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The #001; cal .177 before final assembly. All action components are metal
(with the exception of seals, spring guide, and two washers). Please note the many substantial design alterations. NOTE: None of shown items are for sale. Items for sale are on the shop page The HyperMagnum pistol project - prototyping in progress Assembled, with a not yet shaped grip. Planned are ambidextrous, lefthand, righthand, and ditto as a shoulderstock--six possible models. The latter will get you the smallest carbine ever. Only a single screw attaches the action, so it will be possible to easily and quickly change stocks in the field. The main tube, breech with interchangeable transfer port installed, and frame. Some holes have yet to be drilled. The prototype is almost done.
Heavy mods The trigger blocks are scheduled for some surgery too. Drilling the four holes to later hold the two main pins into the trigger
block housings, using the original cylinder as the matrix to get the holes
to fit perfectly. This is why parts must be serial-numbered. In the picture, two holes are already drilled; tight aluminum pins pressed
into the lower holes holding the housing in place. This picture also reveals why those guns will never have a recoil-rail-off-adjustment
problem, a common issue with model 54. Notice the third hole in the rail?
It later holds a screw and a counter-nut... the cure to that pesky problem
being that easy (for once). The triggers in steel. I've made just a batch of twenty, but it felt
like two hundred! How I hate repetitive tasks. Helluva job! Some holes
needed to be drilled with a tolerance less than one tenth of a millimeter.
The rough form was waterjet-cut according to my outline drawing. With this
technology, a very fine computer-aided jet of water with some abrasive
additives hits the material with immense pressure and velocity and cuts
through inch-thick metal in seconds. Definitely preferable as opposed to
using a saw. All the same, a lot of work remained... Here you see them bead-blasted but not yet blued; The spring guide, a
3/16" steel ball will be pressed into the hole (not visible) after the
hot-dip bluing. A very few are left for sale. Ask us on the Contacts page. The assembled trigger block - supertuned for match performance; silk-smooth
first stage, crisp and predictable second stage thanks to its steel trigger
blade and various other design alterations. The trigger unit performs very much like a Rekord trigger after those
modifications. The now obsolete parts of the first prototype; the trigger block housing
and safety slider. Left; the housing with its bottom not yet welded onto it; in the middle
the modified original safety sear with a pin soldered onto, and right the
slider in aluminum and steel. The slider had the tendency to slide back during firing into "safe" position;
on re-cocking, the safety was turned on and in rare cases the trigger hung
in firing position. A safety hazard really, and together with the problem
of wear-off of the slider's later anodized finish due to tight tolerances,
I thought it better to abandon the whole design and move on to something
less problematic. To see the assembled gun, take a look at the range
page; prototype #1. This is the new housing design which works a treat and will be final.
As you can see, I'm actually making these parts from scratch, and by hand! Here is the trigger block housing in various states of progress; in the
front is the finished prototype; bead-blasted and blued. In the background
the precision steel tubes with 3mm tube walls, 31mm in diameter where the
part starts from. Some tricky electric arc welding is required. After the opening for the safety bolt has been drilled into the 3mm thick
steel walls of the trigger block housing, some careful filing is needed
to fit the opening to the protruding bolt. Here you seen all parts welded to the tube and the welding seams grinded
and sanded. The cylinder cone (top right) is lathed from aluminum. Top left is the
cocking lever pivot. These are mirror-polished samples which will get black
anodized. The parts will loose some of their shine in the process, matching
perfectly with the polished and hot-salt bath blued steel. Take a look at the gallery of showgun #001
to see how the aluminum looks when bead-blasted and anodized instead. Butt pads Custom scope mounts The mount is lined up to get bead-blasted and then a fresh anodizing
will be applied. This complicated procedure is necessary to properly sight-in the scope.
Read more. Here, the mount has been bead-blasted and black anodized. To epoxi-bed the scope for a completely stress-free support, black tinted
epoxi is smeared into the rings. In the backgrund you see the scope middle
tube protected with brown carton sealing tape, which will be removed later. Next the scope is gently pressed into the rings. As cured epoxi does
not adhere to any plastic, this will prevent the scope from getting permanently
attached to the mount. The tape provides a temporary placeholder for a
layer of very thin double-sided sticky tape that will later be placed between
scope tube and rings. The latter method is an safe way to prevent the scope from creeping inside
the rings, plus it protects the tube from getting scratches or ring marks. Logging This is its bottom (root) side. Diameter about 20"; weighing about
100 pounds (though it felt like 200). The Chestnut wood's tannins make it pretty resistant to yeast and insects;
not much bug damage and only minor parts were rotten. Its upper side. Note the huge void. Probing it didn't turn out very conclusive.
It was going deep inside, that for sure... The odd thing with roots is that the grain does not run in one direction;
it twists and turns at will, sometimes there seems to be no direction at
all - not suggestive at all to make up one's mind where to place the cut. After pondering and trying to understand this stunning chunk of wood
for hours, I finally made up my mind and sawed it in half, knowing full
well that any change of direction in cutting would be close to impossible
after the final cut; the boards would get too small. The wood being hard as a rock, the 35cm chain saw was often blocked.
There's always the risk of hitting a grown in stone; granite in this territory
- the Swiss Alps. Not this time luckily. Gorgeous grain reveals after having cut five or six 2" thick slabs.
They will be air dried; slowly and carefully to avoid splitting. This
will take quite some time though. Watch out for the things getting made from that wood.... Patterns for tracing Center bases have to be glued on both ends; tricky as there isn't much
of a surface to hold them. Yet they have to stay in place without flexing
while the stylus traces over them. The ones shown are original grips of a Smith&Wesson 78G. The plastic
was cracked in several places so there was no remorse sacrificing them
for their last purpose. I've heard grips for the Smith&Wesson 78/79Gs are difficult to be
traced in wood as they are too thin... See the shop
if you want to get a set of those! I offer them in different species of
wood! The ones shown are in Maple. Rifle stocks 95% of the inletting is done (the stock was not clamped into that vise
for the routing, btw) and the rough form is cutout with a compass saw from
birch laminate. Pretty hard material (its glue) and wearing the tools... ... but the nice thing about it is the lines you get from its laminated
layers which give you perfect control about the shape while sculpting. The rifle stock is ambidextrous, sculpted from 66mm birch laminate. Here
it's ready to serve as a pattern to be traced in precious walnut. Sanding the duplicated American Black Walnut riflestock to perfection.
A laborious task which I regard as very profound. The stippling is made using an engraver with a milling head, which rotates
at 20'000 rpm. This is the only way to do it for me. Hammering it in with
the use of needles (nails) is not an option as it would splinter and compress
the wood rather than removing it. Here is an example of bad stippling on a scrap piece of walnut. It has
been hammered in with nails. The needles method is often seen on even expensive
match rifles. Now you know why a lot of manufacturers stain the stippled
areas black, because dark areas would otherwise result when applying the
finish, as this test clearly demonstrates... Stippling on the fore arm in progress... ... and the readily stippled pistol grip. The wood grain will later show
unaffected through the stippled areas. The cocking lever also requires some attention: here a batch of five
handles in oak... ... sanded with 60 grit so far. This is fun stuff compared to the other
parts... Another method of stippling, or rather, creating and anti-glide surface,
similar to race-tape. While the sprayed on 2-component varnish is still
sticky, fine sand is strewn on the surface using a sieve. The surfaces are still fragile after removing the tape that covered the
smooth surfaces. The next step is to again coat the whole riflestock; a
fixative for the sandy parts. Web Design and photography© by Blue Line Studios
THE METAL
Many parts are milled from solid blocks of steel and high grade aluminum. All parts are in the white; they will later be blued and anodized.
A batch of three guns in the works. The actions are stripped to the max,
even removing the scope mount rail. The latter is tricky business; don't
try this unless you know what you are doing, and it absolutely needs to
be done.
Sure, I could use ready-made Pachmayrs but I like doing things the hard
way... The one shown is not yet finished.
Shown is a customized one-piece mount with drooped 30mm rings. The new
arrestor hole is at a different location than the original and is threaded
to take a set screw acting as arrestor pin. The other three holes are for
weight reduction purposes.
THE WOOD
A Chestnut root from a tree that must have been struck by lightning. It
looked several years old. We found its root at the foot of a huge cliff
on rough and steep terrain, well charred, and free of bark.
It takes some preparation to make pistol grips ready to serve as patterns
for duplication in wood.
The inletting is the first and one of the most difficult things to do on
a rifle stock. In the background you see the router.
