Re- barrelling the M60 Pig

Having one of the commonly busted off barrel pigs, I fancied fixing it.. Not sure if this counts as a Kit bash but anyhoo....
I didn't want to just glue a bit of plastic on the end or use a cocktail stick or whatever, I wanted to do a decent tough repair, and as always I gravitate towards using Metal !
I found a nice bit of brass rod that was a spot on diameter for a barrel, it was cut to length plus a bit for trimming, I carefully drilled down thru the re aining barrel stub using tiny drills in a pin chuck, the trick being to keep it on centre otherwise youd emerge thru the side if it went wonky, there's not much extra to play with ! I wanted to retain the "collar" the barrel passes thru.




I drilled it in increments rather than just blat thru with one drill..
( to be continued shortly )

The new brass barrel was a nice fit in the collar, I had to reduce the rear end in dia as I didn't want to drill larger than necc into the main part of the gun.. I used a crappy cordless drill as a "lathe" and a file to turn down one end of the new barrel to fit. This done it pushed in quite happily and looked acceptably  straight and true to me !




So far, so good, this assembly could be superglued in later, next up to fabricate the front sight unit, this triangular affair would have to mount on another collar over the barrel. Luckily in the junk I found a bit of old steel brake pipe ( from a car) this was a good sliding fit over the barrel and was pretty much the same dia as the plastic collar on the original.
The sight itself was a fiddly bit of hacksawing and filing, again from a lump of scrap steel.

Next up was to fix the triangular sight element to the tubing that would become the barrel collar. For this I used solder, superglue wouldn't be much good here as the points of attachment are very small. To make life easier I soldered the sight to the tube before cutting it to size. Holding or clamping such a thing for soldering is often a nightmare, in this case I had 2 attempts, the successful version using a pair of mole grips to hold it together.
After soldering it needed much cleaning up and filing to shape, only then could it be cut down to it's final, short collar dimension.
I purposely altered the way the sight sits on the mounting, Hasbro's one is equilateral kind of whereas the real gun it leans forward slightly so i took the liberty of doing the latter.

I was tempted to try and solder the collar to the barrel, with a lower melt point solder but decided not to risk over heating it and have the sight fall off, so superglue for that job.
That's more or less it really other than to paint the new bits silver-ish to match the rest of the gun. I may have a go at fabricating a bipod for it at some stage.
You may think I'm a bit mad to proceed like this rather than just buy a complete unbroken M60 from evilbay, but where's the fun in that eh ? !  

How do you solder something so teeny tiny?

(I know, I know: very carefully! )

Impressive micro-craftsmanship, leading to a final result that is both more accurate and more durable than the original! You'll be wanting to snap the barrels off all your miniature weapons!

SCU_HQ wrote:

How do you solder something so teeny tiny?

(I know, I know: very carefully!  )

Impressive micro-craftsmanship, leading to a final result that is both more accurate and more durable than the original! You'll be wanting to snap the barrels off all your miniature weapons!

I've got one of the mini blowtorches that run on lighter gas, good for small soldering jobs.
I was going to do the same job on an AM bren but the barrel's just too skinny, so I did the tiny drill trick and used some very thin brass threaded rod to make a core for it, seemed to work and feels strong enough.

What is the proper name for that tiny precision drill tool? I think I kind of suddenly need one!

SCU_HQ wrote:

What is the proper name for that tiny precision drill tool?    I think I kind of suddenly need one!

The drill tool we always called a "pin chuck" they are/were a common engineers or toolmaker's piece of kit, very handy for use with tiny drill bits.
They may well be called something else in the US though....

Porky wrote:

The drill tool we always called a "pin chuck" they are/were a common engineers or toolmaker's piece of kit....

Thanx! Also called a "pin vise" in the U.S., although it's not really a vise, so...

SCU_HQ wrote:

Porky wrote:

The drill tool we always called a "pin chuck" they are/were a common engineers or toolmaker's piece of kit....

Thanx! Also called a "pin vise" in the U.S., although it's not really a vise, so...

Now you mention it I have heard them referred to as a pin vise, as you say, it's not a "vise" ! Funny lot the Yanks, bless 'em !

Wow..very impressive repair

Thanks for the thumbs up R-T..
My next bit of metal bashing will probably be on the jeeps ( tho I'm a bit busy doing similar on 1-1 scale vehicles this week )

That's a very fine fix Porky. Well done on that.

Dreadnought wrote:

That's a very fine fix Porky. Well done on that.

Much appreciated dear sir !