Pimp My Gun is a unique tool that allows anyone without any drawing and/or firearm experience create an image of a gun which can be very useful but the fact that anyone can use it is why it is criticized so much and why mistakes are commonly made. Hopefully this guide will help people be able to design good quality guns which could actually have a chance of working in real life.
The Beginning
When you first decide you want to create a gun in pimp my gun you should first think about what you want to create, if you just randomly put together parts you will start running into problems as soon as you begin. First write down a list of specifications you wish your gun to have:
This will act as a basic outline of your weapon and help guide the construction of your weapon.
Research
You should do a little research into similar weapons in real life, this will allow you to be much more accurate in the details of how the weapon actually works and if it would be suitable for it's desired purpose, for example a sniper rifle would not have a 100mm long barrel.
The Inner Workings
When you first start building your weapon in Pimp My Gun begin with the inner components, although the full inner workings of weapons are not available in PMG things such as the barrel, bolt and gas block are. If you can set these out realistically you can build around them creating a more realistic weapon.
The barrel, bolt, gas tube and gas block of a gun similar to an M4, the gas block in this weapon is actually located within the front sight so if you don't put the sight on in this system it would not work.
The Receiver
Most of the recievers in Pimp My Gun have several different parts:
Upper Receiver
The Upper receiver is where the ejection port resides and is also where the barrel joins the weapon.
Lower Receiver
The lower receiver is normally where the magazine is found as well as the trigger mechanism.
Bolt
The bolt of gun is designed to block the end of the chamber when firing the gun, when it pulls back it also extracts the spent casing from the chamber and ejects it through the ejection port.
Dust Cover
The dust cover is designed to keep things like dust and mud entering the mechanism. When it is closed it covers the ejection port so it must be opened to fire.
Building the Receiver
You must first select the lower receiver, choose one that best suits your weapon. Check that the magwell fits you desired magazine. Then comes the upper receiver, this needs to fit reasonably well with the lower receiver and must have an ejection port large enough to eject the desired ammunition, if it does not the weapon would always jam. The bolt and dust cover are not to hard to position.
Dust cover in the open position.
Barrel Alignment
Barrel Alignment is something that sometimes goes wrong and really depends on the receiver you have selected.
Some guns have the barrel aligned with the ejector port like on the XM8 shown above or slightly above like on the M16 shown below.
On older and bullpup weapons the ejection port is normally above the barrel shown below with the AK-47 and L85.
If you want to get the alignment accurate do some research.