[ Guns Take a Long Time to Develop ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I want to talk briefly about
the trials and tribulations of putting a new gun design into production.
The fact of the matter is it's really hard, it takes a long time,
and I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate that.
So let's start with: I would assert that in order to put a new firearm into production
will take typically between 5 and 10 years of development time.
Now there are obviously exceptions.
The Sten gun and the PTRD anti-tank rifle are two particularly notable exceptions
of guns that went into production very quickly, however those are also extremely simple guns.
When we're talking about things that are intended to be high quality,
large production guns, it just takes a lot longer to do it.
So the first issue is the jump from a handmade, proof of concept,
prototype sort of gun to an actual production line assembly is massive.
And that's something I think a lot people certainly don't really understand the magnitude of.
The thing is, with a prototype it's like one gun
with multiple people working on it for an extended period of time.
And you don't have to figure out exactly what the tolerances are
on the parts in order to make a single example of the gun work.
You hand fit it, and ... if something doesn't quite work right,
you tweak the one or two parts involved until it does work right: presto, you're done.
And that's why you can have trials examples of rifles
do phenomenally well in, say, reliability endurance testing,
and then production versions of the gun fall flat on their face.
It's because, well, when you go to mass production, now basically
you don't get to put a person's hands on the individual parts at all in the process.
You're making hundreds or thousands of individual parts at a time,
they all go into bins,
and then you take one of each part from a bin
and put together a gun, and hope that it works.
Because at that point you've already put in all the time to develop the tooling.
So let's keep in mind the way actual parts are made for things, and have been for
quite some time, is that you have a series of jigs and fixtures on cutting machines.
And the idea is you put a piece of material into this fixture,
and you hit a button on the machine and it will make a certain profile of cut on the part.
So the way guns used to be made before CNC
was typically huge lines of machines, and each machine did like one cut.
And if you had a fancy curved surface, well, you'd have a custom made cutter
that would cut that fancy curved surface in basically one axis on one machine.
And then you take that part and you move it to the next machine
to cut a different surface.
So first off in the production series, you have to have your tooling set up so that
the part is held exactly correctly in the machine,
and that cutter is taking exactly the right amount of material.
Or it's taking exactly the amount of material that you intended to.
Because you may not know exactly how ... deep does that cut have to be.
You won't know at the very beginning, and we'll get to that in a moment.
But then ... like every cut is a separate machine.
Today with CNC we can use one machine to do a bunch of cuts one after another,
which makes the whole process vastly more efficient and faster.
But it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that you're making
one cut at a time, and it's got to be just right.
Now let's say you get the part out of that machine, and something's not quite right.
... Which is to say, you put it in a gun and the gun doesn't work.
The first thing you have to do is figure out why isn't the gun working.
And there can be some really counter-intuitive,
very difficult to figure out, rationales for things not going right in guns.
The L85 is a good example of this.
You had things like little bits of brass being shaved off the cartridge cases
because of overly sharp surfaces in the feedway.
But the ... symptom that was being seen was the gun is not cycling reliably.
And ... it's a significant investigatory process to work backwards from, "The gun doesn't cycle."
To, "Ah, we are occasionally getting a little bit of brass stuck in, say, the locking lugs,
and it may not be there after we clear the malfunction."
So you can't assume that just because someone knows what all the parts
are that go into the gun they automatically will understand intuitively
... the reason for every potential malfunction.
... Gun design is littered with mystery malfunctions that take time to try and figure out,
and often a lot of trial and error.
The mysterious seventh round stoppage on the M1 Garand is a good example.
During development the guns developed a habit of not cycling on the seventh round in the clip.
Why the seventh one?
That's the question, that's the sort of thing that takes a lot of time to develop.
Now fundamentally once you figure all this stuff out,
what you'll end up with is a tolerance zone for every dimension on every part.
And that is to say if the dimension is supposed to be 1 inch,
it will work from ... 0.95 to 1.05, hypothetically.
But you have to figure out what that boundary zone is.
It will be different between different parts,
some parts have more tolerance for interacting with others, some have less.
You will have parts where sometimes the ... amount that you can be below average
is different than the amount above. So it's not 0.95 to 1.05,
maybe it's 1.0 to 1.05, or the other way around.
And this is the process that you don't really have to do in a handmade prototype.
You don't have to figure this out because you're just making one gun work,
and once you've got all the parts within those ranges,
you may not know what the ranges are, but once the gun works
all the parts are in the right range, and that example is good.
Now to turn that into a production line thing, you've got to figure out
what are all of the ranges for every dimension on every part.
You then have to also be able to set up your manufacturing equipment
to cut parts within those tolerances.
If you have a fixture that doesn't hold a part steadily enough,
the part has just a little bit of vibration to it,
that's going to dramatically expand the variation
in a particular dimension or dimensions that are being cut on that part.
At the same time, you also don't want things necessarily to be too perfect.
Because let's say you have a part that works fine with a 10% variation in the dimension.
Well, if you're putting in the time and effort to cut it within 1%,
but you don't need to, you are wasting time and efficiency where it's not necessary.
On a commercial enterprise this is relevant because it cuts into the profit margin,
or correspondingly increases the final price of the gun.
From a military perspective, say in wartime,
every minute or hour that you spend making a gun more perfect than it needs to be
is that many fewer guns that you can make in a given time frame.
This is why nations go to these sort of last-ditch simplified styles of guns.
It's just so that they can make more with less.
Where we see problems are when people attempt to release guns
onto the market or into the military without having sufficiently done that process.
And I contend that that process of figuring out all of these
interrelated dimensional restrictions on a gun,
which is going to have dozens, if not over 100 individual parts,
that is a 5 to 10 year process to do.
And that hasn't really changed much with the advent of CNC.
CAD/CAM software certainly has helped it.
But this is still a labour intensive, time intensive process.
And it's compounded by the fact that you will never be able to predict and test everything.
There are always going to be issues that show up in the field.
Once you've got 1,000 or 10,000 guns produced,
something's going to come up that you didn't anticipate.
So a few examples of guns that we think of today as supremely reliable,
but actually took 5 or 10 years to get right.
Well, the one that comes to mind right off the bat is the AK.
The AK was originally developed with a stamped sheet-metal receiver.
That's the Type 1. I have a video on it, I'll link to it at the end of this video.
The Type 1 didn't work. ... They had so much trouble getting those stamped receivers
to be within tolerance, within the acceptable dimensions,
because the Soviet Union hadn't done (in guns) finely crafted stamping.
They'd done simple, more like bent sheet metal guns,
like the Papasha 41 and the PPS-43.
But they hadn't done things kind of on the level of detail that, say, the Germans did.
And by the way, Germany, they had a huge reject rate on ... MP43/Sturmgewehr 44 receivers.
... Just because Germany was able to pull off that gun, doesn't mean that they did it perfectly.
They threw out a ton of scrapped receiver stampings in the process of making them.
But they're in the middle of the war, and they don't have the time
to be able to slow down the process, fix the process,
reduce the scrap rate, and then put them back into production.
Because they need the guns right now, so they just accepted
a high scrap rate and produced them anyway.
The Soviet Union looked at this massive scrap rate on AK receivers and went,
"This isn't viable, we have to fix this." And it took them years to do it,
and in the interim they went to just a simple giant steel block of a milled receiver.
That was not the original intention of the gun.
And it wouldn't be until the introduction of the AKM that they
were finally able to get that sorted out and ... manufacturable.
So you think of the AK as,
"Oh, it's super simple, it's easy. Third world countries can manufacture them."
Well that's not really the case, there was a tremendous amount
of engineering effort and time that went into actually getting that.
Now once you've figured it all out, it gets a lot easier to replicate it later on.
And that's why we see the AK technical package being distributed to a bunch of other countries,
and those countries being able to manufacture them
much more quickly and easily than the original Soviet development time.
When it comes to like counter-intuitive or difficult to predict things,
we can look no further than the AR-15.
The change in powder types led to a change in ... port pressure,
which led to a change in the gas pressure going back into the action,
which led to an increase in the velocity of the bolt travelling rearward,
which led to a change in the rate of fire.
The gun fouled more because it had different powder in it.
It was cycling faster than it was intended to.
You had parts damage, you had unreliability.
All of this originally due to a change in powder type that didn't affect chamber pressure.
So how do you take that and figure out the root cause?
It takes time, and it's the sort of thing that can't always happen at the factory.
So when people think about, "Why don't we just build X?"
As well as ... like, "New gun X is 5% better than the M16 in these prototype initial trials,
so we should obviously adopt it like now."
Well the problem is prototype gun X is going to have some teething issues.
There are going to be problems that are going to be found
if it goes into major production and service.
It will take time to get it into production.
And it may not end up being ... any improvement over the current rifle
once it actually gets through production, so.
This of course also applies to reproductions.
People say, "Well, you know, the Sturmgewehrs. Germany managed to make Sturmgewehrs
75 years ago, why can't someone make a reproduction now?"
Well, the technical data package is basically gone,
and someone's going to have to recreate it from scratch.
Which means they have to figure out all of those dimensions and tolerances on their own.
And we've seen people try it, and nobody's really managed to pull it off.
The example I love using is SMG's reproduction FG-42, which
by the way, now has been in development and manufacture
like twice as long as the original FG-42 was in Germany.
And that's why that gun works now as a reproduction,
because Rick Smith has put essentially 10 years plus into that gun, that's what it takes.
So, I didn't intend that to turn into a rant.
Maybe that's a bit of a rant, maybe not.
But hopefully this can bring a little light to why things aren't as simple as,
"Well, we have a CNC, and we just push the button and it spits out a working gun."
Because there really is a lot more to it than that.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this.
Thanks for watching.