Well perhaps my post was a little unfair. The Winchester that existed prior to WWII desires a lot of credit for having come up with such a successful design, in an exceptionally short period of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_carbine
Last night I looked through my book “War Baby” and saw that Winchester had production problems. Most of the M1 carbine vendors had production problems, some, like Underwood, did an exceptional job in the transition to production.
If you have never gone through something like that, the transition from hand built items to full scale production is the most risky phase of any program.
That’s why you should not buy a first year production car.
However, the book did verify that Winchester produced their firearms on old, obsolete equipment. The FN book shows that their chaotic and illogical production flow created the situation for out of tolerance parts to stack up, and then be assembled days, weeks, if not months later into the final assembly.
According to the book deliveries from Winchester were suspended in Aug 1944, by the Government, and 10,000 fully assembled firearms were re inspected and reworked.
However, they were not the “bad” Boy. Rockola apparently was the worst managed of all the M1 Carbine makers. Ordnance basically had to take over and run the plant to get anything out the door.