CNC (Computer Numerical Control)

["DoubleAction"]

....I can not say enough how much CNC had changed the manufacturing industries and the world we now live in; This especially holds true with the firearm industry. The terms "Pre-Fit" and "Close Tolerances", no longer applies to justify the variants of the American standard ,with "Thats Close Enough". The process of using computer technology, has drastically removed the human error from the equation from the manufacturing industry forever.

At no time in history have seen the global exchange of bringing goods and services to the table of finished goods. Where in history have you seen frames produced in another part of in world, slides in a another, barrels another, and components transported by air in over night for next day delivery, and assembled for the customer in just a few hours, while maintaining a strict level of quality standards. Welcome to the world of CNC manufacturing, where "Sloppy" just don't fit in.


This slide came with a .40 S&W barrel, and I installed a factory Sig Sauer 357 sig barrel in the same slide.

.....While holding the barrel and slide up to four 48" inch fluorescent tubes, I inspected the light around the hood and the chamber area and port. Perfect Fit.

[melgumby]

I remember as a young person, the only way to maintain tolerances that close was with diamond dust.

[TMan]

It has come a long way. New York Air Brake was one of my customers back in the early 70's. The engineers used Fortran to input their data, and the output went into punched cards (80 column/12 rows). These were taken to a machine that used the cards as input and created a punched paper tape. The paper tape was then used to run the milling machine. They were on the leading edge.

The other interesting thing was that they had two electric blast furnaces. The power company not only charged them for total consumption, but also on the peak usage. They calculated peak usage in 18 minute intervals. So NYAB installed an IBM System 7 computer to calculate usage and they set a threshold. At 15 minutes into the interval the computer projected total usage, and if it was going to exceed the threshold it would cut the electricity to the blast furnaces for a couple of minutes.

Everything worked well for awhile then it hit the fan: massive computer outages. The IBM Customer Engineer kept replacing parts, but it was one failure after another. The problem was that the blast furnaces were emitting fine particles of metal into the air. These got sucked into the computer and caused the failures. The joke was the blast furnace was getting even for having its electricity cut off.

They ended up creating a small room to hold the computer and pressurized it with outside air. No more computer failures.

[blueglass]

A fellow I shoot Black Powder with just ordered a new CNC machine from Japan. His cost as a dealer for this brand no less is 1.5 million dollars. It's good down to 3 millionth of a inch apparently in tolerance. I think he needs some big contracts to pay for this puppy. I used to work around them at a military facory here which is now owned by General Dynamics. It builds the armoured vehicles for both of our armies. The Striker and Coyote models no less. The best in the world. Darn good wages there I can attest to for sure. Over $35.00 perhour plus benefits.