WVsig
Member
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2012
- Messages
- 2,063
JMB did not design the gun we call the Browning High Power or Browning Hi Power. His last patent is my avatar. It is not the gun we shoot today. Read the real history of the development of this pistol in books like Vanderlinden's FN Browning Pistols or R Blake Steven's The Browning High Power Automatic Pistol and the truth becomes clear. The main contribution to the pistol by JMB directly was the breech lock design. The rest not so much. He did not even design the mag the gun was build around. He made the original protoypes and then did not directly work on the project again. Only one of the original protoypes featured a locked breech design. The other was a blow back design.
When Le Maître passed sitting at his desk at Herstal he was working on a elegant superpose shotgun not the BHP. Too many people do not know the real origin story of the BHP and continue to post inaccurate myth instead of facts. It gets old trying to correct them in just about every BHP discussion. OK Rant over.....
As to the new pistol it is a High Power in name only. I think of it like the Ian alluded to. It is like the new Bronco. It sort of is an homage to the original but except for some very basic design elements it has little relation to the older version. It is a High Power in name and spirit only. There are many reasons for this but #1 is the tooling at FN was out of date and was too costly to remake. It was also designed in a time when manual labor was cheaper than machine labor. It made no sense in todays modern machining world. The clones which are currently being produced are all coming from Turkey where they basically pay slave labor wages. This is the same reason that labor intensive designs like the HK MP5 are still produced there. The new pistol had to be made differently.
Some of the biggest complaints about the New FN High Power is that it is heavier and that the slide and frame are wider then the original. It was pointed out on another forum that there are reasons for this. They removed the 3 locking lugs from the barrel and the slide. The barrel no longer locks into these lugs. These add time to the production of both the barrel and the slide. The new one has a more modern locking system which uses the front of the barrel locking into the front ledge of the slide. As Ian points out this is much cheaper to manufacturer.
What Ian did not mentioned is that they had to make the only lug massive enough to take the pounding and spread the stresses out over a wider area. The three radial lugs only engage horizontally between 10 and 2. If two of them were removed, it wouldn't take long for the first lug to deform and set back. Once it setback and the barrel lug would set forward and increase headspace by a like amount. This is exactly what most modern manufacturers have done in order to keep from having to hold to close dimensions with three lugs. This meant a larger wider lug had to be used. This of course resulted in a wider slide and frame. I do not own a FNX but I am willing to bet that the barrel is similar if not the same. This might explain why the gun is heavier than the original but still ways less than the CZ Shadow 2.
Leveraging economy of scale is essential to being profitable for todays gun manufacturers. I am willing to bet that they can make this gun on a lot of the same tooling they use for the FNX line. If it does not sell they have not invested in proprietary machinery except for what was needed for the frame since the FNX is polymer.
When Le Maître passed sitting at his desk at Herstal he was working on a elegant superpose shotgun not the BHP. Too many people do not know the real origin story of the BHP and continue to post inaccurate myth instead of facts. It gets old trying to correct them in just about every BHP discussion. OK Rant over.....
As to the new pistol it is a High Power in name only. I think of it like the Ian alluded to. It is like the new Bronco. It sort of is an homage to the original but except for some very basic design elements it has little relation to the older version. It is a High Power in name and spirit only. There are many reasons for this but #1 is the tooling at FN was out of date and was too costly to remake. It was also designed in a time when manual labor was cheaper than machine labor. It made no sense in todays modern machining world. The clones which are currently being produced are all coming from Turkey where they basically pay slave labor wages. This is the same reason that labor intensive designs like the HK MP5 are still produced there. The new pistol had to be made differently.
Some of the biggest complaints about the New FN High Power is that it is heavier and that the slide and frame are wider then the original. It was pointed out on another forum that there are reasons for this. They removed the 3 locking lugs from the barrel and the slide. The barrel no longer locks into these lugs. These add time to the production of both the barrel and the slide. The new one has a more modern locking system which uses the front of the barrel locking into the front ledge of the slide. As Ian points out this is much cheaper to manufacturer.
What Ian did not mentioned is that they had to make the only lug massive enough to take the pounding and spread the stresses out over a wider area. The three radial lugs only engage horizontally between 10 and 2. If two of them were removed, it wouldn't take long for the first lug to deform and set back. Once it setback and the barrel lug would set forward and increase headspace by a like amount. This is exactly what most modern manufacturers have done in order to keep from having to hold to close dimensions with three lugs. This meant a larger wider lug had to be used. This of course resulted in a wider slide and frame. I do not own a FNX but I am willing to bet that the barrel is similar if not the same. This might explain why the gun is heavier than the original but still ways less than the CZ Shadow 2.
Leveraging economy of scale is essential to being profitable for todays gun manufacturers. I am willing to bet that they can make this gun on a lot of the same tooling they use for the FNX line. If it does not sell they have not invested in proprietary machinery except for what was needed for the frame since the FNX is polymer.
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