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Sturgeon's House

Designing A Rifle From Scratch(ish)


Sturgeon

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19 hours ago, Sturgeon said:

 

It would have been terrific but it prevented the use of ACR stocks, which is what I was going for. The ACR stocks were too fat. :(

 

Could you have done away with the ACR stock and used a slimmer design? Or was the ACR stock mandatory? 

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22 minutes ago, Lord_James said:

 

Could you have done away with the ACR stock and used a slimmer design? Or was the ACR stock mandatory? 

 

It's the only off-the-shelf folder that's adjustable and not a piece of shit. I wasn't really interested in designing my own stock.

Also, if you had a SOPMOD stock fully collapsed you couldn't charge the gun, either. So there were lots of compatibility issues. To solve them you'd have had to widen the receiver significantly, which would have made the gun heavier for basically no reason.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 year later...

It's a shame that most useful gun files, including yours, have been yeeted from Grabcad... if it's not asking much it would be awesome if the F4 files were reuploaded, perhaps in a cloud or something like it.

 

Regardless of that I would like to thank you Sturgeon for all of your work so, it has been a great inspiration for me, specially in regards to more aerodynamically efficient projectiles... so much so my final ME bachelor's project has been on the subject.

 

You also inspired me to try to make my own rifles, if anything it's a great exercise in modeling and material selection, it also highlights what I need to improve. I hope I can post my work in another thread for it to be thoroughly shredded and I can beat the dumb out of the design and myself.

 

Also... I cannot stress enough Sturgeon's points on charging handles and dust covers: Fuck those things.

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On 9/30/2020 at 10:52 AM, Sten said:

It's a shame that most useful gun files, including yours, have been yeeted from Grabcad... if it's not asking much it would be awesome if the F4 files were reuploaded, perhaps in a cloud or something like it.

 

Regardless of that I would like to thank you Sturgeon for all of your work so, it has been a great inspiration for me, specially in regards to more aerodynamically efficient projectiles... so much so my final ME bachelor's project has been on the subject.

 

You also inspired me to try to make my own rifles, if anything it's a great exercise in modeling and material selection, it also highlights what I need to improve. I hope I can post my work in another thread for it to be thoroughly shredded and I can beat the dumb out of the design and myself.

 

Also... I cannot stress enough Sturgeon's points on charging handles and dust covers: Fuck those things.


Hi Sten, I actually yeeted the files myself. I was concerned about ITAR violations. Shortly after that, Trump definitively changed the ITAR rules to remove the ambiguity about things like the F-4. So, I need to reupload. But I've been tremendously busy! I have some spare time right now, so I'm going to reupload that right now.

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Really impressed by the F-4, very clever layout, specially the offset recoil spring and guide rod assembly, as well as the asymmetrical lugs, the use of the Desert Eagle anti-rotation device (did it appear in other guns before? As said on these forums, the Tavor is similar, but it uses the guide rod instead of a dedicated spring loaded plunger.)

 

Thanks for sharing your design, it was very useful to me as it showed the strengths and weaknesses of my own design. Keep on the good work.

 

Only thing I didn't really like on your design is the lack of space magic BS... you need to shove some isogrids and cast Be alloy parts in there just to spite the people that have to build the thing.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Sten said:

Really impressed by the F-4, very clever layout, specially the offset recoil spring and guide rod assembly, as well as the asymmetrical lugs, the use of the Desert Eagle anti-rotation device (did it appear in other guns before? As said on these forums, the Tavor is similar, but it uses the guide rod instead of a dedicated spring loaded plunger.)


The APE device on the F-4 (which also appears on the F-5, F-6, F-12, and F-8) is mechanically distinct from the Desert Eagle/Tavor approach. Both use guide rods to achieve anti-rotation, but the consequence is that they do not achieve APE. The bolt being forced against the guide rod causes significant friction during feeding, which my approach eliminates. Fundamentally, the APE device on the F-4 is a simplification of the "claw" on the Steyr AUG. So in order to achieve a frictionless cycle, the APE device needs to be separate.

If you don't know what APE is, this video I made explains it: 
 


 

 

4 hours ago, Sten said:

Thanks for sharing your design, it was very useful to me as it showed the strengths and weaknesses of my own design. Keep on the good work.


You're welcome.

 

4 hours ago, Sten said:

Only thing I didn't really like on your design is the lack of space magic BS... you need to shove some isogrids and cast Be alloy parts in there just to spite the people that have to build the thing.


The F-7 is full of space magic BS, including isogrid.

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Ah thanks, I needed the properly terminology for the APE. I need to check the DE back because I'm pretty sure it was a spring loaded pluger, not unlike yours on the Steyr claw... the DE really is an interesting gun, completely stupid and unpractical, but god it's cool and worth having one for the cool and engineering factor.

 

The F7? That thing with the gigantic lower and the upper being basically a rail segment with a ring for the barrel? I love that stupid thing. It's certainly an easier approach than to overmold and entire proper skeleton like HK should have done, fine tuning it for rigidity would be interesting, but then the aim clearly isn't for it to be a benchrest gun.

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4 minutes ago, Sten said:

Ah thanks, I needed the properly terminology for the APE. I need to check the DE back because I'm pretty sure it was a spring loaded pluger, not unlike yours on the Steyr claw... the DE really is an interesting gun, completely stupid and unpractical, but god it's cool and worth having one for the cool and engineering factor.


I thought it was a guide rod but I might be mistaken as I haven't checked out a DE in a long time. I did base the APED on the F-4 on the AUG's design though, just a different approach.

 

5 minutes ago, Sten said:

 

The F7? That thing with the gigantic lower and the upper being basically a rail segment with a ring for the barrel? I love that stupid thing. It's certainly an easier approach than to overmold and entire proper skeleton like HK should have done, fine tuning it for rigidity would be interesting, but then the aim clearly isn't for it to be a benchrest gun.


If you're talking about my design, that's the F-5 and F-6. The F-7 is a bullpup with an extruded upper.

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7 minutes ago, Sten said:

Ah thanks, I needed the properly terminology for the APE. I need to check the DE back because I'm pretty sure it was a spring loaded pluger, not unlike yours on the Steyr claw... the DE really is an interesting gun, completely stupid and unpractical, but god it's cool and worth having one for the cool and engineering factor.

 

The F7? That thing with the gigantic lower and the upper being basically a rail segment with a ring for the barrel? I love that stupid thing. It's certainly an easier approach than to overmold and entire proper skeleton like HK should have done, fine tuning it for rigidity would be interesting, but then the aim clearly isn't for it to be a benchrest gun.

Top to bottom:

F-4 Phantom, F-5 CODPIECE/Tiger, F-12 Archangel, F-6 Hellcat, F-5G Tigershark, F-7 Shinden

tiS9teH.png

The F-8 Bearcat is not shown, but it's basically a slightly shortened Archangel for a different max COAL.

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  • 2 years later...
On 9/23/2018 at 2:14 AM, Sturgeon said:

 

Concur, I am not a fan of stylization on a rifle. Aesthetics should be incorporated where they don't interfere with anything else perhaps, but the "Audi treatment" is haram.

 

The AK is a good example of the correct application of aesthetics in a rifle, actually.

I'm sorry to reply to such an old post, but I was reading through this thread and I can't help but catch on to you mentioning the AK's aesthetics. 

 

I can't help but ask whether you mean that Kalashnikov intentionally made his rifle better aesthetically, or that the rifle simply accidentally ended up looking good?

 

I know less than nothing about firearms design and I assume that it is always form-follows-function, so the idea of Mikhail Kalashnikov (and the Soviet procurement system by extention) giving a damn about how their rifle looks sounds crazy to me. I can't imagine communists caring about how their rifle looks laying besides a corpse on a battlefield scorched by nuclear fire.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/24/2023 at 10:58 PM, tsv said:

I'm sorry to reply to such an old post, but I was reading through this thread and I can't help but catch on to you mentioning the AK's aesthetics. 

 

I can't help but ask whether you mean that Kalashnikov intentionally made his rifle better aesthetically, or that the rifle simply accidentally ended up looking good?

 

I know less than nothing about firearms design and I assume that it is always form-follows-function, so the idea of Mikhail Kalashnikov (and the Soviet procurement system by extention) giving a damn about how their rifle looks sounds crazy to me. I can't imagine communists caring about how their rifle looks laying besides a corpse on a battlefield scorched by nuclear fire.

 

I am saying that Mikhail Kalashnikov very deliberately designed aesthetics into his gun. If you believe that the Soviet communists didn't care about aesthetics, you've never seen a Russian Great War-era propaganda poster:

mAngVPP.jpg

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I could never deny that Soviet artists had taste, though I had no clue it extended into their weapon procurement too. I don't know if I should ask this in the general firearms thread as to not derail this one, but I hope it wouldn't bother you to elaborate a bit on some of the things that Kalashnikov did to incorporate visual design into the AK. I'm terribly curious since I always thought it was an accident that the AK turned out to be a handsome rifle. 

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  • 6 months later...
On 4/8/2023 at 4:30 AM, tsv said:

I could never deny that Soviet artists had taste, though I had no clue it extended into their weapon procurement too. I don't know if I should ask this in the general firearms thread as to not derail this one, but I hope it wouldn't bother you to elaborate a bit on some of the things that Kalashnikov did to incorporate visual design into the AK. I'm terribly curious since I always thought it was an accident that the AK turned out to be a handsome rifle. 


He did quite a bit, and it was deliberate. Making a handsome rifle was important to him. You can see this probably most clearly in the contouring of the bolt carrier and dust cover, which was unnecessary, but makes the AK look quite well sculpted. Obviously there's a lot of utilitarian decisions in that rifle as well but I don't think there's any denying the end result is iconic.

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