A friend had a Bushmaster rifle that they wanted to add a bipod to – unfortunately, the freefloating handguard has no provisions for mounting a bipod and even more, the handguard is integral to the barrel nut itself. Still, I’m always up for a challenge. To make things easier, I decided to leave the handguard/barrel […]
A friend had a Bushmaster rifle that they wanted to add a bipod to – unfortunately, the freefloating handguard has no provisions for mounting a bipod and even more, the handguard is integral to the barrel nut itself. Still, I’m always up for a challenge.
To make things easier, I decided to leave the handguard/barrel nut in place and put the entire upper on the mill. This way I could use the upper receiver as my horizontal plane reference. I stuffed toilet paper down between the barrel and handguard to catch any chips, and used a strip of electrical tape on either side of the handguard to keep it from getting dinged by the vise jaws.
My first thought was to use a test indicator in the spindle against the two flats on either side of the upper receiver’s bottom to get it aligned vertically, then I realized that a much simpler method would be to chuck a large diameter multi-flute endmill and bring it down against a parallel while loosely clamped in the vise. Then tighten up the vise while keeping a little pressure on the quill to keep things aligned. Viola, perfect alignment without a test indicator.
Next step was to find the centerline of the handguard. There wasn’t enough clearance to use a cylindrical edge finder on the jaw faces, so I flipped the edge finder over to use the conical tip. I just had to make sure to set the stop on the spindle so that I used the same Z height on each side. Also, this wouldn’t have worked if the top inside edge of the jaw faces was dinged up, since using the conical end of the edge finder in this way gives only point contact rather than the edge contact that the cylindrical end would have provided.
With the Y axis centered, I set my X axis zero as the end of the handguard and used a spotting drill to make a divot for the first hole 1.000″ in.
One of the ball end milled grooves on the handguard would be sitting right under the rail, but the groove is off-center by a little bit, so the spotting drill would be hitting the edge of the groove and not able to make a proper divot. So for the two center holes, I used a 5/32″ endmill to punch holes all the way through (5/32″ is just a few thou smaller than the #21 drill used for the needed 10-32 threads).
After drilling through all 4 holes, I put a 10-32 tap in the drill chuck and loosened the collet so I could spin the chuck by hand (but still have it perfectly positioned in the X-Y plane).
After using a pick to dig out the toilet paper from inside the handguard, I attached the rail, and everything fit perfectly. Remove from the vise, blow out any straggling chips with compressed air, and the job is done! Ideally the screws should be installed with blue loctite (the metal is thin enough that you have to be careful about not torquing the screws too much and stripping the threads), but since my friend wanted to maybe start with having two stub rails installed instead of one long one, I’ll let him deal with the threadlocker.