The Dawn of Innovation (19 page)

The first American production at Springfield and Harpers Ferry was not machinery-intensive, beyond the use of standard water-powered machines like trip-hammers and lathes. The two armories reached their targeted production rate of about 10,000 muskets a year well before war finally broke out. They also made substantial productivity gains, but it came mostly from work-flow improvement and the creation of specialist teams for specific parts.
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A serious policy focus on mechanizing arms production came only after the war. But high-level chatter about the possibility of full-scale mechanization started earlier, much of it generated by Eli Whitney, the best known of the early contractors. But first, a short primer on the complexities of gun making.

Making small firearms—pistols, muskets, and rifles—was one of the most demanding crafts of the preindustrial era. A gun is a precision machine designed to produce repeated, powerful, internal explosions; relatively minor imperfections in the firing apparatus will cause misfires and can even kill
or maim the gun's user. Embodying those crafts in machinery, therefore, was a signal accomplishment. Traditional gun-making crafts are still alive in the United States, so to better understand the mechanization challenge, I tracked down a practicing master gunsmith, Steve Bookout of Newton, Iowa, who agreed to let me spend a few days learning about pre–machine-age gun making.

Bookout is a big man, in his early sixties, and heavy in the neck and shoulders. An army helicopter pilot in Vietnam and now retired from Maytag, he makes and sells replicas of vintage guns at his backyard forge, and instructs a loose coterie of apprentices in the crafts. He achieved his master smithing stature not only from his body of work, but by creating a “master piece,” the most perfect rifle he could make. It was submitted to a board of master gunsmiths in Alabama, who examined it and certified it as the work of a master gunsmith, engraved it with the place and date of certification, and placed it in a display cabinet with other master pieces as a permanent record.

Bookout has family roots in the trade. All of his handmade guns have an elegant brass “Bookout” sideplate. A rifle on the wall, with the same sideplate bearing the date 1820, was made by a quadruple-great-grandfather. Like his ancestor, Bookout makes his guns with traditional tools and without power machinery. Each one is a minor work of industrial art.

The major components of a flintlock firearm are the lock, the stock, and the barrel.
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Traditional gunsmiths usually did the whole job, as do most of the modern practitioners of traditional gunsmithing. But even in the colonial era, craftsmen in larger workshops often specialized in one or the other.

The wooden stock of a rifle or musket is an elegant, complex shape, widest where it supports the barrel, narrowing and sloping down to seat the hand and trigger finger, and fanning out into the shoulder rest at the
butt end. In Great Britain, where the landed gentry were the largest private gun market, fitting a gentleman's gunstock was as personal as fitting his frock coat. In the hierarchy of woodworkers, gunstockers are on a par with top cabinetmakers. In the early nineteenth century, a skilled man could produce about two stocks in three days.

Barrel making was the most physically demanding task. One of Bookout's apprentices, Tim Crowe, a Wisconsin general contractor, was also visiting when I was there, and the two of them roughed out a pistol barrel for my benefit. They started with an iron skelp, a flat piece of iron that Bookout harvests from the rims of old wooden wagon wheels. After it was heated in the forge to a cherry-red, Bookout grasped it in a pair of long tongs and held it over one of the semicircles cut in the sides of a big chunk of cast iron called a “swage block.” Crowe then hammered the bar into the swage shape.
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(I was out of harm's way, working the forge blower.) With repeating heatings and hammering, the skelp gradually took the shape of a half cylinder, which they closed by “hot-welding”—hammering the cylinder shut around a mandrel, a steel rod the width of a pistol barrel, to fuse it into a single piece of iron. It is a high-skill task: uneven hammering at any point can leave dangerous weak spots.

Barrels must be straight, and barrel straighteners were among the highest-status craftsmen at military armories well into the twentieth century. Each armory had a window containing a pane with an inlaid horizontal line, and an apparatus for holding new rifle barrels level and perpendicular to the line. In a good barrel, the window line should make two opposite crisp straight shadows on the barrel interior that stay straight as it is rotated. A skilled armory straightener made his adjustments by high-speed tapping with a light copper hammer, instantly spotting the right place to target.
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Bookout uses the same method for his barrels but starts with a line mounted on a six-foot bow.

Muskets are smooth-bored weapons that early-nineteenth-century militaries preferred over rifles. They were inaccurate and had a short range
but were much less prone to fouling than a muzzle-loaded rifle. The infantry tactics of the time placed a low premium on accuracy. Opposing lines of soldiers stood within fifty yards, usually in two ranks that alternated firing and reloading in unison. Close-rank volleys could create horrific casualties even if no one aimed at anyone in particular. Drills emphasized formation maneuvers and loading procedures, not target shooting.

The greater accuracy of rifles is the result of spiral barrel grooves that spin the projectile and stabilize its flight. The legendary Kentucky rifle of the Revolutionary War era (which was mostly made in Pennsylvania) was a weapon of uncanny accuracy for its day, and British officers quickly learned to fear American snipers. Bookout is also a sharpshooter and an active competitor in vintage rifle competitions. He has a Montana game warden–certified 760-yard antelope kill to his credit using a replica of an 1874 Sharps. The shot was “off-hand” (without a rifle stand), without special sights, and on a windy day, which is extraordinary. Matt Damon used the same model Sharps for his climactic shot in the movie
True Grit
. (In online chat rooms vintage-gun hunters speak of a Sharps killing range of about 200 to 300 yards, but there is an annual 1,000-yard Sharps marksman contest in Montana.)

Crowe had come to Newton to rifle a new barrel under Bookout's supervision. Bookout has a rifling machine constructed on a long wooden frame. One end has chucks for holding the barrel; at the other is a thick wooden roller holding a barrel-length iron bar with a cutting edge attachment. The roller is incised with five evenly spaced grooves spiraling along its length and passing through a wooden collar with a tooth to fit the grooves. The craftsman positions the cutting bar at the opening of the barrel and fixes the position of the spiral guide in the collar tooth. As he pushes the cutting rod through the barrel, the rod replicates the path of the spiral guide. After each pass, the next groove is fixed in the tooth to cut five evenly-spaced spiral grooves.

Crowe is a fairly skilled craftsman, but the rifling takes him a full day. Each groove requires twenty or thirty separate cuts. Crowe and Bookout made an assortment of shims from postcard stock and cigarette paper to gradually raise the cutter bit to deepen the riflings on each pass. The inside of the barrel was also liberally dosed with lubricant to reduce heat and clear shavings. Bookout uses hog lard, both for its verisimilitude to the old days and because Iowa overflows with hog lard. Interrupting a cut in mid-stroke can be a minor disaster, because it is difficult to reposition the tool in a groove partway down the barrel. Worst case, the barrel has to be rebored to remove the partial grooves and the process started from scratch.

 

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The hot iron skelp is hammered into semicylindrical shape in the swage block, and then hammered shut around a mandrel. Skilled hammering at the right heat fuses the iron into a single piece.
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A wooden cutter holder with incised spiral grooves is placed in a toothed collar, with one of the incised grooves fixed in the collar tooth. As the cutter is pushed into the rifle, it traces the incised spiral. At the end of each pass, the cutter holder is repositioned to move up one groove in the collar tooth to cut the next rifle groove.
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With the lock in half-cocked position, the shooter pours powder into the touch hole and the pan. The frizzen is snapped down to protect the powder. Soldiers near an action moved with their muskets primed and in the half-cocked position.

The third major component of a gun is the lock, which presents the most intricate of the gunsmith's challenges. Loading a flintlock musket or rifle required the soldier to stand with his weapon upright, leaving him dangerously exposed on a field of battle for up to a minute or even more for a green soldier. The ammunition used in the War of 1812 came in paper cartridges that contained both a ball and the right amount of powder. The soldier opened the cartridge with his teeth, poured the powder down the barrel, pinched the cartridge paper around the ball to make the wadding (so explosive energy didn't leak around the ball), dropped the wad into the muzzle, and ramrodded it tightly in place. Under cover again, he prepared for firing by pulling the hammer into the half-cocked position; then he poured a small amount of additional powder into the pan and snapped down the frizzen to cover the pan. With that, the gun was primed, the pan powder protected, and the hammer in a safe position. Near an action, soldiers moved with half-cocked muskets.

To fire, the hammer was first pulled back to the fully cocked position, which rotated the tumbler backward, compressed the mainspring, and locked the tumbler in place with the sear. When the trigger pull released the sear, the tumbler rotated forward, and the hammer slammed into the frizzen plate, pushing it open and striking sparks. The powder in the pan ignited next to a small touch hole, emitting a large smoke plume into the shooter's face.
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The explosion ignited the barrel powder through the touch
hole, and the gun discharged. In human time, the trigger pull and discharge are virtually instantaneous.

The lock tumbler encapsulates the lock maker's challenge. It is a complex shape, subject to great stresses, that must operate within a close tolerance range. The tumbler connects to the hammer by fitting a large square-end spindle into a square opening at the hammer base. If the fit is loose, or the corners of the fitting abrade, the hammer stroke will lose force. The surface of the tumbler's high-friction points, like the tumbler notches, must be very hard; if they abrade so the sear slips, the lock is inoperable. But if the tumbler is
too
hard, it will lose tensile strength and be prone to cracking. The steel in the mainspring must be of excellent quality to retain its power. If the pivot fixing the tumbler to the stock is misaligned with the hammer rotation, the torque could twist the lock plate or otherwise interfere with a smooth action of the flint and the frizzen.

A manual craftsman like Bookout starts each lock piece with wrought iron, which is easy to chisel when it's hot, and cuts it into an approximation of the final shape. It is then forged by hammering to expel remaining impurities and to increase its structural integrity and toughness. The forged piece would be further chiseled and filed into the final shape, largely by eye. The last step before the final grinding and polishing would be case hardening at the main friction points, by careful heating and quenching in a carbon bath.
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The armories' water-powered lathes saved much time in rough cutting and grinding, while powered trip-hammers removed most of the brute work of barrel welding. (A standard sledge hammer suspended on a fulcrum and raised and released by a toothed wheel could achieve hundreds of steady-force hammer strokes a minute.) Otherwise armory guns were made more or less with the methods Bookout uses, although separate groups of craftsmen worked on each major component. The early-period mechanization chatter was mostly focused on the lock, the hardest mechanization challenge of all—which takes us back to Whitney.