making a firing pin, the fast easy way

dan1dad

Howdy everyone. Havent been on for a while. Life's been busy, and well, just haven't been doing much with the firearms lately. If anyone remembers, and I doubt as it was around a year ago last I talked about this but I have an AMT backup 45. Nice little gun. heavy as its all stainless, and the trigger pull is 10 pounds which sucks, but its very reliable and mine shoots great. Not a long range shooter, but within 25 years, you can easily keep them all in a 3 inch group, and that's good enough for a CCW gun.

Well , the firing pin broke on it a while back and I machined another one out of stainless on my mini lathe. Its worked fine since. Oh, I also polished the shit out of the trigger pieces and did a little more work to get the trigger pull down to just a hair over 8 pounds. Not great, but better. IF anyone knows how to get it down to around 5 or 6, please share....

Anyway, about a month ago the handy dandy Hamilton Beach hand blender shot craps on me, and being the kind of guy I am, I salvaged anything I might need in the future out of it. One piece was a solid piece of stainless rod about 3/8 dia and a little over 6 inches long. That's when the light bulb went off and I decided to make more firing pins out of it for my AMT backup. Not that I expect to break anymore, the first one lasted around 20 years and got a lot of use. But when replacements cost around $30 bucks, and I can make them for free, why not!

But here is the cool trick I came up with. At least I think I did as I have never seen , read nor heard of it being done before. Though I could be wrong and please correct me if I am.
Instead of using the lathe, I just grabbed the tap and die set. I used a series of taps to remove the unwanted material. In this case I used an 8mm die first. Once it was threaded, I chucked it in a cordless drill and hit the bench grinder until the threads were gone. Took about 2 minutes to do that. Then I did the same with a 7mm, then a 6mm. Then for the smaller parts I used a 4mm and then a 3mm, and finished it up with files, sandpaper. All in all, it took me a little less than an hour to make the first one. The other 2 took about a little over an hour to make. Not to bad. in a couple hours I made $90 in firing pins.
Very Happy

gelandangan

I have use my bench drill as a quick and dirty lathe.

IMHO for firing pins rather than using unknown quality piece of steel, it may be better to use a drill rod or silver steel as the material.
You can put it on a lathe, or drill, grind out the parts that is not a firing pin, polish it nice and smooth,
then heat treat it by heating it with a torch till its no longer magnetic, and quench in water or oil.
Afterwards, put it in a lead pot set to about 750 F or 400 C for an hour to draw temper.

But then again, if you need a firing pin, anything handy is good to use, even nails.

dan1dad

gelandangan wrote:

I have use my bench drill as a quick and dirty lathe.

IMHO for firing pins rather than using unknown quality piece of steel, it may be better to use a drill rod or silver steel as the material.
You can put it on a lathe, or drill, grind out the parts that is not a firing pin, polish it nice and smooth,
then heat treat it by heating it with a torch till its no longer magnetic, and quench in water or oil.
Afterwards, put it in a lead pot set to about 750 F or 400 C for an hour to draw temper.

But then again, if you need a firing pin, anything handy is good to use, even nails.

geland, Ive made them that way too. drill and tool steel is ideal for it, but in this case the original was stainless, so I wanted to recreate it. But you are correct, it is best to use known metals, and take the extra time to do things right to give it the best chance of a long life and quality service to the firearm. but I figure with the AMT, I can make 2 or 3 of these for free, and hopefully that will last me a life time. I may also make one the proper way too. It would be best if I use it for a CCW weapon. Better to be safe than sorry. And how sorry would I be if the firing pin broke when my life at stake. .

dan1dad

what I like about sizing this down with threading dies is that its pretty cheap, especially if you go to Harbor Freight tools. Dies, drill , a file, sandpaper ( optional) and the kitchen table ( also optional) and you can make a firing pin quickly on the fly. A drill and file alone and you can make most any firing pin as well, but it seems easier to remove substantial metal that's been threaded quickly than file it down. Normally though I use my Nano Lathe, littlemachineshop.com/...uctID=4224 cheaper, more precise out of the box and slicker looking than the Harbor freight mini lathe. Which I also have.