I started playing Max Payne 2 last night, and the warehouse level made me ask myself: how easy is it to make guns? I always thought you need a like a real factory and stuff to make firearms, but in Max Payne (and, come to think of it, Gunsmith Cats) we have this woman who works out of the second floor of a warehouse. No big mchinery, just parts and tools. This would be a great contact to have in Shadowrun.

So is the small independant gunsmith thing a reality? How does it work, to whom would this small business sell, what kind of weapons can they make, etc.?

With a machine shop, it's definitely possible.

Is it cost-effecient? Or fast? Not really.

-Siege

Edit: Remember that you would be competing with mass production.

However, gunsmiths can make a living repairing, customizing and generally tweaking weapons.

Not a great living, but in the fictional world of SR a gray market gunsmith could do well. Just think about how many times a samurai looked at his sheet and said, "Damn...I need (insert upgrade here). But I don't have the B/R skills to do it..."

S'why taking a gunsmith as a contact is a good thing. Especially one that does 24-hour call service for a marginal surcharge.

Buy an action here, a barrel there, stock. BINGO instant gun

Or if you have a machine shot you can make most of the parts..i think.

Raygun would know better probly.

i'm not sure if it's possible in the real world, but they do exist and are quite helpfull in my campaign. Specially when you want a personalized gun made with Cannon Companion, which isn't mass-produced.

They do indeed exist in the real world. My father-in-law just priced out some changes to his 1911. Add a beaver tail, change the grip, refinish, it ended up costing him $700. Now the gun itself cost $1,000 new. So it's a pretty spendy affair to have a gun "remade". In SR though I could see someone with a warehouse and a machine shop going into the gun business selling knockoffs of other guns. A Pred that isn't by Ares etc...


On a side note, is MP2 as good as the original?

I'm not sure if you're in the US Back, but if you are skim through the phonebook under "guns" and you're bound to find at least one.

They do exist, although weapon-tweaking and repair services are usually mixed in with selling weapons and various accessories like holsters and whatnot.

-Siege

I know some gunsmiths personally, and many of them have some light machining tools in their shops.

They could fabricate a trigger, or hammer, or something like that, but probably not an entire reciever.

The greatest advantage of an independant (shadow-)gunsmith would be, ofcourse, untraceability (less paperwork, or not paperwork at all; hell, if you come to think of it, a real underworld gunsmithing pro could probably get you in contact with a good credstick forger who could arrange for a 'license'. For the right price, ofcourse).

The same goes to bombs, which are quite easy (though risky) to make in a basement lab (Chemistry or Demolition shop in game terms). They won't carry the chemical (or nano, if you buy the really hot stuff) tracers that commercial (read: corp-manufactured) explosives have.

Also check Cannon Companion, page 23. It mentions the "Street Sweeper", which is a low-quality shotgun you could easily get the schematics of from the net and manufacture in a simple machine shop. Its ammo is even easier to make (black powder and metal debries), so no wonder why gangers use it.

I'm in canada, and I've only ever seen a real gun once (aside from the ones the cops have, of course)

In Max Payne 2, they say the woman was a licensed gunsmith, bla bla bla. So I'm think maybe she buys various parts, assembles them, and sells them back. Or maybe she works with a specific gun maker and assembles and resells them.

Then again, come to think of it, maybe she did just make adjustments on guns. Hmm. Well, put this way, would it be feasible to run a cheap knock-off factory like was suggested, where you buy parts and assemble copies of existing guns?

And yes, Max Payne 2 roxxors.

I would assume so. Most of the parts of a gun aren't actually that complex, it's just putting them together that's the problem. With the proper machinery, you can probably make a gun from scratch in your basement. No promise it's any good - even if you're a superb gunsmith, you're not going to make any polymer-framed wonders of craftsmanship because you will have a hard time getting the materials and actually manufacturing them to the degree a real gun company would.

I've always allowed characters with gunsmithing facilities to make cheap or not-excessively-complex firearms - I limit the options they can pick, knock up the weight a little bit, and viola. I've never been a fan of allowing characters to have custom guns - really, how often do you see homemade rifles the performance equivalent of Remingtons or Armalites, let alone the ceramic-framed, increased power, internal recoil comp fully automatic monsters most players seem to think they should be able to whip up in their friends garage? That's always been the equvalent in my mind of taking some steel and plastic and building your own OICW.

It's also a question of machining tolerances. Most 'basement machine shops' only don't produce fine enough tolerances to make a (complex) gun from scratch. Though, this is one of the reasons that the AK series of rifles is so respected. Any halfway decenct factory can turn AKs that will shoot out (though they might have trouble hitting anything). For less robust designs, you get things like increased jam rates, inaccuracy, etc when the part tolerances are not as good.

In general, most gunsmiths will do things like change the material and dimensions of the grips of stock of your weapon, add or take away small bits of weight, change the sights, fabricate new springs, hammers, and triggers, extract broken firing pins, install barrel porting, and so on. None of these come close to 'building a gun out of metal blanks'. In SR expect most 'normal' gunsmiths to do things like change the grip to fit your hand (race customization costs), install smartlinks and gas vents, etc. Expect shadowy ones to make supressors, reduce barrel length beyond legal minimums, convert civilian versions of military arms to selective fire, and so on.

indeed if one knows the inerworkings of the guns one can make a wonderful living rebuilding antiques and tweaking newer guns in fact there is a gunsmithing shop where i live i keep meaning to see what they have there

With advances in rapid-prototyping technology (3-D printers), it seems likely to me that by the 2060s a gunsmithing shop should be more than capable of producing high quality, high precision polymer materials. Whether you'd actually want to make a firearm out of such stuff is another matter entirely.

All of you guys reading this do realise that just about every gun from a musket to a Glcok started out in someones basement or garage right?


Makeing a gun from scratch varies on the complexity . Any shmuck can take a pipe , a nail , and a hammer , and make a shot gun or other zip gun , It gets more complex as your gun improves . The info is out there , Hell man you can make a half decent subgun with hand tools if you use a prebuilt mag .Weither or not it is legal is a hole other ball of wax . With the exception of a few types of guns you are not allowed to make your own here in the land of the free .

Shadow :
7 bills , for a beaver , and a refinish ? Who did your dad go thru ? Even Wilson isn't that bad .

These days, gunsmiths, at least those in the US, can buy pre-fabricated parts from outlets like Brownell's or Midway and assemble custom firearms with a relatively small investment in tooling. The cost of a shop is Shadowrun (5k, IIRC) should cover anything a gunsmith would need to do, but you should need a facility to manufacture firearms straight from forgings or castings.

I put just about to cover my heinie .

Well, let's put it this way. I could probably go down to Sears and buy the requisite parts to build myself a 12-gauge... shotguns being the simplest firearm to build. If you want proof, go take a look at a break action double. Trigger mechanism, break mechanism. Barrel, stock. That's about it.