If you don't get it just right, your gun don't work. It has to do this in the cold, in the hot, in the rain, in the dry, in the dust, with indifferent maintenance, with variations in ammunition quality, thousands of times. All those bumps and grooves inside the receiver cause the bolt to turn at just the right moment and in just the right ways to extract the spent case, eject it, strip a new one off the magazine, chamber it, and lock the breech. The bolt uses the energy of the round being fired to move backwards and rides against the inside of the receiver. The receiver of a firearm, particularly an automatic one, is a very complex and precise shape. Lacking detailed parts and not needing much precision, stamping worked well for these simple shapes and was efficient.įirearms are quite another story. It worked well for simple shapes like pots and helmets where a flat sheet of steel can be stamped on progressively deeper dies. Nevertheless, its relatively thick armor, relatively large gun, and automotive reliability made it a surprisingly successful stopgap. Here is an M3 Lee, the US state of the art in early 1942, showing its riveted armor. The US was particularly behind and had to play catch up. When the war started, many armies were still fighting with riveted tanks, fabric covered biplanes, and no radios. Things like welded armor, monoplane aircraft, radar, and portable radios. Many technologies we take for granted were just being put into mass production when the war started. Most armies went into WWII with much of the same technology as at the end of WWI. One of the important things to remember about WWII is, technologically and tactically, it was a very different war when it started than when it ended. The US would start the war with the M1 Garand, and it would win the war with the M1 Garand.įor the Germans it was an entirely different matter. But the M1 Thompson was heavy and lavishly expensive, so the US took a chance on the stamped M3 Grease Gun, but as a gun for rear echelon troops. If what you're producing is good enough, just keep producing it and getting it into the field now. Changing production, and particularly production techniques, disrupts production. The question is less why didn't the US use stamped weapons, and more why the Germans took the risk on stamped weapons.įor the US it was a matter of " if it ain't broke don't fix it" and this holds doubly true for wartime production. To understand why this was all a factor, we need to talk about the state of technology at the start of WWII, and what goes into making a firearm. Several reasons: stamping something as complicated and robust as the receiver for a firearm was largely untested technology the US didn't have the desperate manufacturing and material problems the Germans did the US didn't have the desperate firepower problems the Germans did. Also InRangeTV's many videos on the problems attempting to reproduce the StG 44. TL DR: Watch historical firearms expert Ian McCollum discuss and disassemble the revolutionary StG 44 and you'll appreciate the problem of stamped rifles better.
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