The setup looks a bit weird because this is the only vise that was worth using for this job, and all the clamps were missing or broken apart from these. The angle clamping force of this type of vise ensured the round workpiece wouldn't roll when clamping, as the flat bottom of the action needed to be perpendicular to the slab-siding. A good square was used to get the part close, and then it was checked with an indicator.

The 3/4" Ripper roughing tool made this job completely painless, taking 0.100" without the smallest sound or vibration.

Final cut depth was .175", taking less than one minute to complete.

With both sides roughed out, flat, and parallel in five minutes, I clamped down on the flat slab sides and came down with a 1/2" carbide and blended the corners.

I took another cut off the bottom, skimming off the stupid fucking "huuur this is gun, it could blew yer balls off" bullshit of the bottom.

Filed and sanded it for a bit nicer finish, and thar ye go.

Here's the old barrel compared to the new.

I might radius the corner between the slab sides and the bottom cut.

When I was done, I picked it up and felt satisfied the weight savings were worth this violent diet. It felt really, really nice.

My heart sank when I realized this might hurt accuracy.

Uh oh.

So I put the Ruger scope rail on it to find out what the accuracy could be like now that I hacked half the barrel off.

Being a proponent of "QD lever mounts so you can enjoy a nice scope on more than one gun", I felt this was fitting.

WHAT

I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF THIS SCOPE BEING SO FUCKING VERSATILE

LOL DEDICATED OPTICS

I only had a small pack and a cloth to rest my new lightweight, high speed low drag pistol.

I wasn't sure what to expect.

Ruger pistols are accurate, but how bad could it get?

Clays at 200 yards.

Ten shots at 100 yards with Winchester ammo. The extreme spread is 2 7/8ths of an inch. Vertical of 2 1/2", horizontal of 1 3/4".

With a ransom rest and target ammo, less than 2 arcmin would be easy.

Looks like today's experiment was not a total failure.

Final thoughts.

Needs to be blued.
My BM of dedicated scopes was tongue in cheek, sorry.
This was stupid fun.
Scoped pistols are hilarious.
Shooting this without the scope bullshit is really nice, the weight is much more balanced.
Scope got a little dirty, washed off fine.
Ruger can't into standard rail slots. Useless shits. Had to cut proper grooves into their rail.

That's about it, feel free to questions, comments, doubts, threaten, or something.

P.S. I laughed at this for like five minutes.

>>3320
As a former Ruger inspector, my sole critique is that the transition from full diameter to reduced area could have been a little more elegant.

If you look at the old "Standards" they had a fairly slim barrel as well. Never really understood why they insisted on having big clunky barrels, short of reduced man-hours.

That's pretty awesome. I would have been afraid of warping it unevenly. You should do a slow rust blue and post pics.

>>3329
I'm putting off bluing it because I want to radius the edges from the bottom to the sides a bit.

As for getting a smoother transition from the full diameter to the reduced area, by far my primary goal in this was weight reduction. A loss in aesthetics was something I was willing to trade off. Having a ramp or a larger radius in the slab side would have left a lot of metal.

>>3330
I'll be rebluing it later when I'm satisfied with the finishing touches, so I'll be sanding the whole upper to match and blue all in one go.

I have the most confused erection.

Now with more radii.

Any thoughts on if I should chamfer or radius near the top?

Like where the flat sides meet with the top, I'm wondering if I should round that out.

Looks okay to me but I'm not good with aesthetics.

>>3436
I think it looks good as is, the radius on top smooths out the transition.

I'd say that's pretty baller (this of course is coming from someone with mill envy). Looks like you made the pistol better.

However...did you ever shoot it at 100 yards with the extra barrel meat just to see if you actually lost any accuracy?

Also I would have tittered like a school girl too if I had a fuckhuge optic on the pistol, but secretly I want to do the same thing to my wife's Neos when she's not around

>>3439
I'm afraid I never shot that pistol with the badonkadonks optic before cutting the barrel. Getting a bit less than 3 arcmins with average ammo from a pistol, in my hands, is decent so if it lost accuracy, it probably didn't lose very much.

Not that I'd notice with my shaky mitts :(

♪♫ Tsukurimashou tsukurimashou ♪♫ sate sate nani ga dekiru ka na ♪♫

Feels nice, looks okay to me. Success?

>>3444

>>3443
>>3444
That came out really nice.

sounds memey

Man. My first choice would be to have turned it down on a lathe. But I guess this works too. Looks pretty great actually.

The only thing is
>>3317
Are you uhh, supposed to be clamping on that surface with those two toe clamps on the side? Wasn't the slot on the bottom of the vise there just for being a clamping surface? (in fact, other examples of this type of design have a wheel cut on the front and back too to make a slot for clamping.)

Pic is Mk1 chan

>>3565
>>3565
If I turned it down on the lathe, I'd need to leave a big ol' gland where the front sight is and then need to mill the sides/bottom off there anyway. Slab siding was just simpler, much easier, quicker, and removed enough weight for my feel.

The clamps can sit there, the vise surface they're clamping on is harder than the steel making up the clamps. Every surface on that vise was hardened. The reason why they're clamping on there is that nothing really fit where I was doing this at the time; the actual machining side of the operation was done in my sleep. The hard part that caused me endless headaches and actually took hours was finding clamps, finding threaded rods, finding t-nuts, juggling t-nuts that were too small for the table slots, clamps that were too big or too small, threaded rods that were stripped/too short/too long/wrong thread, and dozens of other fucking bullshit ass fuck problems that drove me right up the fucking wall. Dumb shit that baffles and angers me to this day, more than my blood pressure will care to recall.

The only thing that worked right in terms of clamping was that little vise itself, because I made that years ago. The shop had their own vise, but it was not worth its weight in slag. Calling that shop vise a by the name of vise is an insult to vises everywhere.