Homemade .45 ACP Single-Shot Pistol

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June 24, 2016 / Comments (0)

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Youtuber Royal Nonesuch shows us how it is possible to make a homemade .45 ACP single-shot pistol. Read on for the details.

A Homemade .45 ACP for Survival When SHTF

YouTuber Royal Nonesuch is at it again. This time, he's got something really cool and functional in the form of a .45 ACP handgun he, once again, built in his garage with nothing more than a few parts and some really shoddy looking welds.

Of course, there was some (okay, a lot) of ingenuity involved but it's no surprise based on what he usually shows us in his videos. Seriously, I wish I had half the skill this dude has.

It took me two 80% lowers to get it right when I built my homemade AR-15, and I'll still have to read the instruction manual next time I do it.

But, this isn't about me, it's about this striker-fired, single-shot, break-action, .45 ACP handgun. While it's ugly as sin, it seems to work well and is at least somewhat accurate for a handgun with no sights.

He didn't supply us with a build sheet, so we'll try to break it down the best we can. If you see something I don't, please feel free to point it out in the comments section below.

For the obvious parts, he said he used a paintball gun lower. I'm not sure how well it will handle the recoil from such a heavy caliber self-defense cartridge, but so far so good.

I'm sure these are more plentiful than an actual handgun lower, plus the lower (where the grip is) is what you consider an actual gun with a serial number. So, if you buy a complete pistol lower from a real handgun, you'll have to go through a background check for it.

It looks like he used a real .45 caliber barrel which we (and many gun experts) always recommend over a pipe for many reasons. First, a pipe can have weak spots in it and that's not good.

Second, pipes aren't rifled and therefore, are much less accurate. Rifling helps to stabilize the bullet pre-flight, and if it comes out of the barrel tumbling it loses accuracy.

Third, not having a rifled barrel may be illegal. You can find a barrel on everyone's favorite auction site for between $40-150.

As usual, you can find the things he uses to make the gun in a hardware store. So, there are lots of nuts and bolts on it increasing its hideousness, tenfold.

One such bolt is used to hold the barrel to the lower. If the bolt is taken out, the barrel breaks open (kinda flipping backward) to be un and re-loaded.

Final Thoughts
Unfortunately, as stated above, he didn't provide a build sheet for this, and there are reasons for it. My guess is, he doesn't want to be held responsible for the idiocy of others.

Making a gun can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. But, it can't hurt to speculate a bit, right?

His firing system (and really, the entire pistol) seems to be similar looking to a Ruger Mk 3 or S&W Victory (which, by the way, I'm in the process of doing a gun review on so stay tuned!), minus some of the parts usually present.

The hardest part to figure out, is how the “firing pin” works when he attaches it to the trigger group. This method of loading is a bit tedious, but remember this was built in a garage with a welder and some spare parts.