Any funny stories about having to improvise gun solutions?

Welcome to the forum.

Looks like this may be a fun thread.

Got out to the hunting property and went to chamber the first round in my 300 BO and the chamber was so fouled from all the suppressed shooting I had done with cheap commercial ammo a week or two earlier that it would not chamber a round. Did not have a cleaning kit in the truck or cabin (a situation that has since be rectified). Made a pull through barrel cleaner from a piece of par-cord, scrape of heavy gauge wire, and some napkins from the truck. Got it clean enough to chamber and function and had a good rest of the day.

Walkingfunk said:

And smelled pretty good

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Nothing like the smell of smoked brisket and burnt black powder, huh Walkingfunk?
Anyway, welcome to THR!

I watched my Pop make a firing pin for an old .22 single-shot,,,
Out of a ten-penny nail.

Does that count?

Aarond

.

A super fancy trigger guard for a cheapie 16ga single shot that didn't have one anymore. Made it out of a spoon handle when I was about 14 probably. My mom, to this day, doesn't know where spoon #8 from the set went.

Walkingfunk said:

New Years a couple years ago while visiting family we wanted to shoot my 1858 cap and ball with paper towel blanks and I realized I left my grease at my apartment. After trying a cylinder and getting a chain fire (slow fizzle but still ) I started looking for a grease around their kitchen and ended up using pieces of fat from the New Years Eve smoked brisket. It worked (albeit kinda runny a like pure crisco). And smelled pretty good

My first thread after years of reading,
Thanks y’all for letting me part of this community!

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Lard was the usual bullet grease for ages. (It started a war once.)

For cap-and-ball revolvers, I have always used Crisco or the cheaper store brand.

Walkingfunk said:

New Years a couple years ago while visiting family we wanted to shoot my 1858 cap and ball with paper towel blanks and I realized I left my grease at my apartment. After trying a cylinder and getting a chain fire (slow fizzle but still ) I started looking for a grease around their kitchen and ended up using pieces of fat from the New Years Eve smoked brisket. It worked (albeit kinda runny a like pure crisco). And smelled pretty good

My first thread after years of reading,
Thanks y’all for letting me part of this community!

Click to expand...

I've seen guys use peanut butter, in cw reenactments, I gotcha that I never used grease on my cap and ball revolvers, always used grits or cream of wheat. Not as messy. It also works well as an over powder wad when loading round ball.

You mean like having to re-wire 13 M60's becuase the Armorer for that unit wired the gas pistons in backwards and then forgot his Armorer Kit when they went to test them out? I only went along for some 60 trigger time........

How about some bacon grease for patch lube? Or seeing someone build a "stock" for an old no name single shot out of a 2x4, then a few pieces of black iron pipe? He was the very definition of "bored engineer/tinkerer.

Too many to list. But in the same vein I have used oil from a vehicle dipstick as firearm lube before. Not great. Probably put more contaminants in, but worked for long enough to get some real stuff.

Here's something I posted on another board seven years ago:

"Rock Dust & Weeds: 9 Shot Ruger SA .22Mag

Friend of mine got a used one a few weeks ago. He wanted me to go with him to a farm he owns to shoot it. He's crippled so he likes to have somebody along to open gates, staple targets, etc. He can get around but it's hard for him. I get to shoot a little of his ammo & try his guns.

He fires one or two cylinder fulls through it and then I noticed something is wrong! Lo and behold! The ejector rod is jammed!

He's starting to get really ticked off. I yell at him (we're wearing muffs) to wait and let's see what's wrong. (Later tells me if he had a hammer at hand, he might have broken the gun!)

So I take the gun over to the table (my friend normally shoots from the driver's seat) while he picks up a .22LR Ruger SA.

Now I'm not a gunsmith; 'nor do I play one on TV'. What was it good looking women used to say to me before I got old? Oh yeah: "In your dreams!"

Oops! Off topic! Nevermind.

Rod is still jammed, as I take the cylinder out. Then pull out the Farmer Model Victorinox (one of the Swiss Army Knife models) my friend gave me for Xmas '85 IIRC. Used the smaller flat tip on the can opener to carefully remove the housing screw.

Hmmm, only a little firing debris and no burr(s). Plenty of lube. Spring okay. Housing straight and smooth. Rod straight and smooth except where the tip has been peened a little against the cylinder face (but that's not the problem). Hole in side of frame looks good (both larger and smaller diameters). In fact the smaller which the rod goes through just before the cylinder is obviously greater than rod diameter.

Get to playing with it. Stick the rod through the frame hole from the front and what the heck? The frame rod hole is as rough as the proverbial cob! Towards its front at least. I can't see it, even in sunlight with my glasses. Sure do feel it!

Now what can I do? No abrasive paste or tool(s) to deliver it. Hey there's lots of limestone around here. And there are these stiff tall dead weeds. Being dry and porous, the weed ends hold oil and dust, yet are still stiff enough.

Find a couple of rocks and grind them together. Break off a long piece of weed thin enough to fit the rod hole. Square the end with knife blade. Wet the tip with lube from housing and charge with limestone dust. In retrospect, oil from the dipstick might have worked better to hold the dust.

Finally start working the rod hole for maybe half a minute or so. Then rewet tip, recharge, and start working again. Did this at least six times IIRC. Sometimes had to recut the tip. Kept retrying the rod in the hole until I could tell it was smooth enough. Use a burger chain napkin to wipe any remaining dust out/off and reassemble. It works! Could be smoother but NO more jamming! Shot several cylinders full through it and cases were ejected just fine. The jamming may have been why the gun was traded in.

When we went back to his house later, I got hold of some toothpaste, Q-tips, and a cordless drill. Charge tip, chuck in drill, then work the hole again for 10-20 seconds. Remove, get new Q-tip, repeat for maybe eight times, checking with rod through hole each time. Finally clean with alcohol, reassemble, relube. Much smoother now.

Mutual friends get a chuckle hearing how I fixed his gun with rock dust and weeds. Hope y'all do.

Oh yeah when we were at his house, I noticed the ejector housing is sharp edged on both sides of the slot, especially the upper edge, which is cutting/gouging the rod handle. What I have been using is insufficient to dull the edges. Since my friend is too cheap to pay a 'smith, does anybody have a Dremel?"

A shooter once asked me if I would mind helping him. He had a brand new AR 15 and had gotten a patch stuck midway down the barrel. He had tried tapping the wad with a jag splitting the brass rod at the end , the RSO had tried without success. So I asked him to remove the bullet from one of cartridges with pliers and to dump half of the load, than to load the case without the bullet into the chamber with the rifle pointing upwards so powder would not spill. He fired it, lots of smoke was produced and told him to wait a couple of minutes for the patch to burn itself out. In the past I've use lighter fluid but I quit smoking.

Hatcher at the Ordnance Department, while researching bore obstrctions, tried that with patches jammed in the Springfield barrel. Of course the string cleaning apparatus would pull but not push. Hatcher found that despite all the variations tried, the unbulleted half-full of powder round worked almost all the time

Sticky extraction on some 50 BMG fixed with Crisco.

I sacrificed an old aluminum crutch so that I could use an old .22 pump with a shattered stock... .

I'm not really a "gunsmith" by any stretch of the imagination; I'm more of a "gun-fixer". In other words, fix it good enough to get by til it can be fixed right. But, I've had a couple of interesting incidents through the years. This one sticks especially in my mind:

A few years ago, my BRNO side by side broke a firing pin the night before a quail hunt. Now this firing pin isn't complicated, but does require a lathe to make. Guess what I don't own? Yep. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I used a broken screwdriver shank as my stock and chucked it in my drill press. I used a flat file to turn down the shoulder and shape the ends; then fitted it to the gun and used it for at least a half-dozen hunts afterwards. However, I did have my gunsmith make me a replacement, and a set of spares, not long afterwards when I took the gun in for other work.

Mac

Not sure if this will be the type of story you want but here goes.

I was going Deer hunting one morning near the end of the season. It start sleeting on my way down to camp and it turned into freezing rain before I got there. After arriving I walked about 1/4 mile and claimed up into my stand. Maybe 10 feet to the top of the ladder. By now everything is coated in a thin layer of ice. Me, the ground, the ladder, everything. When I get into the stand and am sitting in my chair I find that I'm missing my rifle! As it gets light enough to see I spot my rifle sticking in the ground at the bottom of the ladder with about a foot of the barrel in the ground! It seems that a thin layer of ice had formed on my jacket and the rifle slipped off of my shoulder as I climbed the ladder.

Well I climbed down and retrieved my rifle, looked around for something to run through the barrel and ended up cutting 2 or 3 stalks of Johnson grass. After I climbed back up into the stand I started pushing the mud out of my barrel with the Johnson grass stalks. After I got most of the mud out of the barrel I used some pieces of a paper towel as a patch to make sure that I had the barrel clear. (I always carry a wad of paper towels in my pocket when hunting)

aarondhgraham said:

I watched my Pop make a firing pin for an old .22 single-shot,,,
Out of a ten-penny nail.

Does that count?

Aarond

.

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I did the same for an old Monkey Ward (Western Field) single shotgun. Never changed it out, worked perfectly as it was until I cashed in on a buyback.

I have a Remington 541 (?) bolt action .22 lr rifle. I bought it new in 1974 or so; close out, so either Remington quite making them or the store quit selling them. I cut the barrel off to 18 inches and had it crowned again. Put on a scope; not a high priced one, but not a 'rimfire' scope either. But the barrel was still a skinny, small diameter thing that looked rather forlorn. I found an aluminum tube that fit the OD of the barrel and it slipped on without much fuss. So I pretty neatly hogged out the barrel channel in the stock, trimmed the tube to the proper length and jammed it all together. It looks a bit odd, but I prefer it to the skinny barrel under it all.

I think that should be my next project.

aarondhgraham said:

watched my Pop make a firing pin for an old .22 single-shot,,,
Out of a ten-penny nail.

Click to expand...

Basically same thing I did.

Grandpa had a rusted up 16 gauge single shot that he had under the seat of his pickup for years. Actually he had totally forgotten about it. He quit using it because the firing pin was broken off.

I used motor oil and fine sandpaper to take off most of the rust. Soaked it with penetrating oil so I could open and close the action. Used a fine punch to drive out the old firing pin and ground a spike nail to make the new one.

Only used trap loads because the action was so wobbly I didn’t trust field loads. Killed a LOT of rabbits. No front bead, just point and shoot

You couldn’t pay me $10,000 to shoot that gun once today.

Cut a piece of paperclip to replace a lost firing pin retaining pin in an M-16A2. It worked fine for several hundred rounds.

My brother and I along with a friend of his each bought a cap and ball revolver on sale back in the 1970's. The store was selling them at cost and had caps and powder but no balls or molds. I ordered a mold an waited. My brothers friend apparently had no patience to wait . He drilled some holes in a piece of wood and cast some projectiles. My brother was with him when he shot the gun. They stopped at my place to show me the pieces as it had tore the revolver (brass framed) apart. After shaking my head and realizing they were both in one piece I got a good laugh .

Improvising should be my middle name.

Just today, wanted to put a muzzle device on a new rifle. But couldn't torque and index far enough with the provided new crush washer. After many, many trips down to the basement to do some sanding to thin the washer, and back up to try again, so I could torque properly and index in proper alignment I went just a little too far. ARRGGGHHH!!! Too pissed off to run out and buy a new crush washer to start over!!! What to do? How to do build up the faces of a washer by only a micrometer or two? SPRAY PAINT!! Yup, spray a couple coats of flat black on the two faces of the washer, speed dry with hair dryer, try again and .... VOILA!!! .... INDEXED PERFECTLY!!! (Might be icky if and when I have to take it off, but I'm not planning on doing that, ever).