Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

35. Cut to Size, File to Fit, and Paint to Match

Many years before the Crunch, Ian Doyle was a college senior, majoring in business at the University of Chicago. He was enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program. One day at the cafeteria, as he ate lunch with his friend Todd Gray, Doyle was introduced to Dan Fong, a freshman who was majoring in industrial engineering. Gray mentioned that Ian and Dan shared a common interest in guns. So it wasn’t long before Ian and Dan became shooting buddies. They took frequent trips to local gun ranges, both indoors and outdoors.

Although he did a surprising amount of surreptitious gunsmithing in the Industrial Arts Building’s metal shop, Fong lacked a workshop where he could work on guns with any expectation of privacy. It was 215 miles from Doyle’s home in Plymouth, Michigan, to Chicago, so other than on some occasional weekends spent at home, Doyle was also without a private workshop.

Their need for workshop space was solved by Todd Gray. Todd’s father had owned three hardware stores. Just a year after Phil Gray retired, he died of a heart attack. This was when Todd was a college sophomore. Phil Gray left behind a wonderfully equipped home carpentry and machine shop in a detached garage that sat behind the Grays’ house. Most of the equipment was later willed to Phil’s brother (Todd’s uncle Pete). But while Todd was in college the shop sat idle and available for Todd to use. His father had amassed a large assortment of shop equipment, including a Unimat lathe, a small Bridgeport milling machine, a band saw, a radial arm saw, a power jigsaw, and a huge assortment of hand tools.

One evening Ian was invited to a pizza feed at Dan Fong’s dorm room. Also there were Todd Gray, and his roommate Tom “T.K.” Kennedy. After hearing about the shop, Doyle asked, “Have you got a welding rig?”

“Actually, I’ve got three: A basic oxyacetylene with small tanks, a 220-volt arc welder, and a wire-feed.” He took a bite of pizza and added, “But I’m not very good with them.”

“Well, I’m a welder!” Dan declared. “When I was in high school I spent half my time in the metal shop, faaab-ricating! Mostly it was various Rube Goldberg contraptions and even some metal sculptures. I’m pretty good with a torch. So if you don’t mind, we’d like to come over for a Saturday or two-”

Doyle interrupted: “Or maybe three or four.”

Fong continued: “-and do a couple of welding projects that the BAT-Fags wouldn’t approve of, like…”

Todd grinned, but T.K. clamped his palms over his own ears, and half shouted in his Sergeant Schultz voice, “I know noth-think. I hear noth-think!” After a pause, in which he gave the others a stern look, T.K. said, “Look, what you choose to do is up to you guys. But I don’t want to know what you are doing, understand? It’s better that way. You guys can go and play ‘Mad Scientist Takes Up Welding,’ but count me out.”

Ian soon rented a private mailbox at a Ship-It store on the west side of Chicago, using the name of Ian’s cousin, who had died of a congenital heart defect at just two months of age. When he was seventeen years old, Ian had stumbled upon the dead boy’s birth certificate, after having been asked to shred some of his mother’s old papers. Since the deceased cousin was born three years earlier than Ian, Doyle’s plan had been to have a fake ID so that he could buy beer before he turned twenty-one. But eventually it was just used for buying machine gun parts sub rosa.

The owner of the Ship-It shop was a shady character. In exchange for an extra thirty-dollar “processing fee,” he didn’t ask for anything more than the birth certificate and a dance club photo ID as proof of the identity of “Randall Stallings.”

Their first project was a World War II-vintage Sten Mk II submachinegun. These 9mm SMGs had a very simple design using a tubular steel receiver. Parts sets for the guns (sans receiver) were cheap and plentiful. Finding several ads in the Shotgun News, Ian bought a “hand select” parts set for $220. From another vendor, he bought a 4130 steel receiver tube blank that already had a cutting template glued on. The magazines came from a third vendor who sold used but serviceable (and very greasy) thirty-two-round magazines for just $9 each. Doyle also bought just one scarce forty-round magazine, which cost $40 just by itself. All of these mail orders were paid for with U.S. Postal Service money orders that Doyle paid for with cash.

When the greasy parts set arrived, Fong was a bit disappointed by its condition. Several of the parts had rust pitting, and Fong pointed out that the stock extension was slightly dented, so it wouldn’t fit on the receiver tube blank. Ian laughed and said, “Don’t sweat it, Dan! We’ll just cut to size, file to fit, and paint to match. It’ll be easy!” Assembly did indeed turn out to be fairly simple. Aside from a touch-up weld and final finish, the Sten was built in just one weekend.

Their next project was more ambitious: an Ingram M10 submachinegun. Like the Sten, its parts set came from an ad found in the Shotgun News. The frame came to them in three pieces, to get around a recent BATFE ruling. The two side pieces of the frame came from one vendor, while the middle piece came from another dealer who advertised this as “The Missing Link!” After they spent an hour building a jig block to ensure that the pieces would be held at precise 90-degree angles, welding the three pieces together took just a few minutes.

Welding together the frame and assembling the M10 took the trio just one day. The time-consuming part was making the parts for the sound suppressor that attached to the M10’s factory-cut muzzle threads. The suppressor was a clone of the famed Sionics brand, which was codeveloped with the Ingram SMG in the 1960s. The suppressor project took several weekends.

Dan and Ian started with a set of Sionics machining diagrams that they found advertised in Gun List. Ian was able to buy seamless aluminum tubing stock from a local vendor. The same company provided some aluminum bar stock that would be drilled and lathe-turned for the internal spirals. Fong botched cutting the threads on the first two tubes, but the later ones turned out nicely. Luckily, they had plenty of extra tubing stock, so they didn’t need to make a second purchase.

The final touches in the welding and painting of the two guns were done in Michigan. This was because Todd’s mother objected to the smell when her kitchen oven was used to cure the Alvin high-temperature engine paint that was used on many of the gun parts. Over a three-day weekend, Todd, Ian, and “the Fongman” took a road trip to Plymouth, Michigan, and worked in the garage at the home of Doyle’s parents, who at the time were away on vacation. When he had been invited to join them, Tom Kennedy declined, declaring: “I don’t know what your fascination with full-auto is! I can squeeze my trigger finger pretty fast, and that’s not a felony.”

The last-minute welding work in Michigan included attaching the front strap hanger for the Ingram and touching up the trigger-guard welds on the Sten, which Fong had declared “imperfect.” For this they used Gray’s portable oxyacetylene torch, which they brought along on the Michigan trip. This was the first time that Todd ever helped Ian and Dan do any of the welding. The paint curing was done in the oven of the Doyles’ “summer kitchen” fruit- canning range, which sat in the screened back porch. The welding and painting weekend in Michigan turned into an extended pizza and root beer party for the trio.

Later that school year, Dan and Ian drove to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to test their two new toys. They did so at Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park on a rainy weekend. Hiking deep into the forest for two hours on deserted trails across patchy snow assured them privacy for test-firing the guns. First they fired the M10 using special subsonic-velocity ammo. With suppressor attached, each shot sounded like little more than a hand clap. They fired just sixty rounds through it, mostly with the SMG’s selector switch turned to the semiautomatic position.

After stowing the Ingram and its magazines in Ian’s backpack, they got out the Sten gun. Because the Sten was not suppressed, they fired just twenty rounds through it. The first eighteen rounds were loaded into magazines with just one cartridge per magazine, to test to see if they were stripped out of the magazine properly when the bolt slammed forward. Like the Ingram, the M10 fed flawlessly. Finally they reloaded two magazines with three rounds each. These Dan shot in two quick bursts. The gun functioned as expected. They then pulled the stock off the Sten and re-stowed it in Dan’s backpack. They didn’t stop grinning for hours.

Originally the completed Sten was going to belong to Fong, while the M10 would be owned by Doyle. But after their test, Fong got cold feet and claimed that he didn’t have a secure place to store an unregistered Class 3 gun. He asked Ian to buy him out of the Sten project. Doyle, who had a more cavalier attitude about legalities, was happy to do so. He hid the guns and their accessories in a wall cache in his parents’ basement.

Eventually, Ian bought a spare barrel for the Sten that had a threaded muzzle. He and Fong then spent another two Saturdays in the Grays’ shop, completing a 9mm suppressor that was almost identical to the “can” that they had built for the Ingram.

The two guns and their accessories were stored for most of the next fifteen years in the wall cache, sitting well oiled in plastic bags, each of which also contained a large packet of silica gel desiccant. All this time, Ian’s parents were oblivious to their presence.

Three years before the Crunch, Ian had a permanent change of station (PCS) back to Luke AFB. Just after that move, he took Blanca and their daughter, Linda, on a two-week driving trip to visit relatives in Wisconsin and Michigan. While in Plymouth, he retrieved the submachineguns, bringing them home in tape-sealed boxes marked “Books.” Once back in Arizona, he more extensively test-fired the guns out on a section of BLM land north of the old copper-mining town of Ajo. He put nearly three hundred rounds through the guns, with just one jam on the Sten, which he traced to a dented magazine feed lip. Not wanting to risk another jam, he buried that magazine at his impromptu shooting range. He spent the next day at home, cleaning and lubricating the guns and suppressors, and painting all of the magazines to match the guns. He stowed them in a pair of military surplus 20mm ammo cans and buried them under the crawl space of the rental house.