[Verjigorm]

Making weapons and armor, duh. :)

But seriously, Armoury(small arms) can be used at low levels and with minimal equipment. With a circular saw with a carbide blade, a set of good files, a good drill and a vise, you can make a variety of firearms out of common piping. Oh, a torch helps too.

The simplest zip guns are shotguns or .22s with simple slam-fire pins. You make two lengths of pipe, one the size of the shotgun shell, one slightly larger than the other one, so that they will slide inside each other. Rig up a simple pin set up, load a shell into a barrel, slide it into the reciever(heh), and then slam it back to fire a 12 guage shotgun shell! Poof! That can be done with off the shelf parts from any hardware store(or plumbing store) and wrenches, hammers and nails. And JB Weld. Probably a base time of 4 hours or so to plan and build. It's a single shot weapon that requires a ready action to take apart after firing, a ready action to remove the spent casing, a ready action to draw a casing, and a ready action to load it into the barrel, then another ready action close the breech(HAHAHAHA. "the breech" he calls it..). That's a 1(5) ROF, and a Fast Draw Ammo roll can shave that down to 1(4). No safety, no sights(use a fluorescent zip tie around the barrel with the catch up as a bead if you wanna get fancy), a crude stock at best. It's dirty, nasty and cheap.

But it's also something you can build with a bare minimum of equipment or materials. And if you're a decent shot, turning some pipes and washers into a shotgun is better than using it as a club. It takes a bit of time to do, but it's not hard. Useful if you're playing some sort of "weapons specialist" type who is separated from his firearms for whatever reason. Being able to fashion a crude gun is a useful ability if you are already heavily invested in firearms.

You can also scrape the phosphor off of matchheads and use that as a crude propellent for a muzzle loader built from pipes and wood.

With access to a vise, drill, saw, torch and power, you can make simple single-shot weapons out of pipes and barstock in a day or two with a safety! I wouldn't drop it. Unless you built in an ejector of some sort, it's going to be a ROF 1(5) weapon as well. But it's a little bit safer.

These weapons are not built to very high tolerances and use low pressure rounds. The sloppy tolerances help to keep them from catastrophically failing, as much of the pressure of firing is vented and lost through gaps between the action. This creates a noisy and impressive shot though, with lots of smoke and fury. You're going to get less performance out of these weapons(I'd say atleast -1 per die) for cartridges they can safely handle.

The more time you have, the more you can do. With sufficient time, using nothing more than the aforementioned power drill, torch, power saw and some miscellaneous tools(hammers, screwdrivers, punches, etc) you can manufacture a working gas operated semi-automatic, magazine fed smoothbore rifle. Not ideal, no, but it's better than those jokers trying to use muzzle loaders and those crude pieces of junk I started the thread with.

Armory Melee weapons is good for taking those wall hanger pieces of junk you find in a looted pawnshop and turning them into real weapons. For many of them you can cut off the crappy rat tail tangs and then cur down a portion of the blade to make a true tang, slap some wooden grips on there, then wrap it with wire. It takes about 4 hours for simple modifications.

You can take rebar and heat it up and shape it into survivable spikes or short blades and affixed to hafts or handles for a variety of different weapons.

Armoury can be used to fashion a shank from almost anything. Taking a newspaper and rolling it up, then wrapping it with wire from headphone sets stripped of the rubber insulation will make a rather lethal stabbing implement. heavy enough paper(like poster board) can be folded and taped to make a crude shank that will stab someone. It probably won't kill them, but multiple stabs to the throat would probably prove a point.

Armoury body armor allows you fashion body armor from buckets, street signs and cars with some shears, drills and/or punches, rivets, hammers and plastic. I think you could probably get DR 2-3 from multiple layers cut from plastic buckets, body panels of cars and street signs riveted together. There's my much talked about paper armor(an inch of paper will protect pretty well against a lot of low velocity things), though it is really improvisational(it's going to fall apart, quickly). But there's a lot of everyday stuff that is out there that can be turned into crude armor to protect you from bludgeons and light weapons.

It's a really useful skill, and complemented nicely by scrounging in a survival or post-apocalyptic setting.