OK. So most of you know about "Maurice", the shell-ejecting-under-gas-pressure Ruger SA (New Vaquero in 357). If not:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZAGpJr5RsU
The next step (naturally!) is magazine feeding - spring-loaded tubes plugging into a new hole in the recoil shield just left of the hammer. Once the cylinder is dry and the first empty chamber passes in front of the mag, a new round slams forward into that chamber, goes once to the right to fire, once more to the right to get gas-ejected by tapped muzzle gasses off the previous round.
A 1ft long straight mag should be able to hold 8rds of 9mmPara, and I *think* I can make a helical-coil "spiral mag" of up to 20 rounds
.
Now, to do this right the 9mmPara caliber makes a lot more sense. Rimless means a smaller hole in the recoil shield, narrower bore magazines, etc. And a big one: because the 9mm case doesn't need full support at the rear I can run massive chamfers at the rear of each cylinder bore for smoother insertion of rounds. That in turn means a 9mm custom cylinder.
I have $7k that should finally show up this week. No, I'm not spending all that but doing the mag upgrade is in the budget.
I also have access to a machine shop and a couple of experienced machinists. More on that in a later post.
I'm starting this thread because I lucked out on Ebay and scored this for less than $20:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...sspagename=STRK:MEWAX:IT&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc
It's an excess 6.5" section of a Douglas Premium rifle barrel in 9mm, left over from somebody else's project. By pure dumb luck the fattest end is .7" for half an inch, exactly perfect for Ruger's barrel threads (11-16ths/24tpi). Yes, that means it's too narrow. That's OK - because I'm not going to screw it in in the usual fashion. I'll do some other thread on the nose end and use a custom nut out there to push a sleeve backwards over the barrel and press against the front of the frame "Dan Wesson style".
This will let me set the barrel/cylinder gap to whatever I want once the new cylinder is done.
The cylinder will be off a Bowen blank, line-bored custom to the frame and with an oversize cylinder bolt (Power Custom) and oversize base pin (Belt Mountain) added first. The goal is a "zero free play" setup when done.
If I can get it running with 5rds in the cylinder plus a 20rd mag, continuous, I'm going to run an entire SASS stage with no reloading once before they laughingly throw my butt out. Better yet: there's no rules against this critter in either Steel Challenge or ICORE...well...OK, not YET.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZAGpJr5RsU
The next step (naturally!) is magazine feeding - spring-loaded tubes plugging into a new hole in the recoil shield just left of the hammer. Once the cylinder is dry and the first empty chamber passes in front of the mag, a new round slams forward into that chamber, goes once to the right to fire, once more to the right to get gas-ejected by tapped muzzle gasses off the previous round.
A 1ft long straight mag should be able to hold 8rds of 9mmPara, and I *think* I can make a helical-coil "spiral mag" of up to 20 rounds
.Now, to do this right the 9mmPara caliber makes a lot more sense. Rimless means a smaller hole in the recoil shield, narrower bore magazines, etc. And a big one: because the 9mm case doesn't need full support at the rear I can run massive chamfers at the rear of each cylinder bore for smoother insertion of rounds. That in turn means a 9mm custom cylinder.
I have $7k that should finally show up this week. No, I'm not spending all that
but doing the mag upgrade is in the budget. I also have access to a machine shop and a couple of experienced machinists. More on that in a later post.
I'm starting this thread because I lucked out on Ebay and scored this for less than $20:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...sspagename=STRK:MEWAX:IT&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc
It's an excess 6.5" section of a Douglas Premium rifle barrel in 9mm, left over from somebody else's project. By pure dumb luck the fattest end is .7" for half an inch, exactly perfect for Ruger's barrel threads (11-16ths/24tpi). Yes, that means it's too narrow. That's OK - because I'm not going to screw it in in the usual fashion. I'll do some other thread on the nose end and use a custom nut out there to push a sleeve backwards over the barrel and press against the front of the frame "Dan Wesson style".
This will let me set the barrel/cylinder gap to whatever I want once the new cylinder is done.
The cylinder will be off a Bowen blank, line-bored custom to the frame and with an oversize cylinder bolt (Power Custom) and oversize base pin (Belt Mountain) added first. The goal is a "zero free play" setup when done.
If I can get it running with 5rds in the cylinder plus a 20rd mag, continuous, I'm going to run an entire SASS stage with no reloading once before they laughingly throw my butt out. Better yet: there's no rules against this critter in either Steel Challenge or ICORE...well...OK, not YET.