Your cart is empty
Italy's WW2 submachine gun, the Beretta38A/44 is clearly one of the best weapons of it's type. 9mm open-bolt, select-fire, & with a non-reciprocating charging handle. Ahead of it's time!
As usual, we started out with a pile of torch-cut pieces. We started with 2 sets of parts, one from a cross-bolt safety, and the other from a grip-safety model. Both sets are torch-cut, with lots of missing metal. We stumbled on a third set of parts that had a complete fire-control. We didn't use any of it for this project, but it's on the right, and it was useful to get the spacing of the torch-cut parts correct.
Remember, we can do this because we're licensed! Don't do this at home, kids!
In the back, we cut a slice of one kit to make up for the lost metal in the torch-cut. Straight cuts and straight welds make for a straight tube! Angled welds are a lot of trouble to get right. First weld pass is to get fusion without filler. Second pass adds filler, and is then ground flush.
The front of this sub-gun is much harder. We need a big splice to get this back together.
\
This splice piece is longer than needed, so we can trim up the ends and 'weld straight'. After that, it's metal-finish time. To match the finish, we blued and boiled the receiver and barrel, finished up using 0000 steel wool, then an oil bath.
The engraving along the top had to be 'faked-in' to match the existing engraving. We used our fiber laser for this:
Somewhere in the 'Cal.9 1948' there are 2 weld seams. Worked out pretty good. The final result:
Here's a quick run-down of how it operates:
