Diameter Of The 50rd Drum ?

[Mohawk]

Hi Guys,

 

I'm planning a little project over the winter to try to create a dummy 50rd drum for my 1927A3, the plan is to embed a .22lr magazine in it, possibly one of the Ruger 10/22 teardrop 50rd drums !

Can someone supply the me with the diameter of the drum ? The rest I can workout from pictures, once I have a measurement to start with.

 

Thanks

 

Chris W.

[First Sergeant]

Just happened to have a Seymore L drum and tape meassure on the desk when I read this post. It's 6 1/2" in diameter and the body is 1 3/8' thick. Hope this helps.

 

Chuck

[deerslayer]

Gave that a little thought myself at one point. Ruger mag was a little bit longer than the opening I seem to remember. Then you have the issue of sliding the drum into place and the ejector. The ejector would stick up to high to allow you to slide a drum into place. An obvious solution would be to redesign the bolt/gun to have a fixed ejector, but at that point you might as well build a new gun.

 

Numrich's first drum was an empty drum shell with a 10 round stick inside. It also had a "T" shaped back piece to allow you to slide the drum up from the bottom.

 

Please give it some thought, just wanted to save you some potential problems I found with the idea.

Dan

[Mohawk]

Thanks Chuck, much appreciated.

 

Dan, I've tried a standard 10/22 mag & that will fit if you remove the locking lug off the front, so I'm fairly certain that the big Ruger drum will fit in the space.

 

As far as the ejector goes, I had a look at the banana mag adaptor & magazines & yes you can't slide the adaptor in with a mag in it because of the ejector/mag lips sticking up. The answer to this is simple if you use a drum, provided that the dimensions are good, I haven't got the big 10/22 mag yet, as I need to check how big it is. The answer, will be to make the 10/22 mag move, either vertically inside the Thompson drum, or swing to one side. This could be controlled by the drums spring key, you could even drill a couple of holes on the bottom side of the mag port to accept a couple of locking lugs & thus not need the Thompson mag release to lock the drum in place !

 

The ejector could be fashioned as part of the carrier for the 10/22 mag.

 

Like I said its a project http://www.machinegunbooks.com/forums/invboard1_1_2/upload/html/emoticons/smile.gif Might not ever work, but its something to work on over the winter.

 

Thanks

 

Chris W.

[Mohawk]

Hi Phil, Thanks for the advice.

 

I've been looking & looking for a drum, but have yet to find one & from the info I have found, they are very rare & don't work very well by all accounts. Being as I'm in the UK, getting Thompson stuff other than for deactiveted .45's (now there's a crime) is nearly impossible.

 

From what I can gather from the serial number site, they only made just over 5000 of these 1927A3 .22LR models so they are quite rare & even more so in the UK. I've only just acquired this gun & want to improve its reliability, so I'm working on that & the drum idea could end up as a 15-20 rd stick in a genuine Thompson .45 drum mag if that's as good as I can get it, but I'd like to do better http://www.machinegunbooks.com/forums/invboard1_1_2/upload/html/emoticons/smile.gif First up will be a bunch of 20rd .45 stick mags with inserts, looks much better than the 30rd one I have at the moment.

 

If I get anywhere, I'll post my findings on the board.

 

Thanks

 

Chris W.

[Mohawk]

Thankfully, mine is & always will be only semi-auto action. I'll take onboard your recommendations & see where I've got with it in a couple of months.