After reading Frank de Haas 1969 book on Single Shot Rifles and Actions and many , many hours of drawings, making cutouts from cardboard, pinning them on a flat piece of foam to simulate there movements ect. I have come up with a design of a simple swinging block single shot rifle that I am going to build.
The design I have come up with is similar to many of the early rimfire reifles of the 1890 to 1930's period. Right now my plan is to build it in 38 Special, centerfire and see how well it funtions and holds up with that level of pressure.
Everything I do is on a very limited budget as I have way more time than money and it just feels better doing it as keeping the costs down justifies the end result.
My plan is to make the receiver in 2 halves, then after milling the needed recess pockets for all internal parts the halves will be bolted and pinned together. There will be a thru bolt for the breech block, hammer, trigger and there will be about 5 # 6 steel taper pins thru both halves.
The barrel will not be threaded into the receiver, it will be fastened to the frame by several design features I have come up with that should be strong enough for the purpose.
The barrel blank I have to use is 1.00 dia. and the bottom half of the area that will contact the receiver will be similar to a half of a hexagon shape, a flat on the bottom and sides 60 degrees on up to the centerline, top half will be round.
There will be 2 shoulders about 1/2" wide that will match cuts in the 2 receiver halves to keep the barrel from moving either forwards or backwards. There will be 2 8 X 40 screws that will clamp the barrel breech end to the frame in front of the shoulders and there will be a key that will be dovetailed into the bottom of the barrel that will be secured by a bolt from thru the bottom of the frame.
The material I have for the receiver is 304 stainless flat stock 5/8 thick X 2" wide so the receiver will be 1.250 thick when assembled.
I was thinking of Tig welding the 2 halves together but after much thought , I would not be able to remove some of the parts inside if the receiver were to be 1 piece.
All of the swinging block designs that I have studied do not have any support at the rear end of the breech block when the action is closed. The design that I have come up with makes it possible for me to have square shoulder cuts at the rear of the breech block that would be impossible to machine into the frame if it was made from a single piece of steel instead of the 2 halves of my design.
I suspect this will take me some time to complete because you always run into problems that were not considered in the planning stage. I am still gathering materials but I was able to get a good barrel blank from Green Mountain for $ 30 plus shipping, the piece of 304 stainless from E bay $ 20 (enough for several guns ) and tool steel , 4140, A 2, drill rod ect from a friend still in the tool & die buisiness for free and I have plenty of wood to make the stocks from from past projects.
As the title of the post asked if anyone has made something like this or has any tips or criticisms of my plans I would like to hear from you.
I thought I would get into this on a entry level project and if this is a sucess, I may try a falling block design that I have already considered but is a much more advanced design than this is.
So anyone else have similar ideas, sucess or failures
I would like to hear about them.
Jed
Here is a few of the parts I have so far.
