Lots of good books out there to glean bits and pieces of useful info from. Lots more that have out of date info, like 'sporterizing' cheap and readily available milsurps that nobody much cared about at the time. Which are not cheap or readily available anymore...
But you pretty much gotta glean through the whole lot and pick and choose the data that applies to what you want to do. No one book out there can cover it all, and there is a lot of the stuff from long ways back that is as applicable now as ever. Just depends what you want to do.
Gunsmithing is such a generalists specialty, if that makes any sense. The expectation is that a Gunsmith should be competent working with both wood and metal as well as having an eye for design and line, on top of trying to figure out how to make a living at it. Machine work can either be almost none, or all that a particular fella does, depending on the field he gets into, and the client base he wants.
You pretty much need a library to draw upon.
You can do worse things than to look at a copy of each volume of Dunlap's Gunsmithing, and a copy of Hatcher's Notes, as a darn good start,then work out in the general direction you wish to go. I suspect that you would find most gunsmith written books about machining, to be pretty elementary stuff, from the perspective of the machining itself.
I have not ran across 'the' book yet, and I have a fair few around. Guns are not, for the most part, any more high-tech than anything else a general purpose Machinist should be able to deal with.
Cheers
Trev
