Thread: M1917 Rifle from Forge to Finish

This is pretty cool! M1917 Rifle from Forge to Finish, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39wM-lzDWE4

OSH would have a fit!

Really enjoyed watching that, thank you for posting it.

Workplace injuries and in particular deafness was just an occupational hazard back in those days. If you didn’t like it, then tough. War effort and all that.

My grandfather, b. 1906, was a mech & elec hydro engineer with poor hearing caused the big construction sites here, in Tassie and Canada, elsewhere. He used to tell me that his father was deaf as a post from working in the factories in WW1.

Greetings,
Obviously sped up a bit for efect but they should have been getting slick with three factories having turned out about three million P14 and M17 rifles by then.
GPM.

very cool, wonder what the slushing process towards the end was and did ?

@viper I did a Google and it seems to be an oil coating for metal that may be stored for a long period

And.... Browning Automatic Rifle - Forge to Finish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8kiOBgYp8M

in the silent movie days there was no standard frame rate but the average was a bout 18 frame per second. then when they projected it in the theatre, the projectoinist turns the crank at the speed it looked right. when sound movies came, (1929) it was standardised at 24 fps with mechanised cameras and projectors. modern video was 30 fps. so old silent movies when run on modern equipment look sped up.
peter Jackson when making the WW1 doco 'they shall not grow old' digitally inserted in between frames into the old footage to bring the speed to the correct speed and also to smooth out the motion.

i know this because a million years ago i was in the picture business

yes it is something to do with that

All that polishing work reminded me of when I worked in a jewellery factory. A dozen ladies sitting at wheels sanding discs of paua. I commented to one lady that the circles she was making looked great.
She got all excited and told me next week we move on to doing ovals.
I didnt last long in that place.

when i first worked ina factory out of school the supervisors still wore ties. getting tie caught in machine was a real risk, and i once saw an english supervisor get his tie caught in a belt that was going across the factory floor and being dragged up and eventually would have been hung. no one could hear him yelling over the noise. he was not liked very much and everyone pretended not to hear him until he was on his toes before they shut down the machine

I enjoyed watching the M17 and BAR videos. Quite interesting despite the incorrect subtitles being put in for some of the operations. You can imagine the size of those plants where they had multiples of each machine, all doing just one specific operation. Compare that to todays 5-axis CNC machines that can do most of the machining on a receiver in one set-up. I was surprised at the amount of hand-held grinding operations. They were very skilled operators when you examine the finish on the final products.

As a young lad I worked in a Palmy Nth foundary. First in the school holidays, and then at the begining of an apprenticship. The big 80 tonne brake press was out of a destroyed WWII German factory, and had two big 20mm cannon shell holes in the frame up high. Didn't affect its operation. Even in the 1970's OSH wasn't paid much attention to. A couple of operators on the gillotines lost fingers due to the job being mind numbingly boring, and them getting up to stupid dares on where they could put their hand in between operations And few of us wore ear protection. A lot of the operations required hand finishing with grinders, but the quality of the finished job would be several dozen iterations rougher than the fine work those WW1 skilled operators were. Fuckin noisy. But not as noisy as operating air operated drill rigs in the mines.