Thread: How to start gunsmithing

Lots of good advice here. Take Gundoc up on his offer – learning from a Master is a rare and valuable thing and those skills and tips will stay with you for the rest of your life, whatever you end up doing.

Some miscellaneous thoughts that come to mind:

Gunsmithing doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. It’s easy to get tempted to buy the fanciest tools, take on the biggest jobs, etc etc, and if you take on more than you can handle it can be a frustrating fruitless experience.

Choose a project you’re interested in, read up on it to get a feel for the steps and challenges involved. (The internet provides a lot of knowledge quickly, but be aware that it is often incomplete or limited. Books are hard to get, take time to arrive, and aren’t easily searchable unless digitized, but often are far better written and logically laid out. Often books hold in depth basic information while the internet holds novel/unique/specialized knowledge. Both are valuable), consider how you will take on a challenge, consider your skills and tools at hand, then begin.

It’s not exciting, but practice on junk guns to begin with. You will make mistakes, you just won’t have damaged a valuable gun in the process. You can also experiment with techniques more when you aren’t worried about the outcome. You’ll also learn better ways to do things with time, so the best way you can think to do something when you begin might feel like a hack job to you when you’re more experienced. Plus junk guns (rusty .22’s, old single shot 12 gauges) usually take a lot of minor repairs but keep on shooting fine once their 50 years of dried grease, cracked stock, peened firing pins, and stripped out screws are replaced. Usually the materials to repair these guns are found in scrap heaps, which also helps keep the costs down.

Don’t get lazy or cut corners. It’s so easy to say, and so hard not to. When you’re in a rush or frustrated, take a break, take a nap, have something to eat and walk away for a bit. I’ve caused far more, and bigger problems than I’ve ever solved by cutting corners or trying to rush something. You’re going to do it (we all do), but learn from the experience, and maybe try to make sure you rush/try new techniques on small/low value projects… they hurt less to learn from!

Finally, and this is a big one, always do work that you are proud of. Don’t let someone push you into doing work you don’t think is acceptable, be it quality or safety wise. When you are learning you will be doing work for yourself, so don’t let your impatience or frustration get the better of you. You will learn a lot more and feel better about things if you take the time to do things properly, seek help when needed, and ultimately do it how you wanted, even if it takes extra time.