Shop Talk – Paul Kuhni

By Birk Petersen

Paul’s shop is a tiny, dug out spot in the crawl space under his house shared by the furnace and water heater. There is barely room for two people to stand, and I could not stand erect without putting my head between the floor joists. It has a dirt floor and sometimes groundwater seeps in and he has to stand on boards to keep his feet dry. He has a workbench no more than four feet long, and on that bench is a 6" Craftsman lathe, a cheap 3" vise, and an electric motor with a grinding wheel attached to the shaft. That’s it! Not even a drill press! But you ought to see what he has turned out of that shop: Numerous little engines, a complete miniature machine shop from PM Research castings, etc. But the real feather in his hat is the numerous miniature hand-cranked machine guns, such as Gatling, Gardner’s, and Hotchkiss models. Paul makes his own gears, drills, rifles his own barrels, and he even makes his own scale center-fire ammo. He took the first gun back to Missouri and sold to Mr. Sutherland of The Sutherland Lumber Company and, from the proceeds, went and bought himself a brand new BMW auto. Paul started out as a journeyman, then into management so he had the means for something more in this home shop, but got tremendous satisfaction and great pride in doing “everything” on that little lathe. Paul and I keep in touch regularly; in fact, I just talked on the phone with him within a week of writing this. He just lost his lifelong wife a few months ago and that has set him back a little. At 87 years old, his body is getting frail and he does not even go down to his shop anymore. But his mind seems as sharp as ever. Paul, though not large in stature, is a giant, in my opinion, when it comes to what he can do with what he’s got.

Paul's Shop

Paul Kuhni holding the 1/3 size model of the Hotchkiss carriage mounted gun in his backyard.
Close-up of the gun.
Some of Paul’s other projects. At the left are models of machine tools and engines and to the right are scale model, hand crank machine guns.
This shows Paul’s “combine motion machine” mounted in the lathe’s milling attachment. Both the workpiece and the lathe spindle rotate. In this particular case, he is generating a hex shape out of a round bar.
Paul’s Helical milling attachment. It is incorporated and built right into the tiny compound slide of his 6" Craftsman lathe. You can see the helical gear that has been cut with a fly cutter in the lathe spindle.
This is the rifling machine, which is being held in the vise. it is rather unique in that it functions by a cam follower running in a channel set at an angle. This, in turn, pushes on a rack that turns a pinion and rotates the cutter. It can be set at most any pitch, right or left hand twist.
Here are two die filing attachments that he has made for the lathe. He prefers the one has the Scotch yoke crank and snaps into the tailstock socket because it is quicker and easier to install.
This is a model of a Hotchkiss in a deck gun version of the kind that would have been used by navies.
This is a twin barrel Gardner (they were built with various numbers of barrels). The picture is not focused very well, but you can see a bunch of his tiny scale ammo on the floor around the gun. The making of that ammo would be an article in itself.
This is a Gatling on a tripod mount.