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tig welding receivers

bcfd943

Plastic
Joined
Dec 20, 2002
anyone have any tips on how to tig weld a m1 garand receiver i have a demilled receiver that has matching sections i would like to try and tig weld back together i just purchased a miller 180 tig welder i have gas welded and arc before but tig is new to me any help would be great thx jay
 
Forgedaboudit! First its illegal,the feds bust you and they take all your other guns,second it will be almost impossible to get the correct head spacing,third the damm thing has a good chance of blowing the whole rear half of the reciever into your forehead.
 
It can be done but probably not within specs. You can still buy US GI recievers for around 300.00. I bought one from Mel Bishop a couple of years ago that was great. He may still have some.

You might want to read what Kuenhausen(sp?) says about welded recievers in his Garand book before trying it.
 
thx for the reply guys i have no problem with the feds. the atf has ruled that it is legal to manufacture a firearm for personal use as long as u dont resell it besides i have a class 2 FFL I was just looking for advise i has seen rewelds that work great in the past thx again jay
 
Tim, just for the record it is legal to reweld a garand receiver back together, an M14 receiver on the over hand is a different story.
Getting back to TIG welding the Garand.
One positive thing I can say, is at least you purchased a good machine.
Everthing I'm gonna say from now on may come across as pretty negative - sorry about that.
Ok, if you've just brought a TIG, and never used one before you are one hell of a long way from welding a receiver back together. First thing you're gonna want to do is learn how to tig weld. If anything, TIG is more like oxy welding. I'd suggest doing a course at your local community college and going to a local steel mechant and getting as many off cuts of sheet and plate steel as you can carry to practice.
As for the actual welding - without giving away too many trade secrets.

1. You need to build a jig. This will hold the pieces in place whilst welding. It will need to be made as such to compensate for shrinkage after welding. You'll need to use a set of Garand blueprints to make this or use an original to copy.

2. Your receiver is going to need to be a saw cut one, or if it was Demilled correctly (cut with oxy) your going to need to get a few and mix and match until you have an overlapping set - then saw cut them.

3. After welding you'll need to manuflux or similar to check for cracks. If needed reweld.

4. Grinf the welds down and do any other required machining.

5. Stress relieve and then reharden. I wouldn't attemt doing this yourself, most folks would out source this to hardening professionals. This is where the original blueprints come in handy as they will usually have the hardening details on them.

6. Test fire.

Sounds a lot harder than you first figured right? There's not a lot of folks out there who can reweld receivers and do it well. A Garand is a poor choice for a beginner. My suggestion is to go to some gunshows and see if you can get some Delmilled colt 1911's and practice on them first. When you move into MG's I'd start off with something where the receiver is not a high stressed part. In a Garand/M14 heat treating etc is critical and the receiver takes all the stress. If it fails you're gonna get hurt.

Any other questions feel free to shoot me an email.

[This message has been edited by AAA (edited 12-22-2002).]
 
Bearing in mind that the only real load the welded area is going to see is the impact of the carrier bottoming out at the rear, as the lug area is not involved, I welded some pieces of a milled AK together a while back. Tigged it with .040 wire feed wire as filler rod. Nothing fancy, ground the outside, milled the inside to clean up. It was self jigging the way I did it. I allowed about .015 for shrinkage, and that was a bit more than needed. It's form 2 as a post. PD's love it for a demo. It's had the dog po ran out of it with no problem at all. 75 rd. drums, gas block, and front of barrel a nice blue to straw color now. If it was going to break it would have a long time ago. For what it's worth. Pete 07/C2
 
AAA,
Would not the absolute best way to do such a repair be to anneal the parts first, then weld, then reheat treat? Wouldn't warpage be a major problem to deal with if done that way? Wouldn't it need to be done in a furnace without any oxygen present to prevent scaling? Pete
 
Hmmm, you've got a point there. Though I've never seen anyone actually do it that way. Any Annealing and hardening would normally be jobbed out. I don't know any machine shop/gunsmith that does their own annealing, stress relieving or hardening of large parts unless they really need to. As you suggested, most folks making post samples these days use receivers where there's not a lot of stress on the receiver itself. the only reason that rewelds of Garands and M14's were done is that there wasn't anyone commercially making the receivers at the time.
As for warpage, that's why you make a jig. If something's jigged and welded you'd only see very minor warpage if any. Stress relieving seems to fix this too. What do you mean by scaling? Do you mean during stress relieving or heat treating? That's why you job it out. Most stress relieing and annealing are done in an oven with inert gas. Most modern places will induction harden if there are multiple items. Hardening someing like a receiver in oil would be a real tast and not something I'd want to do myself.
If it was something like an AK, Uzi, etc I wouldn't even bother with heat treating.

Pete please call me Mike.
Mike
 
thx again guys for all the help im going to do alot of practice before i undertake a receiver
 








 
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