Can I blame it on my Aunt? When I was a kid my mom’s sister was always coming up with miniscule precision made items. At around 8 or 9 she bought me a working model of the Wankel engine, the plastic for the block and heads was all cast in clear and we put it together…well, together. It had small light bulbs for the spark plugs and you could see the firing process as the triangular piston worked it’s way around and the plugs fired under the compression stroke. My Mom’s Grandparents migrated here from Germany, and my Aunt is really into the precision German made parts. I guess I inherited that from her as I too absolutely love something delicately small but made with precision. Completely separate from that, at around the same age an older cousin gave me a copy of the Old Testament, in a version about 1” long on the long side!! Full copy of the Bible, just tiny. Thick, as you might could imagine, but readable…helped to have a magnifying glass but wasn’t necessary for very young eyes.
I absolutely adore my Texas Poker Ti Neck-light from Photon Fanatic! I designed it to look like a Leupold scope, Fred fine tuned the design and created a Masterpiece. 5 separate pieces with 8 different areas of .5mm threading, it’s just superbly done. I had originially wanted a miniature of a MagLite, but he wouldn’t copy the design.
I spent many an hour looking over a friends shoulder while he machined parts on his monster lathe at the gun shop he owned and operated. His lathe was easily capable of making rifle barrels, had a very long range of throw, must’ve been some 7’ of travel on that beast, if I recall correctly it was a 14” jaw/chuck. His end mill was also humongous, standing almost 8’ tall with a full reciprocating head for just about any conceivable angle, although it was somewhat of a bear to make those adjustments as the head was so large. These 2 machines were so massive, he poured the slab for his shop and built all but one wall, then used a fork lift to put the machinery in place, built the wall in and put the roof on the shop after they big machines were set. The mill was over 10,000 lbs and it wasn’t easy for him to find a forklift for rent that would lift it!
I was into competition hand gun shooting back then, and he ported my Ruger SP-101 snub-nosed .357 Magnum to help control recoil. That mill was outstanding! He later ported the barrel of my Glock 23 in .40 S&W, cutting a window out of the top of the slide to coincide with the milled portals in the barrel. Very fast repeat shots in competition! Loved it! A few months afterwards, Glock themselves was doing the exact same thing with their competition models!! I had also bought a 5/8” diameter rat tailed file for the single purpose of cutting finger grooves into the front of the Glock’s grip, they later incorporated those into the design as well, completely without any communications….I/we had no idea what Glock was planning, they of course had no idea I’d done the same to mine. Sometimes, a good idea is just a good idea.
Since then, I’ve always been somewhat jealous of the folks with the equipment to manufacture just about anything their imagination could come up with. I didn’t know, back in the early 90’s, that the time spent in that gun shop would forever change how I looked at making parts.
A well made miniature HD2010 would be simply awesome, and don’t I wish I could stand over your shoulder and watch you make it… it would have to be polished, of course!