Local/APVa DIY gunsmith class adds element to hunting
By: BRIAN MCNEILL
Associated Press
07/18/10 1:30 AM EDTAUGUSTA SPRINGS, VA. — Nick Hamilton peers down the scope of his 7mm bolt-action rifle at a bull's eye target propped up 100 yards away.
Hamilton, a contractor from Fairfax County, built the custom rifle himself that weekend as part of a new do-it-yourself gunsmithing class offered by a pair of Charlottesville-area hunting and firearms experts.
Two days of hard work have culminated in this single moment of truth. Will the rifle - which has never been fired - actually shoot?
Hamilton clicks off the safety and places his index finger over the trigger. His body perfectly still, concentration showing on his face. He squeezes the trigger, ever so slightly.
The rifle fires. Its bullet punches a dime-sized hole through the paper target and kicks up an explosion of dust at the Hite Hollow shooting range in George Washington National Forest.
"How'd it feel?" asks Paul Fritz, one of the class' two instructors.
"It felt good," Hamilton smiles. "Real good."
"Well, it works. It goes bang," said Jackson Landers, the other instructor. "Hallelujah."
Hamilton is among the first students to take part in Landers' latest venture: a class on how to build a deer-hunting rifle.
Landers - who already teaches a deer-hunting class for beginners interested in the local food movement - wanted to offer a set of skills to the most hardcore do-it-yourselfers.
In late April, Landers wrote on his popular blog, rule-303.blogspot.com, that he was launching the new class "because hunting, field dressing, butchering and cooking your own food isn't quite DIY enough."
"Hunting and butchering your own food is pretty satisfying as it stands," he continued. "Obtaining that food with a tool that you built yourself takes you to a whole new level."
Landers, an insurance broker by day, seems to be on the cusp of garnering a lot of attention. His first book, "A Locavore's Guide to Deer Hunting" is scheduled to come out next year from Storey Publishing, which specializes in books for country living. His Deer Hunting for Locavores class was written up last year in the New York Times. A TV show is in development by Discovery Networks - which owns the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and numerous other channels - is also in the works.
To co-teach his DIY rifle building class, Landers enlisted the aid of Fritz, a trained blacksmith and firearms expert who lives in Troy. While not at his blacksmith's forge or tinkering with firearms in his garage, Fritz works as the information technology director at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello.
Much of the rifle building class takes place in the garage of Fritz's home in Troy. The garage is remarkably chockablock full of power tools, welding equipment, rifle parts, ammunition, thick firearms encyclopedias, anvils and much more.
A major aim of the class, Fritz said, is to give the student the ability to build his own rifle, using common tools that can be bought at any hardware store.
"Everything we're using here can be bought at Lowe's," Fritz said. "These are tools that you can find very, very easily."
The DIY rifle class gets underway at just after 9 a.m. last Saturday. Hamilton pulls into Fritz' driveway, after a two-hour drive from Northern Virginia, ready for two days of sweaty labor in the service of his goal to own a rifle he built with his own hands.
"I'm a real do-it-yourselfer with everything," Hamilton says. "I figure, why not with guns too?"
Hamilton took Landers' deer hunting class after reading about it in the New York Times. His chose to take the DIY rifle class, he said, after he imagined what it would be like to hunt with a gun he crafted himself.
"Take your first deer with it," he said. "That'd be pretty cool."
Hamilton has brought along an old beat-up Brazilian Mauser rifle, circa 1908, which he will strip down for parts.
Landers, working alongside Hamilton, is stripping down a 1938 Mauser that was used in World War II by the Nazis.
As Landers breaks the rifle down, Nazi insignias are clearly visible on the receiver. Someone - probably a Russian soldier, Landers says - has stamped out three swastikas.
It was apparently picked up off the battlefield by the Russians, as it was kept in storage in Russia for years until it made its way into the American surplus market, Landers said.
Mausers, he explains, have been in use around the world since the late 1800s. Many of the parts are often interchangeable, no matter which country it came from. And they can be picked up for $50 to $200 at gun shows or from many used gun dealers.
From their pair of old Mausers, Hamilton and Landers remove the mechanical heart of the rifles: the receiver and the bolt, which together are known as the action.
They spend hours retooling these parts. At one point, Fritz heats up Hamilton's bolt with a torch while Hamilton bends it by banging it with a three-pound blacksmith's hammer.
The trickiest part of the operation was removing Hamilton's rifle's original barrel from the receiver. It took at least an hour of trying to twist it off with the aid of a wrench, a pipe, a band saw and a six-ton press.
"There you go," Fritz said to Hamilton, as they finally removed the receiver. "You are now the proud owner of a brand new receiver, only 100 years of use."
An important point about the class, Fritz said, is that the student performs 99 percent of the work on his own rifle, all while under the supervision of Fritz and Landers.
After retooling the original parts and making several other modifications, the action is installed in a new stock. Also added are an after-market trigger, a new scope and a modern safety.
The following day, the trio heads out to the Hite Hollow shooting range, located about an hour west of Charlottesville. The goal is to break in the newly built rifles and zero the scopes with the help of a laser.
They spend a few hours shooting at paper bull's eye targets affixed to cardboard boxes and at bright orange clay targets.
Once finished, Landers said, Hamilton's DIY rifle is the equivalent of a high-end deer-hunting rifle that could retail for more than $1,000.
The class costs $800 and students are asked to bring along their own Mauser rifles for parts. At the completion of the class, the students will have their own deer hunting rifle, a gun case, a gun vise, a gunsmith's screwdriver set and a cleaning kit.
"Everyone else in the world takes their gun to a gunsmith," Fritz said to Hamilton. "Not you. You'll get to say, I built this.'"
___
Information from: The Daily Progress, http://www.dailyprogress.com
Topics
VA DIY Gunmakers
D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said his office has turned over 1,500 pages of city Peaceoholics contracts related to an audit of the nonprofit group requested by Ward 7...
More than 2.17 million passengers flew into and out of Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in July, setting a new record for the busiest month in the...
FreedomWorks is among the organizers of the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington, that will hit the streets of the District on Sunday. The event’s theme is “Remember in...
While the governor has promised to unveil his proposal to privatize the state's ABC stores on September 8th, that's not nearly enough time for Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple, a...
Last week, Jeff Smith and Bryan Weaver - Ward One D.C. Council Member Jim Graham’s two challengers for renomination - met up for a rush hour powwow at the corner of...
A state of emergency engulfed the Phillips Collection and its surrounding neighborhood this morning as a renovation-related fire broke out on the roof. No artwork was...
'); document.write(''); }
To view this site, you need to have Flash Player 8.0 or later installed. Click here to get the latest Flash player.
- Sinking with Obama, Democrats plan political triage
- Va. appeals court upholds tracking suspects with GPS
- Noemie Emery: If this is success, what is failure?
- Illegal immigrant indicted for murder in nun's death
- Obama: Forget the economy — let’s talk about me!
- Morning Examiner: White House tells Dems in Congress to drop dead
- New evidence undermines feds' case against Arizona
- Democrats better think twice about lame ducking the rest of the Obama agenda
- Virginia congressman admits: ‘If you don’t tie our hands, we will keep stealing.’
- Obama declares war on Boehner
'); document.write('
'); }
'); document.write('
'); }
Wish I lived near Augusta Springs so I could take the course. Now I have to keep a look out for old deer hunting rifles like the ones in the article so I can do the same thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment