I’ve only gotten into guns in the past couple of years, and when I had a little more money I bought a pistol to carry and a shotgun for a couple of things. While I’m not planning on buying anything right now, I’m still planning on buying a rifle sometime soon, but what I am debating is if I should buy a 5.56 or a 7.62. From the research I’ve done, if I bought a 5.56 I would want a fairly standard AR model, though I don’t know much at all about the thousands of different variations that exist there. On the other hand, if I went with 7.62 depending on how much I could spend I would either go with a Springfield M1A or a good condition SKS. What would you recommend? Why? Help inform my decision making a bit.
There’s two branches to the answer; the simple and the complicated.
For the simple, I can make a wide variety of parts with nothing more than plate steel (also iron or aluminium depending on what’s being made), a metal saw, and a file set. Things like hammers, triggers, things both small and large.
however on the complicated, if I needed to do actual machining, I would need basic machining tools at the minimum. In our post-industrial world, it’s very easy to find things like lathes and mills in more-or-less every factory. You probably live within 10 miles of a machinist’s shop, if you’re within an urban area. And, due to this, acquiring the tools can - at times - not burn your wallet. This would be needed for some of the more complex parts. Receivers, barrels, screws/nuts, etc.
It’s hard to find a place that humans are living in that doesn’t have metal being stored, and in terms of materials needed to produce firearms, all you really need is iron.
This is probably my first time saying this semi-publically, but I’ve been working for a few years on something that I call the StAR project, which stands for “Standardized Armory Research” (jokingly called Stingy Armory Research) and is an attempt at finding the cheapest and easiest options for firearms production at home. With the intention that - theoretically - a “rebel” group could use the research in their firearms production, at least until they’re able to get better weaponry. Though, more realistically, sans-revolution it’s only really useful if you’re cheap and like to shoot. Though, I’m still a long way away from being able to publish my findings, so don’t expect much from the project for a while.
This sounds amazing tbh. In Che’s manual on guerrilla warfare he talks a lot about the primary means of weapons procurement being salvaged rifles from the enemy, and stresses how carefully the guerrilla must ration things like ammo. Regardless, he also says the top production priorities in the Cuban struggle were tanneries for boots and tobacco to keep the freedom fighters in good spirits. I suppose in today’s modern world where some countries are positively brimming with firearms the guns shortage is less of an immediate problem and there’ll be less of a need for stripping the enemy, but as you say developed societies are saturated in sources of metal that can be repurposed. A widely disseminated manual for achieving this could definitely see use all over the place.
In the eventuality that a non-sanctioned force wanted to build up their supply of arms without raising suspicion from gun sales, StAR would be a perfect informational booklet for them to work from. Though, I fear that StAR would eventually be used by Daesh-esque and anti-communist forces, to which makes me hesitant to publish the research on its own. StAR was going to be featured as a section of my book (part 1 can be found here on lemmy, look at the community GWIC), in a portion about armories and wartime production. I’m hoping that having the information be in an explicitly pro-communist literary work would help to deter anti-communists from using the information.