Printer
US Veteran
During the 80's I worked in R&D with Tommy Campbell and it was very interesting to say the least. We had the privilege to work on some real neat projects like the development of the 645, 686, the XM-9 (government contract to replace the .45) and the development of the 40cal. and that's just to name a few. Also from time to time we'd pull a random selection of a certain model of gun (usually 10 at a time) off the production line and endurance test them by shooting about ten thousand rounds through each of them and annotating all malfunctions. By doing that it would give you an idea of any problem areas. If a problem were found an engineering change would be made and we'd shoot them again. Those were tests we didn't look forward to as you can appreciate. Anyway, from time to time we would have weeks and weeks where we didn't have much to do so Tom and I would go into the gun vault in R&D, in there was a selection of all the guns Smith made as well as all our competitors guns plus we had our own M-60, a bunch of our M-76 submachine guns and just about anything else you could think of. Well we'd link up some M-60 rnds., load a bunch of sub guns, revolvers and semi autos and cases of ammo and off we'd go to the outside range up in Westfield. Once we got there we'd have a ball shooting. Also anyone that happened to be there was allowed to shoot anything they wanted. The funny thing was we NEVER had to pick up the brass. Gee I wonder why?
