For those paying attention, you know I like covering homemade firearms, gear and do-it-yourself modifications, and this featured sci-fi rifle may just top the cake. TFB reader, Axel, contacted me about a futuristic rifle design he’d worked out with inspiration drawn from a sci-fi rifle he’d found on DeviantArt.com. I was instantly intrigued, and I think you will be too.

Axel’s inspiration. Used with permission from artist PeterKu

LINK TO THE ORIGINAL ART THAT INSPIRED AXEL

Axel wanted the challenge of picking a sci-fi styled firearm design and turn it into a functional firearm.  Axel said that he could never come up with the visual designs himself, but he was confident in his tinkering skills to bring a design from his computer screen to the shooting range.  The design he settled on was in some ways, one of the hardest and more radical, but in another sense, it looks like it gave him some extra room inside the gun to make things happen.

Naturally, I had a few questions for Axel about his build and you can see his answers below:

So I picked one and figured out I could do something along those lines by using two .22 selfloading rifles.  I tilted them 90° sideways so this bullpup can be used left and right handed.  My target was to use the .22 systems without further modifications.  Just take them out of the original stocks and put it in that one.  Because that’s what this technically is – an aftermarket stock for 2 Marlin 60 rifles. (I had to remove the rear sights).  It could become a product at some point, but no plans of doing it at the moment.

I’ve chosen the Marlin since there are plenty of them and the [fire control group] (fcg) is contained in the receiver unlike at the Ruger 10/22 for example.  So the receiver including fcg builds pretty low to keep the overall width of the bullpup design as slim as technically possible.

Axel’s mockup can be seen in the background of his Marlin 60 photo.

That’s quite a jump from the old, traditional stocked, tube fed .22LR rifles that perhaps harvested countless squirrels, now made seeming ready to take on the next intergalactic invasion.  I’m not usually much into for .22 rifles outside of their utility or for teaching with, but this sci-fi rifle looks like loads of fun.  Axel was quite industrious when it came to making both rifles fire from one trigger.

Since this was a just for fun project – I wanted to have some fun firing it too. So I went with a pull and release trigger, nowadays often referred to as binary trigger.  Pulling fires the upper system and releasing the lower one. Challenge here was, like with all bullpups, to achieve a halfway decent trigger pull.  And here two instead of one fcg had to be operated.   I designed 3 different trigger variants to get there.