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Degtyaryov DA aircraft machine gun

VJJPunisher

VJJPunisher

Necromancing the stone
Full Member
Minuteman
Apr 30, 2010
4,255
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prison purse
Has anyone ever seen one of these? All I can tell is there are some illustrations of what it looked like from some old Soviet manuals. Maybe a pic or two of one in a museum somewhere (missing its sights).

According to wiki they were produced from 1928 to 1930 before being replaced with a couple better options like the shkas.

I became sorta fascinated with it, specifically the wind vane front sight which I never knew existed but turns out were on quite a few aircraft mounted machine guns of the early open top biplane ww1 era, such as on the American Lewis mk1

Well I have a dp28 that never really

did anything me, kinda wierd kinda ugly etc so I decided I was gonna try and convert it into a DA.

Here is the illustration I am using as a guide, and the semi auto dp28 that’s getting hacked up

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I will try and share the project below (it’s almost done so as time permits to post up some photos I took along the way
 
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First things first, I’m not wood worker and the Mandingo grip on the original is dumb, so this aspect of the build I decided to make my own and, to me, improve the concept and build it with a spade grip.

The donor spade grip is a selenoid controlled sg43 spade grip, so same Russian make and look

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Took the selenoid off, and decided to reuse the butterfly but had to reverse it, made a block to fit in the housing

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Chopped off the two tabs on the back of the dp28 lower housing, also of note here, the lower has a nice bore hole drilled in it all the way to the back of the trigger, assumably for the manufacturing process but it works out great as this will be the channel for the linkage going to the trigger

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These show the linkage bar to the og trigger

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Another addition I’m making just for my version of this is to cover the trigger with plates, covers to prevent accidental tripping of the trigger
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There’s was this detent actuated dealy thingy on the spade grip, I assume it was to lock the spade grip on an actual sg43
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Yeah threw that in the trash and made a push button safety that locks the butterfly from coming forward

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Moving forward on this hunk of trash the aircraft drums are shorter but taller so you have to modify how the mag locks in, this means a plate gets welded on to be the forward locking surface
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Ok so now the barrel on the da is exposed and not covered by a shroud like the ground gun dp, the op rod still has a tube protecting the op rod so I did was went to town chopping the shit out of the shroud but keeping the guide tube
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Now if you look at this pic stolen from the far reaches of the internet you see they had a round ring that acts to hold the rear sight tower and clamping surface to the aircraft mount
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Bingo bango you make a ring to be welded on the outside of the collar part of the original shroud

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Again here is the only thing I had to go off of, the illustration from some old manual (rear sight)
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Using a mg42 spider sight that I snipped out some of the posts, I went about trying to fab out what is in the illustration
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Now to the Marvin the Martian front contraption.

Actually very cool and made a lot of sense for so long ago, the wind vane would flow with the wind and in essence account for deflection from you being in a moving aircraft, quite ingenious really

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A bunch of fabrication limits testing and a bunch of 30 thou shim stock and metal bars and failure and viola

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To do next is machine a new gas block that ties into the oprod guid tube, to be continued…….or not, might not be bothered to finish……..we’ll see
 
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This is so insanely cool and inspiring.

Here i am working up the skills to thread a rolling block barrel (dont ask, or do!!) And you and @buffalowinter building cool shit from 2 pages of a ditant history book.

Id pay to watch you guys do a build off. Like top chef, but with guns (i should pitch and TM that)
 
mzvarner said:
This is so insanely cool and inspiring.

Here i am working up the skills to thread a rolling block barrel (dont ask, or do!!) And you and @buffalowinter building cool shit from 2 pages of a ditant history book.

Id pay to watch you guys do a build off. Like top chef, but with guns (i should pitch and TM that)
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I'm pretty sure it wouldn't even be close, with VJJ the clear winner.

Me, doing some precision work. Usually, I'm on fire at some point. Yesterday, I had to stop work because I smelled something burning and it turned out to be me.
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mzvarner said:
This is so insanely cool and inspiring.

Here i am working up the skills to thread a rolling block barrel (dont ask, or do!!) And you and @buffalowinter building cool shit from 2 pages of a ditant history book.

Id pay to watch you guys do a build off. Like top chef, but with guns (i should pitch and TM that)
Click to expand...

Appreciate the sentiment, but Buffalo would smoke my ass at a build off! He’s built a lot more awsome projects that I don’t think I coulda pulled off, been doing it longer, and is a very skilled one man shop. Buffalo does all the fab work and welding and he’ll even cerakote!

Truth be told I’m only really good at mill work and great at conceptualizing. I took a few college classes in machine drawing, mechanical drafting, isometric machine drawing etc, so my isometric doodles as prints are pretty famous around the shop. I have a buddy I work with that’s a great machinist through and through, he helps me out with anything needing done on a lathe, he also can Cnc program so sometimes we cnc a little do-dad off my drawings. Another buddy has years of welding experience, I can mig pretty good but alot of these gun builds require a good tig guy, and he’s mine. The third unspoken dude is another buddy who does the cerakoting.

A lot of these are me conceptualizing an idea, if I can manually machine it on a mill I do it- front and rear sights on this build, all me. All the semi auto conversion parts, me, all the spade grip conversion, me, chopping and converting op rod tube, me. Now the finning the barrel, welding all the parts together, cnc the new gas block, all not me

So to summarize, Buffalo is the god around these parts, he is the go to, the standard, if you will!

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I am currently working on a couple of projects, one of which is a semi-auto Berretta M12 NFA registered SBR. Here is a pic of the collateral damage:
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I am on the fourth iteration of the fire controls, trying to get it right:
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I am the King of the "Monty Python School of Gunsmithing. Our philosophy:
 
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@buffalowinter i had every intention of buying your M249 replica if I had won the powerball.

Keep the builds coming gents. This stuff is awesome. This forum needs a sub of just gunsmithing.
 
It looks like you've cut the fins as a ACMEish thread, rather than plunging radial cuts along the length of the barrel. Was this done for convenience, or historical accuracy? I cut a lot of stub ACME in the shop, and wonder if radial cuts wouldn't be easier for your project - just moving the barrel out from the chuck one pitch at a time to keep the cut up against the chuck.

This is in a manual lathe, not a CNC though, so the whole programmable travelling steady would make a difference to what is easy and what isn't.
 
RPN said:
It looks like you've cut the fins as a ACMEish thread, rather than plunging radial cuts along the length of the barrel. Was this done for convenience, or historical accuracy? I cut a lot of stub ACME in the shop, and wonder if radial cuts wouldn't be easier for your project - just moving the barrel out from the chuck one pitch at a time to keep the cut up against the chuck.

This is in a manual lathe, not a CNC though, so the whole programmable travelling steady would make a difference to what is easy and what isn't.
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They were done on a cnc lathe, matter of convenience to give it the “look”, just typed in some numbers to make a good looking width between cuts on a threading program. Turns out to not be a real thread pattern at all really. I believe almost all of the fins on the old early 20th century stuff that was meant to cool the barrel were cut individual radial like you mentioned, so no mine are not historical at all
 
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Your spit is worth more than what I had in there to begin with so I win
 
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Post collector show aar,

I might be onto something on the being unique and one of a kind type of thing, no one knew what it was, and more than a few asked if it was Japanese(guessing the finned barrel)
 
Too bad your original jap abortion wasn’t there to throw them off
 
Correct, Kansas City, Missouri valley arms collectors association show. They only do it once a year and it’s the only show worth going to in the Kc area
 
Thank you dorn for those, I’ve seen a couple of them but not all.

See guys I told you it was a real thing and not a made up freak show!

Interesting on the second pic, looks like they chopped off the vertical portion of the wood dongo grip
 
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