Custom Action Wrench

Original article photographySource page 14

When working on a project, sometimes even the best of us find that we are in need of a special tool to finish the job but don’t have it on hand. The reasons for this are many, including not wanting to purchase one for the high price tag they usually have attached, or are in a time crunch, etc. Whatever your reason, you are still in need of said special tool to move along with the job.

I found myself in this exact situation when needing to rip the barrel off of the action of a surplus rifle I picked up at a local gun shop for a pet project. After placing multiple phone calls to various companies to get quotes and searching the depths of the World Wide Web, I came up with almost no results costing less than a mortgage payment. I decided to just make my own with some materials I had on hand in the shop.

I had some inch and a half square steel bar and some 1×0.095" wall chromoly tubing in the steel room, so I cut a length of the tubing to make a handle and a few chunks of the steel bar to make the clamping blocks. I faced both ends of the steel tube to make them flat and put a healthy chamfer on them to get rid of any sharp edges, blending with files and sand paper. I aggressively knurled one end about eight inches from the edge to get a solid purchase point for a sure grip on the handle.

At finished length it was two feet long, giving me plenty of leverage to break the connection of a rather stubborn barrel torqued into this old action. Next, after machining the chunks to equal length, I gang clamped one of them together with a scrap bar in the milling machine vice and picked up the center of the set. After spending a few minutes with a 1-2" micrometer and measuring the front receiver ring, I had my desired size. Back to the milling machine!

After hogging out a majority of the material with various drills, I switched to the boring head and precisely machined out the pocket to the exact size I measured. I split the vice open and recycled the scrap bar. I checked my work to the front receiver ring. Finding it was a perfect fit, I deburred it heavily and set it back in the milling machine at 90 degrees from the work I had just completed and drilled two clearance holes for 1/2" bolts.

I put the second milled bar into the vice and drilled and tapped two holes in identical locations for 1/2"-20 UNF screw threads, seeing as I had two Grade 8 bolts of proper length in this size already on hand. Note, you can obviously use whatever size screws or bolts you desire, but a professional tip would be to not use anything smaller in diameter than 3/8" Grade 8 bolts. This bar also needed a recess to accommodate the recoil lug from the receiver.

Rotating the bar 90 degrees and clamping it again, I picked up the edges in the milling machine and found where I would have to put the pocket to fit the recoil lug and also how deep I would have to go to get the best possible clamping force out of the wrench over the front receiver ring. After doing all the math, I put an end mill in the machine, cut out the pocket and gave it a healthy chamfer around the machined edges, and then rounded them off with a fine-cut file.

This is also the bar that I would be putting the handle in, so I rotated the part another 90 degrees and drilled a one-inch hole about halfway down the thickness of the bar. This allowed me to sink the handle into the bar a good bit. I then walked around the tube with my TIG welder to make sure that puppy never came apart again.

Original article photographySource page 15

Left and Here we see the half round for the receiver ring, the bolts used to squeeze the ring, and the cutout for the recoil lug. You can also see the handled welded on. The other end is aggressively knurled for grip texture. This setup worked remarkably well! With that, I had made a custom action wrench in about three hours that will serve me for many years to come. I highly suggest going this route if you have access to a machine shop, welding machine, and the raw materials.

After carefully and evenly snugging the two parts over the front receiver ring and butting up against the recoil lug, I torqued each screw down to 50 foot pounds, placed the offend- American Gunsmith Mailing List Policy Like many other publishers, we make portions of our customer list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we believe you may enjoy.

If you do not wish to receive these offers, and/or information, please let us know by contacting us at: American Gunsmith Opt-Out Program Norwalk, CT 06854 Please include your current mailing label. ing barrel in the hydraulic press, and ding! The threads unlocked and the receiver threaded right off without a hitch. After unscrewing the two bolts that held the wrench together, I took the freshly-made tool apart and had a receiver ready for anew lease on life.

This same tool can also be used to snug and torque this receiver onto replacement barrels. I have since opened up the recoil lug pocket on this wrench to accommodate just about any receiver that will come across my bench in the future. I keep the blueprints handy for the hole locations and receiver ring sizes of all known options on the market today. I even went so far as to make a few bars up with various angles of V-block geometries (30, 45, 60, and 90 degree cut jaws) that all attach to this same wrench.

Should I ever need to make another clamping jaw, I reckon I can make the top half of the wrench and be back to the bench within a few hours. This custom tool has been a huge money-saver and has proven to be ultra-reliable. It was also made in less than a day, so I didn’t even lose any appreciable time on the job. Thank you for reading, and I hope this inspires you to think about this in the future if the need ever arises in your shop! AG