How to be a gunsmith?

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dennishoddy

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To the gunsmiths out there, how do you become a gunsmith? I spent 15 years as a mechanic but i'm burned out, my passion is firearms. I've worked on and built my own stuff, stone fit 1911 slide to frame, cut crowns, fixed feeding issues, replaced internal parts. Do you have to go to one of the schools, which school is actually worth it, can you apprentice instead of schools? I've googled it but it's not clear to me, so I wanted to ask people how they did it. TIA
It sounds like you have a great start.
several members have offered suggestions to further your knowledge and training. Some are accomplished yet retired gunsmiths.
You will never get rich being a smith but if your passionate about the field, you will never be out of work.
My suggestion would be to specialize in a certain platform be it shotgun, center fire, or pistol.
Find something popular in the competition world to focus
on, antique firearms, fine shotguns, competition shotguns, long range CF or something like this to get a name when good shooters mention your name as the person that prepped the firearm that won that match.
You must promote yourself on social media and be able to back up your claims or social media will destroy you.
Most folks that start getting into the hierarchy of gunsmithing find that answering the phone or responding to social media results in time away from what makes them money so they get a bad rep for poor customer service from people that don’t understand how they need time on the mill and lathe to get out the product they make a living from.
I’ve seen a couple of the big time internet gunsmiths are hiring phone people.
Dtech is one I use. I was totally pissed off with a backlog of a year for a custom rifle wondering what the status was of my build.
I finally got it and was so impressed that another went on order.
Owner hired a phone person that answered and gave updates. Kept me complacent during the entire build telling me my parts were on back order and why they weren’t readily available and so on.
He wasn’t BS’ing me either.
So that is my advice as a user of gunsmiths.
 

mr ed

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Theres a world of difference between online and in person. There's absolutely no comparison to having an instructor looking over your shoulder or looking over their shoulder to see it's done right.

Its a big difference watching a video on how to disassemble various guns and actually going to the toolroom and checking ome out to learn on.
Not everybody can afford an extensive inventory just to tear apart and learn on.

To graduate from Trinidad 3rd year repair program they had a list of popular guns
You had to be able to strip down totally and reassemble. And I'm not talking field strip. But total disassembly in a strict time limit.
 

ramco

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Many years ago I attended the two week Law Enforcement Armorers Course at Murray State College. It was part of my training as a Firearms Examiner for OCPD. We covered most of the firearms used by law enforcement agencies. When people asked me where I got my gunsmith training, I tell them I went to MIT. They usually respond with “wow I didn’t know MIT offered gunsmith courses. Of course I don’t tell them that MIT stood for “Murray in Tishomingo”.
 

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