Luger snubnose project

[Olle]

I found a Luger basket case a while back, and it included a spare barrel extension with a damaged .30 barrel. The muzzle had been whacked pretty good and the extension had a bent rail, so I sent it to Tinkerer Extraordinaire Gerald Tomek for straightening and barrel removal.

I hate to throw gun parts away, so once I received the parts back from GT, I started thinking about what to do with the damaged barrel. I could have welded and reshaped the sight base, lined the barrel etc, but looking at the cost for doing this I decided to simply cut the damaged section off:




This is the method I use when I want to get something done: I paint myself into a corner, then I just have to do something to get out of there. I found a piece of round bar that was the right size for a new sight base, so I started out by turning the basic shape:



After turning the blank, I chucked it in the index table. By milling in 5 degree increments (thanks for the tip, postino!), I got a surface that only took some light filing to make perfectly round:




Then I chucked it in the lathe again, bored it and parted it off to the right length:



Then on to the barrel. I had to turn it down a bit for the new sight base, and I also polished out some dings on the barrel while I was at it. After some turning, filing and dry fitting, it started to look like a Luger barrel again:




I used Brownells Hi-Force 44 to solder the sight base to the barrel, and I started by tinning the barrel. Then I put some flux inside the sight base, slipped it onto the barrel and heated it until the solder melted again. I had the barrel sitting upright in a vise, and I added a few dabs of solder around the seam to make sure that it was filled. It disappeared into the seam just as intended, so this sight base shouldn’t come off anytime soon. Or as the locals here say: "That ain't going nowhere!"




With the soldering done, I chucked it in the lathe again do crown it and round it off a bit. I usually make a big mess when I solder, so once I had it out of the lathe I put some cold blue on it to see how it turned out. I was actually surprised to see that there wasn’t much excess solder at all, just a few spots that were easily cleaned up with emery cloth. The seam around the muzzle shows just a little bit, but that was expected and there’s nothing much you can do about it:




And just for fun, I mocked it up on a frame to see how it would look:



The only thing left to do now is to cut the dovetail for the sight, but that will have to wait until I find a suitable end mill (or until I break down and let somebody else do it...). The sight base is not perfectly straight either, but I think it’s easier to align it after the barrel is installed on a receiver. All I need to do is to heat it so I can turn it a bit, so it’s really no biggie.