What material (type of pin) should I use for permanent muzzle brake pin?

[NYH1]

As the title says. What should I use as the pin to permanently pin and weld a muzzle brake on?

Thanks, NYH1.

[Eric D.]

Do you know the material the muzzle brake is made of? I would try to match it as best you could. I'm not familiar with weldability of different SS alloys but if the brake is SS I would look for SS round stock of a suitable diameter. Same thing for carbon and other alloy steels. I believe many commercially available precision dowel pins are are a low alloy, high carbon steel like 1080, 1085, etc. and they would weld ok. You can also find precision ground or cold rolled round stock in similar alloys in the 10XX series. A word of caution though - if you weld onto a high carbon steel there is a possibility some of the carbon will diffuse into the weld puddle and make it very hard to drill later on if you needed to remove it. You could always grind it though.

To be honest it probably doesn't matter all that much. You could even use a piece of a drill bit shank. The only thing I'd want to watch out for is anything ugly happening to your weld puddle because of a funky pin. You don't really need the weld to fuse with the pin either, just cover it up.

[Kenneth]

I just used the piece of drill bit that I used to drill into the barrel. Drilled the hole and then used a dremel to cut a pin out of the drill bit.


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[NYH1]

It's a Colt M4 SOCOM barrel so 4150 chrome moly steel or something or other!

A2 type muzzle device.

I never thought of using the drill bit.

NYH1.

[TMS951]

I have always used a portion of the shank of the drill bit I used to drill the hole. Perfect fit.

Role pins are fine too, the weld will flow into it.

[tom12.7]

Lot's of people who do this just clean the parts and hard solder silver braze with a TIG in a flameless way in a purposely sloppy way to assure ATF compliance for presentation with minimal effect on the base barrel for compliance. It fits within ATF's requirements unless something new has changed.

[Sancho Panza]

BCM A2X was what I used. It came with a pin, & was pre-drilled.

[lysander]

1018 mild steel.

Why make life difficult if you decide later to change muzzle devices . . .

[christopher.dow]

I saw another technique and wondered if it was acceptable:

In this case, the muzzle device had a threaded hole. The gunsmith drilled a hole in the barrel, then ran a screw through the threads and into the hole. When it bottomed out, he torqued the screw until the head broke off. Next, he cut off most of what was sticking out of the hole with a dremel, and finally ground it down and hit I with a wire brush.

It really looked like a weld and the muzzle device was clearly going nowhere. However, no welding was involved.


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[NYH1]

I think to be compliant it has to be pinned and welded or pinned and silver soldered with specific solder. TIG welding is easy for us so that's the way I'll do it.

NYH1.