I thanked the good fellow and went on a search for a "machine gun conversion kit." I looked all through Shotgun News, the bible for gun buyers and sellers. Didn't see a single conversion kit. If you can't find a gun item in Shotgun News, you can't find it anywhere.
But this fat magazine is packed with ads, many set in small type. It's possible the kit was there and I failed to recognize it. So I moved on to Google. Alas, still no conversion kit. But wait there is a booklet called "The Ultimate SKS Full Auto Plans" by M&M Engineering. Aha! I thought, purely academically. Now I'm good to go.
But, not quite. The booklet costs $10. It's 32 small pages. The illustrations are fuzzy, the instructions are vague and the necessary tasks appear to require machine tools, which, in case you did not know, are not cheap. A nicely equipped 16x40-inch lathe from Grizzly Industrial in Springfield, Mo., costs $6,400.
For me to make sense of this booklet and produce a reliable machine gun would be about as likely as my persuading one of the Bush twins to spend next weekend with me.
Nevertheless, let me give you an idea of what is involved, so that you can be informed the next time that a gun-banner tries to frighten you.
First off, you have to buy a rifle. I chose the M&M Engineering booklet specific to the SKS, which I understand to be the Chinese version of the AK-47. The SKS is reliable, abundant and cheap, at $175 or less. So it sounds like just the thing for a city thug, doesn't it?
Now you are ready to transform your SKS into a street sweeper. Stay with me: So far you have done nothing illegal. Except for some parts of the country, such as the city of Chicago, the SKS is legal in its semi-automatic version. What's illegal is the fully automatic version of the gun: a machine gun.
Now, if you are prepared to break the law and produce an SKS machine gun, the first step is to learn how to take the rifle apart. This involves understanding components such as the bolt, the bolt carrier, the receiver, the spring, the cylinder and the gas piston.
Next you have to disassemble the trigger group. You need a hammer, a 3/32nd pin driver and a disassembly block. Got all that? I don't. But maybe you do. So press on. You've got just six more pages of instructions to wade through before you get to the "good stuff."
Now you're on the last lap! All you have to do is to carve a "key" in "any good machine shop" that will block something called the "sear disconnector." The key is a squat rod of steel, measuring 375/100ths of an inch wide and 812/100ths of an inch tall. It's encircled by a deep groove, and it bears an appendage that looks a little like a mushroom cloud.
Oh yes, you also have to build a "cam" and weld it into place on the sear disconnector. Otherwise your new machine gun would become disabled on the first shot. That would certainly be a downer.
Does any of this make sense to you? It doesn't to me. And so I suspect you are getting the point: The easy machine gun is a myth. In fact, if I weren't so polite, I would call it a blatant lie.
