[ A Tour of AREX Defense, Šentjernej, Slovenia ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at AREX Defense in Slovenia.
We're going to take a look through the factory and see how they actually make pistols,
both the all-metal Zero 1s and also the polymer striker-fired Delta gen 2. Let's take a look.
Unlike most companies, even really big companies,
AREX does all of their own polymer injection moulding in-house.
Here we have some of the storage of the injection moulds
that are used to make all sorts of various parts, including of course the frames for the Deltas.
Alright, we're in the tool shop part of the factory here,
and not only does AREX do their own moulding,
they make all of their own injection moulding tools and their own stamping dies.
And that's what they do in this section of the facility.
So we have, in this case, a few of the stamping dies that are set up to be worked on.
Back here we have a number of the older manual machines.
Some things like very fine surface grinding actually going on right now.
But then the majority of this sort of work is done on really modern stuff.
Specifically, a couple of wire EDMs.
Wire EDM doesn't often give you a whole lot to look at,
but this is what's involved in actually making your own mould tools
to make your own polymer parts and stamping dies.
Again, really cool that that's all done in-house,
I've been to some much bigger, much more well-established firearms brand-name factories
that don't do this sort of work themselves.
The tool shop also has its own heat treating equipment.
This is done for small batch stuff, not for their standard general mass production.
That is actually the one thing that is still outsourced here,
just ... for reasons of efficiency and keeping heat treating ovens on and such.
But small scale stuff, so when they're doing development they can do their own heat treat.
Like a small batch of steel for pistol slides for new projects that they're currently working on.
Here we have a couple of the stamping ... presses.
And again they do not just their own pistols, but also a lot of other outsourced products
like feed chutes for large calibre machine guns.
They also do their own cold hammer forged barrels in-house.
And this display board is actually a really good example
of showing the steps of that process. Let's take a quick look at it.
The first step is you start with bar stock and just drill a hole through it.
That gets the starting material there.
But now you have drill marks in the barrel,
and that's going to mess up the mandrel that you're putting inside for the hammer forging.
So the second step is to hone that essentially proto-barrel bore hole so that it's totally smooth.
Then, what they don't have pictured here, is a carbide mandrel
that has the reverse image of the rifling imprinted on it.
And it's smaller in diameter than the hole that they've already drilled and honed.
So you put the mandrel in, you then put this bar into the hammer machine.
And it's going to hammer the bore, one short section at a time,
and actually squeeze it down to the final diameter, if that's 5.56 or 7.62 or whatever.
And you can see that this bar gets compressed in diameter,
and it squeezes out longer, and turns into a barrel blank at this point.
... The mandrel includes the chamber, so that gets hammered in.
And ... at this point you have both rifle and pistol to work with.
So for the pistol, presumably instead of having the chamber on the mandrel,
they then cut this into sections, cut the chamber separately, cut the locking block separately.
For the rifle you have a bit of a simpler process because it's all lathe operations,
turning it down, threading the end.
And that's how you go from a piece of plain round stock to a rifled barrel.
Here we have the honing being done, looks like two barrels at a time.
So that's smoothing out the hole in the bore
prior to it going on to the actual hammer forging machine.
And then this is the hammer forging machine itself.
... We can take the camera and get a little bit of a
closer look in, you can see the hammers working.
What you have are 4 hammers that work at 90 degrees to each other.
So you've got two here and then two here,
and it simply repeats this at an extremely high rate.
Yeah, here we go, here is one of the actual hammers.
These things are dense, this is carbide as well.
Literally squeezing this tube of steel down to forge it over the rifling mandrel, really cool.
So here is the finished product, this one is a 9mm barrel.
So this will be cut into segments to make a whole bunch of pistol barrels.
So here's the initial deep-hole drilling to actually create the base of the bore.
One cool thing I want to point out is this has magnetic chip removal.
If you look at that conveyor right over there.
So on that conveyor there's not actually a moving belt,
it's a moving magnet behind the surface of the conveyor chute
and it pulls the chips up magnetically, that's really cool.
So this is the QC room. Obviously not every part that comes out gets checked,
but a nice percentage of them so that you can find out if you have
actual problems developing with the tooling.
So we have a variety of machines here. We have some of the older manual machines,
surface roughness checking, an optical comparator back there, surface hardness checking.
And then the majority of the work, the ... heavy lifting, is done by CMMs.
So a CNC-based machine here, that goes through with a little touch sensor,
and it's going to check a whole bunch of ... datum points on, in this case, a slide.
And then check them against the CAD/CAM model of what the dimensions ought to be,
and that can give you a really thorough QC check on an entire complete part.
Alright, now we're in the CNC machining hall.
So you can see the whole bank of machines behind me.
What we have running here right now are slides for the Delta pistol.
The specific machines they're using here are Hellers, and they're a palletised machine.
So the idea is the machine is actually running on the opposite side
while the operator can be resetting the tools and the parts on this front side.
So there's basically no down time,
and one operator can do this to two or three machines at a time.
So what he's doing right here is putting partially machined slides
into what are called tombstones, which is one jig that can hold multiple parts at a time.
These are going to start literally as big rectangular blocks of steel.
They're going to go through a series of jigs and a series of machine operations,
and come out as complete slides. It's a really cool process.
What I'm told is that each one of these machines has a capacity
of about 1,000 slides per month, if they're running Delta slides.
This is the operational end of the machine,
and you can't really see anything in there because of all the coolant splashing on the window.
But while it's working here, the operator can be taking out the old parts,
doing quick quality control checks with go/no-go gauges,
and resetting the machine for the next run.
With modern CNC machines it's not just the fact that the machine can put
a cutting bit in the right place and move it in the right path,
the machines also can change out between actual tools.
So these have a rotary magazine of something like 40 to 80 different tools.
And you can see small drills, large cutters,
everything you need to cut a variety of different operations on a single part.
And that's what makes CNC such a cool technology.
Oh, there it goes, the machine's changing.
A pallet of 0% AREX Zero 2 frames.
Parts are machine de-burred, tumbled basically.
You really can't hear anything in here, let's go outside.
So after the de-burring process, CNC parts go into sandblasting.
After ... they come out of sandblasting, they get sent out for surface treatment.
And then coming back from surface treatment,
there is one more bit of hand ... polishing, basically.
After the barrels have gone out for surface treatment,
when they come back of course you have surface treatment on things like the feed ramps.
And so those get manually polished to ensure
really good reliability when the pistols are assembled.
So all of the slide markings are applied by laser in batches.
And then one of the other interesting things to me
is on the CNC machines they actually put a factory assembly number
on each of the major parts: the barrels, the frames and the slides.
And that's different than the serial number, and it's used for parts tracking and QC
through the manufacturing process once you get beyond this point.
What's interesting to me is I normally see this done with batched parts.
There will be a sheet of paper with a barcode that's used to track
a batch of parts through the whole process.
By actually putting an individual assembly number on every major component,
they have really an extra level of QC accountability that can track anything.
Even if a part gets somehow separated from its original batch. That's kind of cool.
Once all the parts are finally done going through all of their QC and their finishing and polishing,
they come here for assembly into complete guns.
Of course that's all a hand-done process, and half of the assembly crew is at lunch right now.
But from here you get complete pistols. They then go to AREX's own small range
where they get two proof rounds each for internal quality control again.
And a number of rounds for function checking,
just to make sure that ... everything is running right.
Now for sales within Europe the guns have to be C.I.P. proofed.
They ... are not licenced or certified to do that in-house,
so after their own in-house proofing then the guns will go to Austria or Hungary.
Or I guess sometimes the proof house guys come here.
But anyway, then they go off for actual C.I.P. proofing.
And then it's packaging and shipping out to distributors and retailers.
This had to be one of the favourite factory tours
that I've ever had a chance to do in the small arms field.
I went into this tour really not understanding
the full depth and breadth of AREX's experience and capability.
I was thinking about the pistols that they've made for the last 5 or 10 years,
not recognising that for much longer before that they've been subcontracting parts
for really big name European brands, like FN in particular, for a long time.
And just the breadth of the processes that they do in-house, it was really impressive.
From the surface treatments, the finishing processes, the moulding,
the cold hammer forged barrel making machinery they have.
It was really cool to see all of this, all under one roof, they were fantastically friendly people.
It was a wonderfully clean and efficient looking facility.
There were some other elements that we didn't even get into in this video.
I'll have a video coming up about specifically the manufacture of machine gun links.
Because they have one fantastically cool machine
that essentially goes from a spool of sheet metal
to spitting machine gun links out the other end of this ... 30 or 40 foot long machine.
So anyway, this was really cool.
A big thanks to AREX for giving me the opportunity to do this.
I came away really impressed, which I'm sure was probably
what they were hoping would happen, but it certainly did.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. Thank you very much for watching.
Thank you very much for watching.