Jul 30, 2012 Posted by Jason in CNC 1911 | 15 comments

Why the CNC 1911 Isn’t Finished, or Rebuilding a DeLorean Engine.

The CNC 1911 I’ve been working on currently looks like this …

… which is pretty much how it looked four months ago. It still needs a fair bit of machining in order to get all the parts to fit. The problem is what little time I have for hobbies has been taking up by other things. First I decided to paint my basement, and before that got finished, I discovered my car had a head gasket leak.

Unfortunately, because of the type of engine, its age, and high mileage, it makes more sense to do an engine swap or full rebuild than to just replace the head gaskets. The main problem is that the engine has paper seals at the bottom of the cylinder liners, and there is a good change they will break when you remove the cylinder heads, which you may not know until you put everything back together and run the engine. If they break, to replace them, you have to pull the engine and remove the pistons. If you’re going that far you might as well do a full rebuild.

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Apr 4, 2012 Posted by Sebastian in CNC 1911 | 7 comments

Next In Line for the CNC Mill

You may recognize the platform. Jason informs me that there’s still a lot of work to be done, as everything is not fitting together all that nicely at the moment. The first attempt was sacrificed to the gods of gravity, and a loose fitting. I guess it’s a good thing aluminum is fairly recyclable, and 1911s aren’t made out of the bones of endangered species, or something. Quite a lot of aluminum has been gone through on these projects that’s been sacrificed to FAIL. But he’ll have a nice collection of homemade guns when all is said and done, for sure.

For something non-gun Jason was machining, he made a time lapse video to show the progress. I thought that would be neat to do with a gun too, so I asked him. Below you’ll find the results of that:

I believe this is a frame that bolts together, which makes it easier to do on the mill.

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