No matter how smart your pet gunsmith is, he will inevitably encounter problems that are simply insurmountable with his equipment and skill. No amount of study of manual or gunsmithing text will get you through some difficulties with uncooperative guns, tools or processes. What separates the men from the boys is the wisdom to recognize their limitations, and having the phone numbers of vital human resources to call upon in time of crisis.
I may not be the brightest star in the firmament but my momma didn’t raise no fool, so I have spent a lifetime accumulating friends who are sources of skills, gear and knowledge which I do not have. You should, too. My gang has done a lot of bacon saving during my career. I’ll tell about a few of them but you can’t have their phone numbers; some names have been changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike.
The smartest human being I know we’ll just call Norman. And I know lots of smart people. My wonderful pa-in-law is a physician with a PhD in neuroanatomy from the University of Chicago; my friend Dusty D. is a Guggenheim fellow and worked for the Smithsonian National Museums; lawyer pal Bill H. is whip sharp and a terror before the benches of Kentucky courts. But Norman is much smarter than these dullards. He is a tool-&-die maker of incredible skill, experience and imagination. Lucky for me, he is also a real gun junky, which may account for why he takes pity on me and constantly bails me out of the situations into which I seem to blunder from time to time. An utterly unassuming chap who looks like Santa Clause on spring break, Norman probably has an IQ of 278.
The Smartest Man I Know
And Why Everybody Needs To Know One
Jerry Kuhnhausen’s excellent manual notwithstanding, for most of us, the bowels
of a Colt New Service are terra incognita. Thar be dragons.
When most of us ponder gunsmithing shops, we conjure up visions of a building chock full of machines, tools, fixtures, vats of unappealing liquids, hoppers of gun parts, corners occupied by stands with firearms in various states of disrepair, and maybe a poster or two of some guns up on the wall. Out of this physical plant emerges the finished product, typically produced along the lines of sausage—which nobody should ever watch done. While it is true physical resources are critical to the proprietor’s success, his human resources are just as important, because without them the enterprise will surely fail.
You can’t go down to the moon-clip store and get these .50 AE clips. You have to
have friends in high places. The wee 6-shot clips are for a .25 ACP J-frame S&W.
These GM-brand base-pin hole reamers (below) were custom made for Hamilton.
Aside from the innumerable broken taps he has removed and counsel given on materials and heat-treatment, he also has several Holy Grail machines in the form of wire EDM (electro discharge machining) equipment and burns out our 5-shot moon clips for the .50 Redhawks we build occasionally. True enough, other people have these and do fine work with them but Norman buys them at surplus, then repairs and reconditions them. This is akin to preparing the space shuttle for launch for most of us.
Our wizard welder Bill M. from Texas is another resource who enables us to produce some fairly sophisticated work. The most skilled TiG welder I know, he works in the oil industry and for medical instrument manufacturing firms. Much of his welding is done under an industrial microscope on very tiny parts. I am in the process of restoring for myself an extremely rare Smith & Wesson export Target Triple Lock, which some knuckle-head (a pox on his house) had re-chambered from .455 to .45 Colt. At least this criminal did not face off the back of the cylinder. The new rim seat cuts were about .015″ to .020″ deep and put the gun out of headspace in .455 caliber. Bill welded these up in grand style and, once re-machined, it will be impossible to detect the sacrilege except for the deeper chambers. No way am I skilled enough to undertake such an effort.
My uncle JR was another fantastic resource until he retired from General Motors a decade ago. Not only a marvelously skilled tool-&-die maker in his own right, he had access to millions of dollars worth of GM’s machinery, including a fabled Cincinnati Monoset tool and cutter grinder. In idle times on his shift, he was kind enough to entertain outside tool grinding commissions for one-off tooling from a certain gun shop in Tennessee. Time after time, I would receive in the mail all manner of complicated tools, many of solid carbide, that must have cost GM a fortune. For those of you who own GM stock, on behalf of our family, we apologize but will not make reparations since the Statute of Limitations has expired. Besides, you GM shareholders have far bigger problems now.
The only thing between us and many otherwise savable Colt New Service revolvers is a wrecked action. Devilishly difficult to tune or repair in good style even if you have a pile of new original action parts, most of us simply do not have the experience or skill to put one aright. My old friend pistolsmith George Wessinger was one of the few I knew who could, but he had the audacity to up and die a few years ago.
Mercifully, we recently discovered Grant Cunningham who has vast experience with these things and can usually save them. He still walks this earth and may be the last man I know who can unravel the Gordian knot that is a New Service Action.
My list could go on and on. Without my roster of truly bright and capable friends, my business would have foundered early on or, at best, existed in a perpetual muddle of confusion and terror. It matters not what path in life you walk, you don’t have to trudge it alone.
GUNS Wheelgunner
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