things to check at this point.
did you get enough clearance on all your denials so that the parts will slide together? this is a good time to check before you go any farther.
did you get enough clearance on your hammer into bolt? check it before you put it together! set the bolt on the completed lower and hold it down with your hand. can you slide it back and forth on the lower with not trouble?
if so, slide it to the forward position and hold it with your hand, pull the trigger... did it drag ? hit the pin? knock it out of your hand? these are what your looking for before you stick it all together. if it does any of that stuff then it will only be worse when you put it together so get your clearance down now.
so lets say that you got that down or made the adjustments that you needed.
so its about getting it to work together now. you still have the matter of the recoil rod, spring buffer and holder to deal with so lets knock that out of the way.
1st your gonna need to shorten that spring by 2" and work from there. why 2"? because you took 2" out of the bolt for the hammer slot and you made need to drop another coil or 2 to avoid spring bind. (you can trim it to fit yours from there)
2nd your gonna need to take 1" off of the spring guide rod to start with and this is a tough piece of steel in mine.
3rd your gonna need to make a spring stop in whats left of that spring channel.
for my spring stop i used the piece of guide rod that i cut off and drilled a hole in the channel as far forward as i could get it and went thru from the top side down into the bottom section a bit. before you ask why i went from the top of the bolt for this just think about it for a second.............. yep gravity is your friend in this and no drag.
DONT WELD THIS IN! you will need to be able to take this out any time you want to get to your FP thats why its removable.
(look close at this pic, on top you can see what im talking about.)
i left a very small hole all the way thru my bolt so that if i wanted this back out to get to my FP all i had to do was stick a small pin in there and shove it out. works very nice, and since the pin is the same size as the hole there is no way the spring can go around it.
this also means that you need to add a bigger buffer in there to take up that space that you can no longer travel.
here is the cut off rod, spring, buffer, and extra buffer:
here is a pic of it all in there together:
a poly buffer would be nice and maybe i'll make one later. im just a poor boy on a garage budget so naturally im using the same type of heavy duty 3/4" hose that has over 2,500 rounds on it in the 28a1 tommy.
the length of this buffer is determined by your bolt travel.
this is my maximum bolt travel with the bolt hitting the guide rod. naturally i want to stop it a few K's before this while still giving as much recoil as possible and dampening it all at the same time.
this part it purely experimental with every build. oh theres plenty of "super math genius" types out there who can tell you what it "should" be.. but i just go with what works.
added 1/4" for compression of the rubber to the distance of the bolt at fully open and put it together and hand cycled it.
no matter how hard i tried to slam the bolt back it didnt bottom out, so this is a good starting point. YES YOU CAN ALWAYS MAKE IT SHORTER and adjust it down to the minimum as you go.
edit note changed method on 12/29/09
last minute late change made in the guide rod set up as i just thought it could be better.
by using a sleeve in the front of the guide rod passage way.... it was a piece of 3/8 brake tubing that i reached down in my pin hole from the top and tacked into place.
this makes a spring support sleeve and still allows the full length guide rod to slide thru.
it also eliminates the need for the extra buffer in the back.
ive still got a 1/4" rubber buffer in there as i just didnt like the sound of it hitting the metal faced buffer from the factory.
it has better bolt closing force now and the guide rod is all the way thru so there can be no spring bind.
sdk
that brings you up to hand cycling and feeding of shells.
first i took some dummys and put them into my mag and hand cycled them thru to make sure the spring was strong enough to force them in with the shorter stroke. it works good by hand and ejects with no trouble.
since this worked it was time for a live test and the 10 second video was posted a while back... here it is again.
that says the basics of feed, fire, eject & cycle are all working just fine.
im guessing video imbedding is not good here?