I started working on my Mech-Tech CCU again

[Big Frank]

After stripping down about as far as it goes and cleaning it really well, I left the parts and everything setting around. I finally worked up enough motivation to do something with it. A few days ago I started planing down the hand guard with a small block plane. The blade depth and angle adjustment is... just eyeball it as you slide the blade around with your hands, and tighten the wheel to hold it in place. Getting the depth adjusted between to shallow to shave any material off, and too deep to get started was nearly impossible, but I whittled down close to 1/3 of the thickness. It smells like epoxy and it's really hard to work compared to wood. Then I got smart and put an 80 grit wheel on the angle grinder. Much better! It didn't take long to take off another 1/3 of the thickness of the handguard and smooth it out. It's a hair thicker on one end but good enough for government work.

I had a tube of rubber cement and tried using it to glue an M203 grenade launcher hand guard over the remaining piece of the original, but it didn't work. I bought a tube of Amazing Goop and used that yesterday to glue it together. Then today I rubbed the excess off with my fingers and drilled the 8 holes where the barrel block screws to the housing. Tonight I'll use more Goop to glue the hand guard to the housing and have a one of a kind CCU. I had a hard time counter sinking the holes to get rid of the ragged edges because every hole is partly on at least one rib. I got carried away with a knife that was too big for the job when I tried to use that instead.

[Big Frank]

Here's the last pic of my hand guard, one of the new style hand guards Mech-Tech makes, and a picture of a CCU with a cropped image of my handguard below theirs. Mine wraps around a lot farther. It goes all the way up to the rail. In a few days (?) when I get everything cleaned up again and put it together, I'll post some pics.

[Big Frank]

I got just enough Goop in the housing to glue the barrel block in. Maybe 1/2 a drop, but it doesn't take much when the parts fit closely. Two whacks to the muzzle with a plastic mallet and I knocked the barrel assembly down into the housing. Then I clamped the barrel in my bench vise and twisted the housing back and forth a few times to make sure nothing else was sticking in there, and the housing slid right off. I wasn't worried about damaging the muzzle because the barrel has a recessed crown, and the stainless steel is a lot harder than the plastic mallet, which serves the same purpose as a rawhide mallet.

When I took a closer look at the muzzle I saw some carbon buildup, or something, at the muzzle and cleaned it up. When I put on my reading glasses it was easier to see that there was some damage to the muzzle. I don't have the proper tools to repair that kind of damage, but I do have a ceramic stick for honing knives. It has 4" of rod sticking out of a 2 1/4" wooden handle. So I poked it in on an angle and worked it in and out about an inch all the way around, being careful not to hit the bore on the opposite side. I kept going until it looked like a uniform chamfer, but I need to check it with a magnifying glass.

I'll be buying a .578"x28 die and die stock, and putting on an A2 flash hider I bought last year. Nothing will hit the muzzle after that, unless it's a cleaning rod. Other than the little speck of carbon, the barrel looked pretty clean when I swabbed the swarf out with a wet patch. I ran a brass or bronze brush though it anyway, then a wet patch came out really dirty. I don't know if I ever cleaned the brush, but I need to. Then I'll have to clean the bathroom sink.   I think the brush was putting crap in the barrel instead of taking it out. 

I noticed that half of the screws for the housing looked like the heads had been hammered on. Then I remembered I did that to try to tighten up the opening of the sockets. They're 9/64" hex screws but a 9/64" hex wrench is a sloppy fit. Nothing else I have, SAE, metric, or Torx, fits any better either. So I put all 8 screws in the barrel clamp and hammered the other 4 down until they matched, then filed them down flat, 4 at a time. I'm going to run each one through a die to clean up the threads, then degrease, and paint them. And make sure the holes in the housing are all bored out to the same diameter, 5/16" I think, with no Goop or plastic handguard over the edges of the holes, and the bit goes straight through both sides. 


Trivia time! I had to open a new package of patches to clean the bore. They're made by Southern Bloomer Mfg. Co. of Bristol, TN. If anyone isn't already aware, they started out making cotton knit panties and night shirts for state/federal mental institutions and prisons. Five years later they found that the scrap from this business made excellent gun cleaning patches.  Their cotton knit products leave no strings or threads and are virtually lint free.

From prisoners' panties to patches. https://southernbloomer.com/

[Big Frank]

I painted the 8 housing screws Sunday morning. I was thinking to myself, how do I paint all the way around the heads of the screws? I need to stand them up! So I poked small holes in the piece of cardboard with an awl and screwed them halfway in. Two coats of paint with a little break in between and they looked good.

I straightened out and used Goop to re-glue the aluminum and rubber parts of the buffer that were stuck together crooked. That one little number 10 screw is the only stock attachment. If it ever breaks off, I'm reaming out the holes and running a 1/4" bolt from the stock into the housing. I don't think I have enough Goop left for what I actually bought it for.

[Big Frank]

I don't remember what the rivet in the right side of the M203 grenade launcher grip is for. My barrel was off an M2037 flare gun I bought a long time ago. The two rivets at the rear, one on each side, are the rivets that hold the shell holders on. They keep the grenade from falling on the ground before you pull the barrel back. Wouldn't that be embarrassing? I had to drill those rivets out and take the shell holders out before I could fit the grip over the remaining part of my original handguard. The semi-circular notch at the bottom rear is a clearance cut for the extractor that's located on the receiver of the grenade launcher. The M203 has a spring loaded plunger ejector at the top of the breech face, and with the extractor at the bottom, the ejected shells go straight down. If it doesn't eject you have to poke the empty out with a stick. Then visit your friendly neighborhood small arms repairman.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

I have a bottle brush just the right diameter to clean inside the housing, but several inches too short. So I cut a steel rod/stiff wire that came off a yard sign to make an extended handle Monday. When I tried to make a loop in the middle it snapped in half because it was so brittle. I managed to make a different shape from the loop and can get 2 fingers partway in. I wrapped the brush handle around the stiff wire, and tied it in a half dozen places with rebar tie wire so it would quit slipping, then taped it all up. It works really well now.

The bolt is a sliver over 9 1/2" long but most of the weight is forward of the breech. I believe that's how it is on sub-machine guns like the Uzi. The barrel is just a hair over 16" if you don't count the barrel hood, but 16 1/4" including it. I spent the day cleaning all my parts. I had some soaking in a bucket of gun cleaner and stuck my dirty bore brush in overnight too.

[Big Frank]

The stock only had 4 positions with a big space between 1 (closed) and 2. The length of pull jumped from 13" to 14 1/2". So I drilled a hole where there already should have been one. Since the drill bit is tapered on the end, not flat, I had to drill the hole almost twice as deep. It wouldn't have hurt anything if it broke through the "buffer tube", but I'm glad it didn't. I wrapped a piece of tape around the shank of the bit to use it as a depth gauge and finally got it just right. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. I used a gloss black paint pen to paint the hole one time. I would have used flat black, but when I bought a flat black paint pen it didn't have any paint in it at all. Now I can adjust the L.O.P. to 13 3/4" which is where it's at in the next post.

When I switched my bedroom gun with my CCU frame, I put the P10 slide on the 13+1 (P14) frame just to see how it looks. other than the dust cover being too long, it doesn't look too bad. A 14+1 or 15+1 .45 ACP with a 3" barrel would be something different. I can imagine people at the gun range asking what the heck it is.

P.S. The Slim Grips are Micarta. I don't remember if they're linen Micarta or not. I don't think they look like they're made of paper, so I'm guessing linen. Micarta is a composite material. Some people refer to polymers as composites when the items they're referring to aren't composites at all. They're just plain old plastic. I've seen it dozens of times in gun rags, I mean gun mags. Bakelite, pronounced bake-a-lite, is a good example of a composite. You can mix saw dust and resin to make a plastic material, and the wood fibers and resin remain 2 separate things.

[Big Frank]

It took awhile but I finally got it all together. I had everything done Tuesday morning before I went to bed, except to mount the flashlight. My PROTAC RAIL MOUNT HL-X LONG GUN LIGHT wouldn't fit on the rail because the slots are narrow and the crossbar is made wide for Picatinny slots. I'm going to use this light on one of my ARs and plan on using the remote switch on that. I can just switch tail-caps when I swap out the light.

https://www.streamlight.com/products/detail/protac-rail-mount-hl-x

So instead of a 1.000 lumen light I have the Streanlight Scorpion off my shotgun, and it's not even the 160 lumen LED model. I think it was around 65 lumens. I need to find the online article where some guy bought a good LED bulb and driver module, reamed out the head of a Streamlight Scorpion and "turbocharged" it.

Why, yes! I do have a laser sight in front of my front sight. I'm not sure which gun its going to stay on so I'm not using the remote switch until I figure it out. It has a big tab sticking out the sides that you push back and forth lick a trigger guard mounted safety.

The "small" mags are all 15 rounds and the big ones are 20 rounds. I forgot that I already had a red-dot sight and bought a SIG Romeo last year. Them I saw this Vortex Sparc II on a Black Friday sale. It was too good of a deal to pass up. It's absolute co-witness mounted with the flip-up sights. I may end up taking it off and using the SIG Romeo instead. I think it has a sharper looking dot, but I need to look at them both side by side to find out. I may eventually get my shotgun drilled and tapped for a Picatinny rail and put one of of my extra red dot sights on it. EGW makes a rail for 30 bucks, but it's cheaper at Brownells and probably at Midway too.

P.S. The long rail is a Mono-Rail. The thing the sling is attached to is something I got when I put a long rail extension on the original short rail. the rail extension went on top and it provides rails on the left and right. It's exactly the same height as the original rail and the Mono-Rail, which allowed me to bridge the gap with one of the 1/2" risers and mount the front sight much farther out. I'll try to remember to take pics of the old short rail and the extension.

[Big Frank]

I bought some black hot glue sticks from Shire Post Mint. Besides fantasy coins, decision maker coins, etc., they also make Wax Seals and Wax Seal Handles that use a strong neodymium magnet for quick and easy swapping of their steel stamp head coins. If you want to put wax seals on your envelopes, they've got you covered. Instead of waiting for your father who's still perfecting ways of making sealing wax, as in The Rolling Stones" song 19th Nervous Breakdown, you can buy hot glue sticks in 7 different colors in Baker's Dozen bags. I bought 2 bags of the black glue sticks and a $5 Surebonder Mini Size 10W High-Temperature Glue Gun. That way I have one gun for the black glue sticks, and still have my old one for clear glue. I greatly overfilled the holes in the sides of the forend with glue, and after letting it set overnight whittled it down with an X-acto knife, to somewhere around the size and shape it would be if it didn't have any holes in it. It actually turned out really well, but the flash on my camera made it look terrible. It shows every scratch that I can't even see anymore after I rubbed my bare hands on it a bunch of times then wiped it down with a dirty gun cleaning rag. A few drops of gun oil might hide the scratches, but as the Brits would say, I can't be arsed to do so. It feels 1000% better to hold onto than it did with those holes in the hard plastic M203 forend.

https://www.shirepost.com/collections/wax-seals



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEseb6-hssc

[Big Frank]

Since I took the tactical light and front sight riser off to make it easier to work at cutting the glue off, I remounted the light in the rearmost of the 3 available notches, instead of the middle slot. It sticks out an inch less now and I can't move it any further back because the mount is integral with the body of the flashlight. In the pics of the rear sight/optic riser, and the front sight riser, you can see how much I previously cut off the end of the rear riser. It's still long enough to flip up the lens caps on the optic at the very front of the riser, with the rear sight up. I don't know why it has a big square notch like a hammer notch, but it's on both ends of the UTG risers. I think I did an okay job of beveling all edges on it too. Now the end is farther from my eye while still being as far back as I can practically mount it on the Mech-Tech Monorail. There are slots missing from the Monorail where 2 nuts hold it onto 2 studs welded on the top of the receiver tube. I have the front crossbolt of the rear riser in the first notch behind the rear nut of the Monorail, and the front of the riser completely covers the screw and hides it. The last thing I did was peel the old Thyrm CLENS Protector off the light, clean the lens, and a couple minutes later when it was dry applied a new CLENS Protector to keep the lens from getting carboned up and dirty when I shoot.