doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com Winchester Winders

SDH, Winder Musket production figures are from Campbell, except for the actual # contracted & delivered. That # (11,419) comes from T.D. Batha's "U.S. Martial .22RF Rifles". Campbell seems to have used whatever Winchester records he could access. Batha apparently tracked down the contracts from the US Gov't end. Batha paid scant attention to the Winder muskets. He was more interested in the WW-2 and postwar rifles.

Winchester made more than 4.5 million guns during the period (1904-1919) that the Single Shot rimfire muskets were in the Winchester catalog. Single Shot rimfire musket production was only about 0.6 % of Winchester's business by volume and probably less if you account for $. Small wonder that a few records are missing. I'll track down some references to the steel allocation for my next post.

Here is a start on WW1 steel allocation. In July 1917, the US gov't established the War Industries Board. The WIB rated each gov't contract and critical resource (steel & other metals, wood, cloth, etc.) by priority and assigned high quality resources to the completion of high priority contracts. The WIB operated until December 1918. A contract for production of infantry rifles or machine guns would have a very high priority and would have been allocated the best steel available. A contract for 22RF training rifles would have a lower priority and would have been assigned lower quality steel.

Very interesting, this is the kind of stuff that makes the web worthwhile.
Thanks waterman!

My grandfather managed Kohler Die & Specialty, a large machine shop making parts for bicycles & roller skates & ice skates. He often said that in June 1917, the WIB seized all their steel stockpile, putting them out of business. The steel was hauled away on Army trucks. Grandfather said they were never paid for the steel. A neighbor in Chicago worked for Armstrong Steel in some sort of minor managerial capacity. As a kid, I heard him tell that they were told by the WIB who they could sell to, at what price and how much could be delivered.

Gov't control extended to the railroads and coal mines. Have you ever heard the expression "That's a hell of a way to run a railroad"? The Railroad Administration operated from Dec. 1917 until early 1920. They ran the rolling stock into the ground and operated at a net loss of $1.7 billion (when a skilled machinist made about $3 a day).

The Fuel Administration ran the nation's coal mines. I'm writing a biography of a mining engineer who knew lots about coal mines. He was drafted and commissioned a captain in the Army in Sept. 1918. He was supposed to oversee a lot of the coal mining, but came down with the Spanish flu in October 1918. Darn near died. Came out of hospital in March 1919 and was discharged. I have his 1917 S&W. Was it his issue revolver? Or did he buy it from the DCM much later? How do I tell?

My family has some experience with this subject:

The "conventional wisdom" is that business people prosper from "war profiteering", which is not always true. Some do, some don't. My grandfather's business, the porcelain enamel coated signs that every gas station in America once had, went bust during WW2 because of wartime resource controls. They made it through the depression in good shape, but the second world war killed them. They couldn't get their raw materials and their machinery was not particularly useful for war production, so they just failed. It took him several years to get back into a related business and he ended up working for someone else.

I don't know how you would research DCM purchases, the records might still exist in a government warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant.

Waterman

Interesting stuff on the WIB that I didn’t know. I’m still trying to get my arms around how this affected Winchester and the Winder Muskets.

I know Winchester had contracts with about half a dozen steel mills Crucible, Midvale, Redding etc. with supplied various steels.

I’m assuming that the frames were forged, machined & polished then sent over to be barreled & stocked to fill whatever requirements Winchester had to fill at the time, whether it be commercial or military.

We really don’t see a drop in Winchester’s commercial products ie..1873, 1892, 1886, 1894 etc. other than normal product phase out/discontinuation.

So I’m having a hard time seeing the impact of the WIB on Winchester production or type of steel used.

Open Mind

V/R

Campbell wrote about what he called "grab-bag" assembly, where an assembler took parts from a parts bin. Maybe they used old parts before new parts or maybe vice versa. How many single shot high wall actions would Winchester have had on hand? The rifle was at or near the end of its run, perhaps was being phased out. They had an initial order (12/1917) for 2000 3rd Models, but the staff instructions said to grind down 1,500 high wall actions. What about the other 500? Campbell apparently could not answer that. Then along came orders for at least 13,000 more actions.

If you were the works manager, would you have had 10,000 actions for an obsolete rifle on hand? Those orders for 13,000 more would require additional production somewhere along the line. It would have been close to 10 % of the total # of both high wall & low wall actions made.

And where would heat treating come into the manufacturing process? Or modification of some actions for rimless cartridges? If a high wall action had been heat treated & otherwise modified for use with rimless cartridges, would or could it be ground down?

Winchester kept other obsolete or out of production models in the catalog as long as they had some on hand. The Model 1907 was last assembled in 1942, but was in the catalog until 1957. But the Single Shot was gone, not listed, after 1920, and then only the Winder musket. The regular hunting rifle was last listed in 1919, the Schuetzen and the 20 gauge shotgun last listed in 1916.

Harold Williamson wrote an economic history of Winchester back in the late 1950s. He wrote 2 chapters on Winchester & WW1 production. Half a page on primers, but not a single mention of any training rifles, even in his list of items produced. Winder muskets did not even rate a footnote.

waterman,

I know this is slightly off topic, but at that same time similar things were happening to Stevens A&T, I know their plant was taken over by Westinghouse, and during that time all the jigs, etc., for the 44½ action disappeared never to be seen again.

Bob

waterman, I really appreciate the info and the depth of your research, but please be careful. Campbell makes way to many assumptions and hypotheticals, and includes too much conjecture for me. He often states what he believes should, could, would happen without concrete facts. For me, his conjecture (what ifs?) almost nullifies the other good info in his books.

Kinda reminds me of Joe Kindig, or John Baird in the muzzleloading world. Took decades to relearn their mistakes, and folks still read their conjecture as gospel.

"Grab bag" assembly supposedly happened with M70s, one finds higher number actions with earlier dated barrels, etc. Townsend Whelen's 52 sporter is supposedly the first one put together but there are at least two with lower receiver numbers. Already serialed parts were in a tray or on a shelf and were taken down at random to fulfill orders.