Two political paragraphs first, then on to tech stuff.
Joe S: in 1986 the feds passed a law called the "Firearm Owner's Protection Act" which was written as a good thing. Let's say you were driving from Pennsylvania to Maine and had to go through New York (state and/or city) to get there, and you had guns in the trunk that were legal in both PA and MA. Under FOPA New York (city and state) were banned from screwing with you if your guns were illegal in NY and/or NYC.
Well at the last minute something called the "Hughes Amendment" was tacked on. This said that no full auto gun that wasn't already registered for private ownership in 1986 could be sold on the civilian market. This basically created a fixed pool of full-auto guns from that point forward. As a result even the crappiest possible full autos from, say, 1985 (Mac10 or whatever) is worth a minimum of $5k today (maybe more, I haven't checked for a while) and really good full autos papered on or before '86 can be worth a small fortune. There are people out there with million dollar full auto collections that would fit in a bedroom...and if the Hughes Amendment is ever struck down by the courts or repealed by the legislature the values of those collections will crash and burn.
So anyways, what I *could* do is apply for an "Any Other Weapon" stamp to allow adding a shoulder stock to Maurice (with a much bigger magazine, and I've considered that!) and I could pay another tax stamp for a silencer. But full auto is a no-go at any price.
As to my original question: I don't see how.
I finally did what I should have done in the beginning: figured out how JMB kept the 1911 from going full-auto by accident (known as a "burst").
This page helped a lot:
http://www.m1911.org/1911desc.htm
Second pic tells the story: there's a piece between the trigger and hammer that a Ruger New Model SA action doesn't have, and then a "disconnector" that is slide-operated that moves the sear back into position before the hammer can drop again.
OK...well let's assume for a sec that I could somehow shoehorn a sear into the frame between the hammer and trigger, rolling on a new side-pin through the frame. Tricky as hell but let's say I could make it happen. I don't see any possible room for a disconnector in there too. Now, I could mount a disconnector externally and operate it with gas pressure, but...my legal problems aren't solved because by holding the disconnector shut against the gas pressure I would have basically a manually selectable full auto feature and...yeah, we're back to illegal-as-heck.
Now, IF the Hughes Amendment were to go away then yes, it can be done. I could do a linkage right off the current shell deflector pin location, run a gas line to push an actuator rod and I'm in business. I could even rig a gas shut-off valve going to the rod to select between manually cocked operation and full-auto.
So...no, for now. What I will do, when I rebuild the gas trap in a few weeks, is add compensator ports so that I no longer have enough gas pressure that could be tapped to theoretically rig it full auto with some other changes as well of course.
