A friend of mine and I were talking about guns, and the old stuff about making a semi-auto into a full auto came up. He said that he wouldn’t do it now, but, if the government fell apart, and the country was all of a sudden ruled by warlords or governors, or some such, he would convert one of the semi auto models that he has,(Cobray, I think) into full auto.
I told him that I had read somewhere that the old Mac-10, and Mac-9, from the original Military Armaments Corp. were the only ones that could be converted, and that the engineering of the ones since the Brady Bill, 1992 Gun Ban, or whatever, made the newer ones impossible to modify to full-auto.
He said I had dreamt that, and when the collapse of society came, he would give me a semi and leave me to fend for myself, and laughed.
So, did I dream that, or are the MAC clones engineered about the same?
Dunno for the MAC-10, but many such as the AR-15 are definitely manufactured now so you’d need a whole replacement receiver. And your friend sounds like a yahoo; a full-auto machine pistol is good for quickly clearing a room or other confined space, period. A waste of ammo otherwise.
The AR-15 is very easy to convert if you have access to M-16 parts. They directly replace the semi-auto parts. These are the hammer, trigger, disconnecter, selector, and bolt carrier. You also need an automatic sear, or else your hammer will follow the bolt carrier and you may detonate the cartridge before the bolt is locked. And there’s the rub. The M-16 automatic sear will not fit in an AR-15. There are two ways around this: Machine the area inside of the lower receiver to match M-16 specs and drill a hole for the pin; or make a drop-in auto sear. IANA machinist, but machining the receiver doesn’t look very difficult. A drop-in auto sear you can probably make with a hunk of metal and a file (plus a spring and a pin). Either way, you’re committing a felony. You can’t even make a drop-in auto sear since (I think) the late-'80s, as it is considered a ‘machine gun’ in itself. Last time I was casually browsing gun parts (I still have a ‘retro-M16’ semi-auto project I’m building – waiting for the proper upper receiver) I noticed people selling full-auto parts. The ads said that you need a Class III permit to buy them. Not the guns; just the ‘go-fast’ parts. Of course in case of the collapse of civilisation, you’re probably not concerned about federal laws.
This is a pet peeve of mine when I watch shows like The Walking Dead. People are always blasting away on full-auto for no rational reason (other than audiences like it). In an actual zombie apocalypse, they’re going to run out of ammo mighty quick. And nobody’s making any more. Ammunition disappears from store shelves whenever there is a hint of more government regulation. Imagine how hard it would be to find when every living person is trying to stock up.
Another thing is this: If you really need a fully automatic firearm after the collapse of civilisation, it probably won’t be that hard to just find one. Why go to the trouble of converting, when you can just pick one up from a dead guy?
In any case… Mac-10 conversion manual. Note that the booklet is for informational purposes only, and that it is illegal to actually do the conversion.
Granted, this is getting into Café territory, but that’s not true unless everyone uses the ammo. It wouldn’t be hard to search around and find some pretty good piles of it. And in The Walking Dead, many places evidently were hit/evacuated so fast that store shelves are basically full.
If the ammo had actually been used, there wouldn’t be any zombies left to bother you.
Better question: why would you want one? Automatic firearms are hard to control. Semiauto is the way to go, even in most military settings.
On an episode of Mythbusters, they compared full auto MACs (don’t remember if it was a 9 or 10), UZIs (not the mini or micro), and M-16s. There was some variance in the magazine capacity (20, 32, 30) depending on the weapon and of course, each weapon had different rate of fire. Bottom line: They all took 2 seconds to empty their magazines.
So, when it all goes wahoonie shaped, I hope your friend has a large stockpile of cases of ammo. And/or a progressive loading press and a huge stockpile of primers, powder, cases, and bullets. And a lot of time on his hands, as cleaning and resizing once fired brass for reloading is very tedious.
I suppose if you can get enough or the right replacement parts (ignoring the legality issue), you can convert any semi auto version of a full auto weapon into a full auto. It’ll be harder for the UZI, though. The full auto UZI fires from an open bolt. To avoid any problems with the US market, the UZI semi auto carbine was designed to fire from a closed bolt.
We’ll have to disagree here. I think the stocks would be found and dispersed very rapidly.
There would be more zombies that there are bullets available, I think. In the case of some other socio-economic breakdown, there are more Bad Guys than bullets.
I agree with this. In most situations, automatic is wasteful and unnecessary. In an actual emergency, it might be good to have some non-cartridge firearms. You could probably figure out to make a usable black powder, and you could make paper cartridges with it and salvaged lead. You might be able to make percussion caps but, like cartridges, existing ones would be a limited resource and I don’t know where you’d get fulminate of mercury to make your own. So you’re down to flintlocks. Or bows and crossbows.
The MAC M-10 or Cobray M-11 (and other variants built on the same platform) can be fairly easily converted to fire in fully automatic mode, but those built after 1982 fire froma closed bolt and will rapidly overheat if fired in full auto. The weapons also have a 4.5" barrel length (about the same length as the typical service pistol) and in full auto mode and contrary to what you see in movies will chew through a full magazine in under two seconds, making them of very limited utility. Practical effective range with the 9mm is probably under 100 feet. Let your buddy carry his noisemaker while you take a Remington 700 or Savage 99 in some sensible caliber, which you will find to be of far greater general use, mowing down hordes of zombies notwithstanding.
You’re going to have a hell of a case of “magazine thumb” after loading the first hundred million rounds. Not to mention needing a large warehouse to store all of that ammunition, which is certainly going to limit your mobility. And if there is one thing to take away from SERE training it is that mobility it key in evasion and survival under hostile conditions. Unless you are bunkered up in Ft. Knox, you probably shouldn’t count on being able to duke it out with your opponents, be they zombies, aliens, Russian Army, or cybernetic bezerkers from the future come back to eradicate all mankind. Blazing away double-fisted with with machine pistols may look cool in Luc Besson films, but in real life that hero is going to be the first one to die as everyone else scatters and runs.
Hey, you’re not going to catch me blazing away full-auto with a gun that can’t hit shit 50 yards downrange! I’m more of the sit up here in my tower and snipe with my Garand or Mauser(s) kind of guy.
I have a beef with Remington. They stonewalled for a long time on their Model 700 problem and even now they aren’t doing nearly enough. Back in about 1968 I was unloading a Remington Model 700 by working the bolt (stupid, I know) and it discharged. The bullet ended up in the headboard of a bed in a house down the block.
Johnny LA overstates the ease of converting an AR-15 to select fire. One not only needs the correct M-16 parts, one needs to know exactly what the fuck one is doing when machining out the receiver and drilling several holes that must be in exactly the right places. This is not a newbie project nor one that is done with common household tools. A DIAS may be workable depending on which lower receiver and internal parts you have, or it may not. Even if it is, you now have a full-auto only weapon for as long as the DIAS is installed.
The BATFE has a long-standing hard-on for weapons that are easily converted to full-auto. If the AR-15 could be converted by drill a hole, drop in a few parts and Bob’s your uncle, they’d have long since jumped on it.
If you go the machining route, there’s only one hole to drill (well, two holes if you count the other side). This is for the pin that holds the surplus auto sear.
As for machining, here is an M-16 lower receiver, and here is an AR-15 lower receiver. Note that the AR-15 lower receiver narrows at the back half, and the M-16 lower receiver maintains a constant width. The little rectangular thing above the selector in the M-16 pic is the top of the auto sear. The receiver needs to be wide enough to accommodate it. The AR-15 lower receiver narrows so as to make it impossible to insert a surplus auto sear. It doesn’t seem that difficult for anyone who knows how to do any machining to simply mill out the excess. Of course you still need to accurately drill the hole for the pin, but it’s easy to find a schematic. This pic appears to show a surplus auto sear inside of a milled semi-auto receiver. A drop-in auto sear is narrow enough to fit into an unmodified AR-15 lower receiver, and is held in place by the take-down pin. Note the block to the right of the auto sear. AR-15 bolt carriers are open at the bottom, so as to not work with an auto sear. The block can be put into a semi-auto bolt carrier to duplicate the solid M-16 part.
And they did jump on it. Drop-in auto sears are banned, except for ones registered before (I think) 1984. It appears that you now need to have a class 3 license to buy the other parts. Machining out an AR-15 is illegal.
Back on the subject of the Mac-10, you used to be able to buy kits – everything but the lower receiver. And you could buy a flat piece of metal with markings where to drill/cut the holes and make the folds. It was perfectly legal – until you drilled holes in the sheet metal. Then you had an illegal machine gun. Same thing with the STENs, but you got a pipe instead of sheet metal.
