Aparently I deleted this thread somewhere along the line.

The pics are so interesting I am putting them back up.

I believe this is from a 1954 Gun Digest article.

I left the scans large because it is worth scrolling for the detail.
If you would like to view them even LARGER, open the album- Article

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Regards,
Lee Jarrett

Fascinating. Thanks for posting

Lee:

Thank you for re-posting this in a large resolution format. The photos are great and provide some wonderful insight.

That handcrafted quality of the 50's is why we love those 4 & 5 screw guns.

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Mitch
SWCA 2438

Lee,
Thanks for sharing the pics. It is cool to see how things were back in the day. Which one is Roy pictured in? LOL

Lee,

Thanks for re-posting this. These photos are fascinating - in the technology we appreciate, and the times I was too young to remember. This should be a permanent fixture on the Forum.

Best Regards,

Jerry

I never knew........

Makes me even happier that I have a Pre-29 on the way knowing how it was made.

THAT, is America and, THOSE are American craftsman. I look at those pictures and, I swear, I can smell the cutting oil.

Yes, it is the 1954, 8th Edition of Gun Digest. Also has info on the newly released Centennial Model, holster info featuring Berns & Martin an three-persons by Myers as well as the catalog pages with models and prices.

With a 1954 vintage .357 Magnum.

Amazing. Thank You.

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I Love This Site

I love the shot of the engineering department with all those guys using the large drafting tables. I've been an engineer since I graduated college in 1986 and have seen manual drafting and the large drafting tables disappear. When I started out as a structural engineer we worked about four years on a drafting table, drawing up things designed by the older, licensed engineers and occasionally checking their calculations or doing a small design of our own. We had to work our way up the ladder so to speak and we had to learn how things were built and how they were supposed to look. Then, when we took the state exam and got our own professional engineer's license we got a desk, which was a huge status symbol in an engineering firm. Now everybody uses a computer and the new grads don't even know what a drafting table was. I've seen many of the younger engineers try to draw something up with a pencil and straight edge and it usually looks awful...manual drafting is an artform that we've all but lost.

Thanks for sharing the cool photos, B

Thanks for posting this. I work in manufacturing (mostly automotive parts) and it is very cool to see how they did it, in the days before CNC machining.

Interesting! Thanks Lee.

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Misty

What a Treat, thank you.

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Always Stay Strong!

Thanks for posting!

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NRA BENEFACTOR MEMBER

Wow, how cool is that? Thanks for sharing.

Wonder which one of those guys made my old K22?

Picture #54 is a gentleman named Charley Hadley. He grew up and lived in Westfield, and was a good friend of my Father's. He is also the one responsible for me shooting my first shot from a .44 Magnum- on Good Friday, 1956! It was an experience I'll never forget.

Good shooting!

Thank you for posting this article. While technology is great ( I guess) it is awesome to see real craftsman at work. I've no doubt those folks took a lot of pride in their work and it is evident in the quality of the revolvers produced in that era. What is interesting as well are all those old milling machines, grinders, forges and steel etc were made in the USA.

To think that the drafting and stock departments are gone...
The drafting is all done on computers, and the stocks are all "farmed out."

There are still a few craftsmen with very long tenures still working at S&W, but they are few and far between. I would venture to think that the comradeship of working there is...gone for the most part. That usually happens when a company goes from single ownership to a bunch of investors.

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Lost it all in a boat accident

Nice presentation, interesting what pride in workmanship could produce when times were so much less complicated, thanks Lee!

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Sam
S&WHF 333 S&WCA 2198

This ought to be a sticky

the one father and son combe with the father working at 75yrs old. certainly don't see that these days. sure wish this is how they still made guns.

I'll get around to an Expert Commentary one day. I actually have a couple of ideas to share.....



I suspect many of the people in the pics knew the photog was coming, and dressed accordingly. Some of the ladies look a bit overdressed for their jobs, but maybe not.

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Regards,
Lee Jarrett

This is a very neat thread. It shows us inside something, I dare say, we will never see again. Real craftsmen at work. People who take pride in, and care about, what they produce. Lots of folks were dressed up, and they may have known that the cameras were going to be there, but I prefer to believe that they dressed like this all the time.

My grandmother who died in 1998, at the age of 96, dressed that way every day. Whether she was cleaning the house, "getting her hair done", or whatever, she was well dressed.

I think people of that time cared.

Lee, thanks for sharing.

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Miss My Buddy crsides!!

Nice article, beautiful pics, BTW. Dedicated craftsmanship on manual machines, in addition to dedicated tooling and drill-jigs, has produced so much of value - it is a shame that those skille have all but vanished.

About the "overdressed": Some places, a qualified MAYBE. But my wife's grandfather was a JANITOR in the 1920-30's (he stoked the furnaces and stoves that heated the office building of a large foundry/manufacturing outfit which I retired out of in 2001).

He always went to work in jacket and tie. The machine-operators generally wore BOW-ties. The only ones who wore rougher clothing were the foundry-guys. They wore clothes which could get burned and patched, though in the old pictures, even some of them had ties. They left their leather aprons at work, but wore jackets on the walk to and from work, even in summer. Some would stop at the first taproom on the way home, but many would walk a good bit further before stopping.

"Appearance" was important. The word "quqlity" was not only applied to products.

Funny thing about those neckties. When my Dad was just a young machinist, he said his boss's being a cheap son of a gun saved his life. Boss liked silk ties, but would not spring for quality ones, he always bought cheap. One day, while leaning over the lathe next to my Dad's, the boss's tie got caught on the burr on the casting being turned, and it started to haul the boss into the machine, but the operator who was VERY quick witted grabbed the tie and won the tug-of-war with the SouthBend by tearing the tie in shereds out of the machine. Next week, boss started wearing bow-ties again.

Flash

A few months back I posted some comments on the manufacturing methods of S&W back in the 1950s by a good friend of over 30 years who is a engineering physicist and works in (as he calls it) the military/industrial complex. I thought he would be interested in these photos so I forwarded the link to this thread. Here is his response, which I share with his permission. I hope you will find his background information on manufacturing of additional interest.


"The S&W factory looked pretty much the same when I visited it in the mid-1970s. Since then it has apparently changed substantially.

You might appreciate a few comments about the manufacturing process. This article shows that S&W is a textbook example of what is now known as the American system of manufacturing. This system uses dedicated, single-purpose tools operated by semi-skilled labor to make high quality, interchangeable parts. Quality is determined by design, careful selection of material, repeatable processes, and continual checking of production against standard gauges. In contrast, the European system (also called the English system) uses general purpose tools operated by skilled craftsmen. There is considerably more variation in quality using the European system, and considerable hand fitting is usually necessary. The initial capital cost to start production is usually lower with the European system, but labor costs are higher. Examples of the two systems are the M-14 and FN FAL rifles. There are fewer, more complex parts in the M-14 than in the FN FAL. Further, a higher level of metallurgy and quality control is required to make the M-14 over the FAL. The FAL was an easier design to make using general purpose tools, and was made literally all over the world. On the other hand, even US manufacturers had trouble making the M-14. The European system may lead to lower manufacturing costs if labor is cheap, as it is in a lot of Third World countries - or China. The European system is also easier to change if the design must be modified.

The S&W revolver frame at the time of the article was made as a closed die forging. This process makes a forging that is close to near net shape, with excellent metallurgical properties. Also shown are a variety of single purpose machine tools used for various operations. One of the most important processes, used to make the rectangular opening in the frame for the cylinder, is broaching. This process is almost unheard of today. When the enormous capital cost of the tooling is considered, it is easy to understand why companies using the American system changed designs with great reluctance. On the other hand, once set up the American system produces a tremendous volume of high quality product.

Today manufacturing is moving back to a modified form of the European system, in that parts are often made on computer controlled machine tools (CNC). Dimensions are spot checked rather than measured against dedicated gauges. General purpose computer controlled machining centers are not as stiff as the single purpose tools shown in the article. The additional flexibility leads to looser manufacturing tolerances (some will argue this, but the statistical studies done by my company are very clear; sometimes the computer controlled machines cannot even get within a factor of two or three of the tolerances produced by single purpose tools). In addition, the lack of stiffness means that keeping up production rates requires softer metals, which cut more rapidly than harder forged metals. So quality today is much more variable than in the past, and durability also suffers since the quality of the metals is lower. Compare your older S&W revolvers with a current production Ruger LCR, for example! In support of this, note that gunsmithing is often necessary today for fitting parts to a 1911 - and this design was originally intended for complete interchangeability of parts by troops in the field."


My friend is a student of history and a military veteran. While in the Army he was assigned to the Test & Evaluation Center at Ft. Benning, GA. Over the years I have never found him to be factually incorrect in anything he's told me.
Dave

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RSVN '69-'71
PCSD (Ret)

Dave
I always really enjoy the information and understanding you are sharing.
I have looked at the machinery and am starting to understand how features like integral ribs were produced. Very interesting thread.

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I Love This Site

That's some wonderful history! Thanks for sharing with us!

Terrific post, thanks.

Thanks for showing us the way it was. A very interesting article giving much explanation of the manufacturing processes involved.
It's hard to imagine with the amount of labor and materials going into each gun, how they could sell them at such low prices.
Lots to learn on the Forum. Bob

That is very interesting. Thanks for posting!

I'll second that. This is very interesting and useful history.

That was pretty cool

Fascinating thread! My thanks to Lee for reposting the article. I don't remember seeing it before, which means it may have slipped into the archives even before I joined the forum a couple of years back.

It had never occurred to me that heat treating steel might be accomplished by electrical resistance rather than baking pieces in a furnace. That is the big take-away from this article for me. Recently someone posted a thread about manufacturing the S&W X-frame, and I was surprised to learn that the initial frame forging is done by hammering resistance-heated steel.

Dang! The stuff I don't know...

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David Wilson

To take this thread sideways for just a moment, it is interesting to me that the .22./32 Target Revolver was still in the catalog in the early to mid 1950s. That looks like what we would call the transitional model, and the transitional kit gun is right beside it. I guess info about the Model of 1953 had not yet made it to the marketing deparment when this catalog was pasted up.

Sure wish I could find one of those postwar transitional .22/32 target guns at a reasonable price. Or find one at all, for that matter.

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David Wilson

Thank you very much for this wonderful set of scans!
A great insight in how S&W worked in my year of birth, really appreciated.
Wish the time of honest, skilled handfitting was stil here...

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anton

I hope (need?) to find one of those 22/32 target guns as well!

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anton

Actually, they were not still in the S&W catalog.

The Gun Digest was notorious for not updating catalog sections for manufacturers and showing outdated data years after it was obsolete.

The Kit Gun and 22/32 Target were only updated in 53, and the lead time for publishing simply precluded showing the latest forms for those guns.

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Regards,
Lee Jarrett

I think I saw one of my revolvers in some of the photos.

Thanks for the journey through the manufacturing process "back in the day."

Good pics, and very informative look back.

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S&W 1911ES
S&W M&P 9c

Thanks for reminding us about this great article Lee. These days when you visit the S&W factory they do not allow cameras. What a contrast from then to the CNC machines of today. I thought readers of this board might like to see the gun used on the title page of this article better, especially the prewar .357 nuts like myself. It is a reg mag 8.75-inch and it came with another barrel, a 4-inch, engraved to match, WOW! It was on the cover of the 5th Edition of Gun Digest. Here it is.

Attached Images

Gun Digest 5th cover 72DPI.jpg (162.7 KB, 125 views)

very good info thanks for posting.

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God save the SOUTH

Great Photos.
Makes me appreciate my 1955 .357 Magnum even more.
We will never see the likes of these again>

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Buy American
Vote Responsibly

Really enjoyed these images.

Image No. 54 got a kick out of - Service Dep't repairing or re-Finishing older Revolvers, and, one can see some ( even then ( very old ones indeed!

Wow...

I bet at that time, one could send in anything they ever made, and, they would repair it if you wanted them to.

What wonderful images...lot of the workers had Cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they worked.

I do that also, and, it is nice to see...and so scarce anymore in the larger workplace.

thanks a lot for posting the pics!!! i could look at them for hours. it's real craftsmanship on display.
#29, the father & son team, is neat...52 years on the job. WOW

Cool pics!

I went through the S&W factory years ago, about a week before the notorious Clinton deal was announced, very interesting tour!

Note that there is only one employee wearing safety goggles/glasses. OSHA would have a fit today.

Great Post! Thanx for sharing.

I was fortunate to take a tour of the factory in the early '60s. It looked just like these pictures. The noise was incredible, especially the big drop forge press and the test-firing range, with no one wearing hearing protection.

I was able to tour the factory on my honeymoon in the late eighties. I found it absolutely fascinating, but my wife wasn't so enthused. As a matter of fact I still hear about it from time to time!

Great post,those were the days. Thanks!