's materials, I suspect a 3 pound .30-'06 would be feasible, but who would want to shoot it, at least a second time?

Jim
 
Probably not hard, but why? I doubt any emergency weapon would be intended for long range accuracy, and a reasonably tight bore would be good enough at short ranges. There will always be better guns around for the taking, and the emergency weapon is intended to allow the taking.

P.S. There is no evidence that any Liberator pistol was ever used against an enemy soldier anywhere. None were even supplied to guerilla forces in Europe (revolvers, STEN guns, BREN guns, and No.4 rifles were the common weapons air dropped in Western Europe, while the Russians dropped M-N rifles, Dek machineguns and PPSh or PPS sub guns to their friends in occupied Eastern Europe.

Jim
 
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Even snub-nosed pistols have rifling. I always figured it had more to do with stabilizing the bullet, even over short distances, rather than just long distance accuracy.
 
skans said:
Even snub-nosed pistols have rifling. I always figured it had more to do with stabilizing the bullet, even over short distances, rather than just long distance accuracy.
Click to expand...

I always figured it had more to do with staying legal than anything else. A snub-nosed pistol without rifling is called a "sawed off shotgun". ;)

Same reason all the "Judge" type guns have rifling.
 
I've also seen a pretty detailed illustration of the devices used by gunsmiths in the 16-1700's to make barrels and rifle them.

Those guys had a lot of time and patience. A LOT.

The rifling rig was probably the easiest. It was a wooden bed that held the barrel and guided a wooden rod down the bore. The wood rod had a track carved into it's length that set the rifling twist. The "button" was also wood with a hardened scraper on it. The scraper removed metal. As the rifling groove got deeper- shims of paper were added under the scaper to deepen the cut. Frankly I'd rather do the rifling than any other phase of construction they showed...

And yeah- I also think the most promising part of the 3-D printer phenomenon is how rapidly a manufacturer like Ruger could prototype parts. Most of the other stuff I see associated with the printing seems to be wishfull thinking.
 
That's only because of the limitations of the resins the current generation of 3D printers use. I saw one engineering prof (IIRC) interviewed who said the next generation will assemble things out of microscopic blocks that can snap together in all three dimensions that will serve as the 3D equivalent of a pixel. These could be made of metals and sintered later, I suspect. After that, he says, the next thing will be advances in equipment that already exists than can assemble individual atoms, so that we actually construct things from the atoms up. This is basically a Star Trek replicator, though you'll need the right raw materials (won't be building new atoms from scratch economically any time soon). He thinks as early as twenty years from now for the first clunky industrial versions.

Can you imagine putting some charcoal briquettes in the hopper and dialing up a perfect 100 carat diamond for the wife on you anniversary?
 
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