Manufacturing using late WWII tech

The M16 family could have been prduced but would probably have been done so in the aerospa......... Aircraft industry. Albeit stock materials would likely be diffrent

Odviously the ak47 could have been produced

AR-180, FAL, etc could have been done easily. Basically any rifle that doesn't rely to heavily on polymer as a structural element could have been produced. Just replace plastic furniture on the AR with wood and it's not a difficult bit of machining for the metal.

-Jenrick

Not a weird question at all. With the exception of the polymers, yes. They would be much more
expensive, due to increased skilled labor. They would also likely need much more fitting. NC and later
CNC manufacturing equipment just wasn’t in general use until the eighties and later. Machining
tolerances in most machine shops of the day were not even close to what they are now. But certainly
possible. This sounds like a good project for a man with a nice home workshop and a lot of spare time.
Steve

Remington builds all of its successful shotguns with WW II technology. A few small parts in the 870 Express have been cheapened with later changes like plastics and MIM, but they don't need to be made that way. They weren't when the gun was introduced.

The AK-47, surely, can be built that way. The M16 would be handicapped by the materials and methods used to make the aluminum upper and lower receivers. The furniture could be made of Bakelite, though.

Most modern, especially military, weapons are designed for ease of manufacturing. My FN49 is a finely crafted semi automatic that the FAL inherited much from but required a lot of machining. WWII technology produced an A bomb , except for polymers and some processes like MIM not much small arms processes that couldn't be accomplished.

Didn't the later models of the BAR have bakelite stocks?

If anything, the HK series is the best example. Stamped sheet metal is dirt simple and easy to make, the auto industry has thousands of engineers skilled in setting that up. Machinery is relatively common, and expensive CNC, as on the AR series, minimized as much as possible.

Looking at what Germany had to do - eliminate expensive and time consuming milling operations on receivers, it's a no brainer. Kalashnikov translated that to an even more primitive industrial base. I operated a Amada press brake for two years, simple prepunched flats are relatively easy to form with 90* bends to make a receiver freehand. With dedicated tooling, a relatively unskilled operator could make thousands of parts, on a manually operated setup with human power.

With intelligent design based on actual production capabilities, HK was selling .308 battle rifles cheaper than Remingtons Model 700 in the '70's, retailing at FFL for $160 vs about $190 to $210.

I see no reason why stamped steel receivers for AR's couldn't be retailed for less than $150 the pair, upper and lower. Good profit in that too, and completely downward compatible. Cheap '80's technology.

BTW, the HK was offered with FRN stocks in the '70's too, no reason for wood by then. Much cheaper and high volume.

Anything based on either machining or stamped sheet steel. Bakelite was also widely used if wood would be a problem in the design. MIM, casting, and stainless steel were not as available back in the day.

BSW

The biggest limitation of your hypo is that hammer forging of barrels was not part of the US industrial base at 1945. However, broach cutting of rifling was, and is a decent method.

I think its importatn to remember that almost all of the current small arms came about in the late forties through the early 60's. For instance the AR-15 is from the mid-late 50's The newest small arm in the US inventory (outside SOCOM) is the M249, based on the FN Minimi, which dates from the Mid-70's.

In other words, the only things that couldn't have been made were the plastic parts, but there are substitutes for plastic.

There have been far, far fewer advances in small arms technology since WWII than people realize. They see the *external* shape of the firearms with their ergonomic curves and assume these are "high tech" uber guns beyond the dreams of prior generations. But when you actually understand the functional parts of the firearms, you see quickly that they are at most extrapolations of prior concepts. Compared with the radical developments of the 1890's after the advent of smokeless powder, the changes in small arms technology since WWII have been minimal. All we've done is tweak the designs and use polymer furniture and a few other newer materials. The guts remain the same as they were in 1940, and really not much different than they were in 1920.

they are at most extrapolations of prior concepts

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True. However, some of those extrapolations require precision manufacturing methods that have been relatively recent developments.

Armed Bear, its not true. There are very few truly precision parts in a modern assault rifle, and CNC's aren't necessarily more accurate. What they are is accurate the FIRST time, and easy to adjust for things like tool wear. There is also an advantage in that those old machines generally made one cut, the the part was moved to the next machine. there is a light loss in accuracy there, but keep in mind the gun industry didn't really dive into CNC machining until the late eighties, early nineties.

The WWII era machinery was more than capable of the accuracy needed.

When I worked at S&W at the turn of the century (Bill Clinton fired me) part of my job was transferring barrel making processes from automatic machines that were WWII and earlier vintage to CNC machinery. It wasn't because the CNC machines were more accurate or made parts faster, it was because there was almost no setup time on the CNC machines, so the time to make large numbers of different parts was faster. The goal was agility.

The big advantage those old machines had was speed. you can only remove so much metal with one tool. The way those factories were set up, there were many many more spindles running...those factories potentially had much higher throughput, but also much more Work in Process.

CNC machines mean higher reproduceability, which means less variation from gun to gun. They effectively tighten the overall range of tolerances. While at the upper end, there's no real variation, at the lower end there's a huge difference, and you have much less chance of getting a lemon. They thus improved the overall quality of firearms.

This is true of automated equipment these days, although it wasn't true of the very earliest automated equipment. Many companies first started changing over to automated equipment in the 1970s, and the result was that many 1970s firearms were very poor compared to the ones that came before and afterwards. Consider my father's 1972 Colt Combat Commander that can't hit the broad side of a barn, or his Ruger Mark I that I've put a lot of work into and just FINALLY made it reliable for the first time in its life.

The World War II equipment was more than up to the task of producing a modern firearm. While certain plastic parts may need to be substituted for metal or wood, resulting in a firearm that is a bit heavier, the overall functionality and quality would stay the same. Arguably, many of the issues with the M16 can be attributed to the tolerances being too tight, even on parts that don't need to be. Many of the modern variants that loosen some of the tolerances are far more reliable and just as accurate as the original, if not more so.

I am of the opinion that the AR aluminum alloy casting and machining could not have been mass-produced during WWII. It was, in fact, a post-war aircraft subsidiary and spin-off that used the state of the art metalurgy technology to develop it.
Al

the aluminum receivers are forged, and they could definitely forge aluminum in WWII

the aluminum receivers are forged, and they could definitely forge aluminum in WWII

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+1

The current alloy may have been an unknown back then but the rifle could still be made with other known aluminium alloys. Heck that's how they made Garand receivers; only difference is they are steel. Matter of fact, the aluminium forgings should be easier to machine.

They knew how to chrome line steel parts. Bakelite would be used, like the orginals, in place of plastic. Mags would probably be stamped steel instead of aluminium. The guns would probably require a little more fitting than today but I can't see it being any different than a Garand.

ETA: The only real downside I can see is in ammunition. .308/7.62 NATO wasn't doable until some time after WWII due to powder technology of the time; .30-06 needed it's case capacity to hit it's preformance numbers then. Same with .223/5.56 NATO, they probably couldn't drive the bullets fast enough to be effective. Don't even think about 6.8 or other new rounds. 7.62x39 would probably be good to go as it was just being developed but not sure about 5.45x39. It might suffer from the same issues as 5.56/7.62.

Phenolic Resin-Bond materials were well in use for Hard Hats, field Insturment Cases, and other tough-resillient kinds of items well before WWII...no reason it could not have been used for Gunstocks if they'd wanted.

Bakalite would have been a little liable to brittleness/shattering, in comparison.


In general, I'd expect that any conventional Arms made now, could have been made just as well or better before WWII, if possibly using different materials or methods to realize the same ends for a given design.


This makes me wish I had got that in-cosmoline, French Walnut Stock, Gilette 'Blue Blade' Blue, 1920's Colt Civillian BAR or 'Monitor' I suppose it was, I ran across and could have got for 2 grand in the early 1980s...


...sigh...


:banghead:


Oye...

Most rifles made after WW2 are based on designs from that time period. Think AK series, Fal, HK's delayed blowback system, were all developed during the war or shortly after.


The only really new design was the AR and thats a 50's design, maybe the G36, and a handfull of others.


Small arms technoligy hasn't really changed much in the last 60 years. What has changed are some of the coatings and plastics.

OTOH I think the older stuff is built better thats why I only own one modern rifle...

I have a machinist friend who has quite a collection of lathes, mills, etc in his garage. According to him, if you want real quality tools you need to buy machines built in the WWII time frame. He says they're as precise as you can get and will last long enough that our great grand children will still be using them.

There’s more to the AR’s metallurgy than simply forging and machining aluminum. The upper & lower receiver is made from a special precipitation hardened aluminum alloy. I don’t think that heat treatment technology was fully understood until well after WWII.

Jenrick said:

AR-180, FAL, etc could have been done easily. Basically any rifle that doesn't rely to heavily on polymer as a structural element could have been produced. Just replace plastic furniture on the AR with wood and it's not a difficult bit of machining for the metal.

-Jenrick

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Actually, they would probably use Bakelite, like the old AK stocks. That stuff has been around for years.

Kernel said:

There’s more to the AR’s metallurgy than simply forging and machining aluminum. The upper & lower receiver is made from a special precipitation hardened aluminum alloy. I don’t think that heat treatment technology was fully understood until well after WWII.

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Heat treatment was understood (remember the whole 1903 Springfield low number problem). They did have aircraft grade aluminum during that time too.

These machines are still in use making match-grade barrels today.