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Or just use tubing of the correct diameter. There's other options as well that I haven't seen people exploring as much, like rolling a barrel from sheet steel.
Cost here is very dependent on exactly what you're trying to accomplish, and is one of the most obvious areas where the conversation's focus on rote abstractions hides a number of significant realities. There's cheaper and much more effective things you can make for less resources than a DIY masterpiece 5.56mm NATO cartridge factory. Nullifying gun control 1:1 with DIY tech can be done, but the fact that people are pushing it so hard is an artifact of memetic incentives, not a reflection of baseline reality. In the actual event, I do not think people will be making 5.56mm cartridge factories, because the memetic incentives will no longer be those of performative activism, but of deadly conflict.
That particular weapon was seriously over-engineered. As an offhand example, the steel pipe barrels aren't actually necessary: you can make a perfectly functional large-bore black powder firearm out of literal paper. Again, the common knowledge generated in this space is not remotely exhaustive, and is largely shape by the incentives of performative activism, not practicality. cartridge repeaters and even automatic weapons are absolutely within the skill range of the top 30% or so of the population now, and technological progress will lower the skill floor significantly in the near future. Powder and cartridge production might be a bit harder, but not much. Smallarms are at the bottom end of the effort/reward curve, though, even for individuals, and organized groups have access to entirely different spheres of capability.
There seems to be this intuition that technology is somehow magical or mysterious, or otherwise unreachably complex. It's not. It's astonishing the proportion that's purely social, purely memetic; people consider one thing easy and another thing hard not necessarily because of actual differences, but because social effects have streamlined one process and not the other. One sees this quite a bit in the gun culture, even before 3D2A took off, but I think it's difficult for people to really appreciate the implications.
Yeah. Given that tubing of the correct diameter can be acquired/made, all that’s necessary is a set of basic machine tools for the rest. As for powder and cartridge production…that seems like it would be a bit harder and riskier, but potentially doable. Dangerous, perhaps, but possible. These things take preparation and know-how to produce, though…this guy had to roll his own ammunition, for one. Maybe you (or someone you know) could’ve built a better gun (or at least, better gunpowder and primers).
Organized groups would definitely have the ability to make 5.56 cartridge factories in the woods/desert/jungle/clandestine location, however.
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To be fair, there was a point in history where it took a village to raise a militia. It was certainly true as late as the Hundred Years’ War, when an English longbowman took a lifetime to reach the point where he could kill a knight in full plate. Even as firearms decisively outpaced armor, men grouped together en masse, because humans working as a team were exponentially more deadly than a lone gunman. (Until it wasn’t.) It took a powerful state to muster entire regiments, train them to march and fight together, and feed them since they weren’t working the fields.
This extended to equipment—especially metallurgy. It takes a lot of fuel to smelt iron, a lot of horsepower to transport it, a lot of well-paid craftsmen to make it into useful shapes. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences chipped away at that advantage. Now a single, motivated member of that 30% could do more of that process than ever before. Cut out (by trade) the mining and maybe smelting and I think you’ve got a surmountable task.
This is extremely unusual by historical standards! It’s not that the technology is arcane, or even that the skills are so hard. Rather, the total man-hours needed to bring iron from ore to a finished, near-modern weapon is just immense. It is proof of our insane economic and technological growth.
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