MANUFACTURING: New Guns from Old Tools

A chromium-plated, .50-calibre aircraft machine gun, Britain-bound, was ceremoniously presented to U.S. Army and British officials last week by High Standard Manufacturing Co. in Hamden, Conn. It was the company’s 10,000th gun, produced seven months ahead of schedule with salvaged secondhand machinery — an accomplishment Army Ordnance “didn’t believe possible a year ago.”

Because Colt’s Patent Fire Arms factory in Hartford was bogged down with other orders, High Standard just twelve months ago received a British order for 12,000 such guns. Tiny High Standard had World War I-seasoned talent,* but neither facilities nor tools. On a suburban weed patch in Hamden it built a seven-acre, modern steel & glass factory in four months. Into a market already picked bare, it dispatched its experts to find machine tools.

From the U.S. Army’s Watervliet, Rock Island and Springfield Arsenals they wheedled a little obsolete equipment; from many a New England textile factory they got a machine or two, one 75 years old. A few new ones, destined for already-fallen France, were lifted from the docks. In its Hamden plant, High Standard tore down the outmoded machines; redesigned, rebored, rebuilt them to fit its production line. On March 15 production began; on April 19 the first gun was finished. Production is now 150 a day. There has been only one reject.

*Notably Production Chief Carl Gustave Swebilius, designer of the first U.S. machine gun that was synchronized with aircraft propellers (TIME, May 26).