As you know if you're been following along with my other posts, I hate machining steel, so for my 1911-ish project I'm going to make the upper frame from 7075 aluminum. If you're not familiar with 7075, it is in many respects as strong as some steels, but without the weight or hassle of machining. The only real downsides to 7075 are it's cost, it's pretty expensive compared to other alloys, and the fact that you can't weld it, which hopefully I'll never have to do. For stuff like this where I only need a little bit, e-bay is my go to source. You can often find cutoffs from a wide variety of materials at very good prices.
Unlike my Uzi bolt, this piece is going to require actual precision. The Uzi bolt really only has one critical dimension, the headspace distance. Everything else can be +/- a bit and will still work fine. This thing requires actually holding a tolerance, so lets hope it turns out.
My workspace isn't overly well contained, so stuff like this is an exciting game of machine for a while, vacuum the chips, machine for a while, vacuum the chips, repeat. Even though it's just aluminum, I'm still using carbide tooling too because carbide is so cheap these days that there's no reason not to. I have my coolant/air blower set up as a homemade Fogbuster style system, so it's just mists on the coolant without making a huge mess of things.
Off to a good start, here's how my first setup turned out:
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