This is an article in advance that will appear in The Manufacturer Magazine.
Keith Regan travels back in time to learn how U.S. Fire Arms Manufacturing Company builds replicas of Old West guns, using a blend of modern manufacturing technology and highly skilled handwork
Hartford, CT, may seem an unlikely place to find a gun company preserving a slice of the Old West. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening inside U.S. Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. President and founder Doug Donnelly, a former competitive shooter, oversees a blend of modern manufacturing and old-fashioned handwork that produces replicas of guns made by Samuel Colt more than 100 years ago, guns that were carried by soldiers, lawmen, and cowboys.
In fact, Donnelly founded USFA in the same factory where Colt made guns until the mid-20th century and has spent years amassing an impressive archive of Colt-related documents, including engineering drawings that show how the guns were originally made. Donnelly and his partners, production manager Peter Rhodes and firearms engineer Bill Daley, have revived the old processes and models to target the classic or cowboy gun market—also called Firearms of History—creating a strong base of loyal customers in the process.
Ironically, Donnelly’s own expertise in the gun area came as a shooter of shotguns, a product USFA doesn’t make—yet. His exposure to the gun-making process during his competitive shooting days, particularly what he saw in the European factories of top-line gun makers such as Beretta, informs how USFA does business today.
Bridging the gap from the past to today wasn’t easy. Starting out in the early 1990s in the old Colt factory—a million-square-foot behemoth in downtown Hartford—USFA had to train every employee from the ground up. “There isn’t anybody alive we could have called upon in forming this company who knows how to do this work,” Donnelly says. The company also had to create its own tools and processes, in many instances reaching back into time but often applying modern manufacturing techniques to create a “high-tech approach to making a low-tech product.”
In its first few years, USFA relied on many subcontractors. After moving into a modern manufacturing facility, however, it began to recognize the value of doing more in-house. “We noticed that time, quality, and delivery, even in the US, weren’t what they could be,” he says. “If we wanted to control it the way we wanted, we would have to control it ourselves.”
In addition to using historic engineering drawings, USFA reverse-engineers old Colt guns, using Pro-Engineer software, stereo lithography, and a process that Donnelly himself pioneered back when Pro-E was still in Beta form. Along with heavy use of CMM and optical gauging, such processes have helped eliminate the need to have a prototype department at the factory.
The automation starts with a steel milling complex, where currently four spindles can handle 70 pallets and some 1,000 different tools. Plans are to expand the capacity to eight spindles and up to 2,000 different tool-heads. “A lot of our parts are milling-intensive; they take hours and hours of production time for each pallet,” Donnelly says. The automated process, with self-correcting CNC machines that can be run from Donnelly’s office as well as the shop floor, enables USFA to mill parts around the clock, even though the factory floor is only staffed for a single shift each day. “That’s critical to be able to gain the throughput we need,” he says.
A similar approach is used in the wood-shaping part of the gun-making process, with a three-axis milling tool producing gun stocks and handles that are ready for finishing, staining, and final assembly.
As parts emerge from the automated section of the USFA factory, they are essentially brought back in time to the handwork area, where dozens of workers polish steel on machines that Donnelly has brought in from Europe or rescued from salvage. “They don’t make these anymore, because people don’t do handwork anymore,” he says, pointing to a row of polishing machines, where interchangeable belts spin to enable workers to put the finishing touches on precisely cut steel parts. From there, hand grips and gun butts are hand-carved, and each piece of steel in a gun is hand-marked with an internal ID number. Finally, the guns are assembled, each one stored in its own case with the original order identifying the buyer. Donnelly hoists a gun and nods with recognition at the name on the order sheet, one of many repeat customers for the company.
All guns are tested in a custom-built testing tunnel that contains smoke, noise, and fired rounds and ensures that every gun is in working order before it leaves the factory. The factory is also designed to be “green,” Donnelly says, with no discharge of polluted water, thanks to a closed-loop recycling system that can handle even the gold and bronze plating—among the most recent processes brought in-house by USFA.
At the heart of the USFA factory is the showroom. Dozens of people tour the factory each month, from dealers and customers to state crime lab experts who gain insight into the gun-making process. In the room, which also travels to gun and trade shows with the company, two dozen replica guns are mounted around a full-size portrait of Sam Colt himself. Nearby sits Donnelly’s archive of Colt’s ledger books and engineering documents, many dating to the late 1800s.
Each year, the USFA catalog is modified to introduce new guns or new versions of existing products. Pistols and revolvers are sold under names such as the Rodeo and the Gunslinger, and rifle models include the Lightning Magazine Carbine. Various customization options result in thousands of different possible final products, Donnelly says.
USFA has started to modernize somewhat. It recently began producing an automatic pistol, though Donnelly notes the automatic design itself is nearly 100 years old. And it’s now the Connecticut distributor for national homeland security product maker FN Herstal.
Still, USFA clearly is most at home in history, reaching back into the 1800s to recall the days of the Wild West, when guns were loaded by hand and carried by rugged cowboys. “People buy our guns because they bring them back to that time,” Donnelly says. “We owe it to them to make them the way they used to be made when possible, but to bring modern technology to the job to make it happen.”
Keith Regan, The Manufacturer Magazine. |
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