Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Train Time

You are living a reality I left years ago
It quite nearly killed me.
In the long run it will make you cry.
Make you crazy and old before your time...
-- CSN&Y
"You Don't Have to Cry"


On the Amtrak shuttle to D.C. from NYC. Sorta feel like I'm in a blender. The event last night went really well. am always amazed at how well people take to shooting...of course ,it's a self-selecting set, but impressive nonetheless.

Yep, Charter builds guns with machine tools rather than CNC, which works pretty well with what is basically a late 19th Century design. The metal doesn't care what drills the hole, a ganged manually operated drill press or a 5-axis CNC, as long as the hole is to spec.

You guys saw that ammunition sales are starting to spin up...just saying'...

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Had to go to 4 gun stores and even Walmart was out of .22LP standard velocity. Some had CCI mini mags, etc.
Finally found a gun shop that had them, $8.99/hundred.

It was the best that I could do, anybody else having problems/

Anonymous said...

"Yep, Charter builds guns with machine tools rather than CNC, which works pretty well with what is basically a late 19th Century design. The metal doesn't care what drills the hole, a ganged manually operated drill press or a 5-axis CNC, as long as the hole is to spec."

Every one who has actually done production metal working as a career is laughing at you.
You are impressed with the quality of photography for "Gun Stories" produced with high speed stabilized ultra modern cameras.
Could you do the same work with a box Brownie ?

Tom B.

Anonymous said...

Tom B...of course he could ! Michael Bane knows everything and can do everything and he's done everything ! He rocks !

Anonymous said...

MB,

We all know you make your living shilling for the firearms industry, but really, you are trying to drum up an ammo shortage on behalf of the ammo companies?

You kept stoking the fires during the great ammo shortage of 2008-2010, but now you're trying to help create aN shortage?

DamDoc said...

GOLD.. SILVER.. GUNS.. AMMO and RELOADING FACTORY.. FOOD.. WATER... GAS... ignore the realities at your own risk...

DamDoc said...

Follow up comment: its real easy to be anonymous....

shawn w said...

like doc said! ^^^^^^^^

got my ammo squared away during the times of plenty.
along with a bit of silver, food, water, medical supplies, hand tools, a bike, a manual pump for my well, a back-up energy supply and some training.

missed a couple seasons of american idol and the bachelor doing it, but i some how survived.

Anonymous said...

if you post to a blog, any blog, well, you're not as anonymous as you think.

anywhoo, when was the first 1911 made?

when did CNC 5 axis machines come onto the scene, the mid 1980's maybe, maybe the 1990's.

so we had, what? a whopping 80 years of clamping frames or forgings in jigs in dedicated bridgeports and drill presses, and lathes....

the guns seemed to work just fine during those 80 years.

How many M1 Garands did Garand make without CNC?

Tom from Roanoke said...

I guess it's easy to be critical, sitting in your moms' basement in your underwear. Most of us appreciate all you do, Michael, please keep it up. Oh, and regards to Alf.

Anonymous said...

Good article to read about gunwriters...

http://www.handgunsmag.com/2012/04/04/gunwriters-know-everything-just-ask-them/#idc-container

Anonymous said...

I have only two questions for "anonymous" at 11:28.
How many years have you been a machinist ?
How many of them have you spent in a gun factory ?
For me, 25 and 6.
Tom Bogan
Laconia NH.

Anonymous said...

To add to my previous comment, T/CArms switched the drilling and tapping process on barrels from a "gang drill press" to a CNC machine.
They decreased the total barrel scrap rate by more than 75% just by changing that one operation.

Tom Bogan
Laconia NH

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous Tom from Roanoke said...

I guess it's easy to be critical, sitting in your moms' basement in your underwear. Most of us appreciate all you do, Michael, please keep it up. Oh, and regards to Alf."

I'll overlook your ignorant ad hominem comment and point out that Micheal's wide experience may include designing, shooting, and customizing fire arms, but it does not include day in day out "production" operations.
I chose to use an analogy that he could relate to his own area of professional expertise.

Tom Bogan
Laconia NH

Michael Bane said...

Tom;

But you prove my point from the subsequent post...changing machinery, changing production processes (MRP to a pure kanban system), etc. all tend to be for reasons OTHER than the quality of the end product. We've known how to make high quality barrels since the 1500s; T/C's process can drastically reduce scrap, important in todays high-priced commodity market...no doubt boost throughput on the barrels, resulting in a far more efficient process...and remove "x" amount of human handling, thus additionally reducing expenses ("dark" factories are cheaper to run than factories full of people)...all these things also tend to yield a product with MORE CONSISTENT quality, because fewer hands are involved in the creation of the barrel, thus reducing the opportunities for mistakes to creep into the process,

However...and this is a big HOWEVER...when we talk about the end unit quality, that is, a barrel that delivers gilt-edged accuracy from a long gun, a modern production T/C barrel is no more (or less) accurate than, say a Harry Pope barrel from 1890 or, heck, a Swiss competition barrel from the late 1500s. Yes, it is TONS easier to produce, but the bottom line — the intrinsic accuracy of the barrel — is unchanged.

The cutting edge on accuracy in handheld weapons these days is built around a better understanding of the nature of how barrels actually work as opposed to how we think they work and enhanced measuring tools to study bullet performance in the Real World...

mb

Anonymous said...

MB Posted
"However...and this is a big HOWEVER...when we talk about the end unit quality, that is, a barrel that delivers gilt-edged accuracy from a long gun, a modern production T/C barrel is no more (or less) accurate than, say a Harry Pope barrel from 1890 or, heck, a Swiss competition barrel from the late 1500s. Yes, it is TONS easier to produce, but the bottom line — the intrinsic accuracy of the barrel — is unchanged."

While what you say is true, as far as it goes.
No, T/C barrels were no better or worse than the competition barrels you mention, however you miss the important point that the T/C product was not a custom or competition product, it was standard production grade.
That was, after all, the motivation for S&W to purchase the company.

Tom B.