doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Help with Gunmaking Definition: "Hand-Made"

The issue also involves some rather arbitrary decisions regarding which tools/machinery is or is not included. For example, there has been a lot of machinery in use in the gun industry from quite a long time ago. Using my sensiblities, the guns I would call handmade include a handful of those who recreate the American Longrifle (eg Herschel House and a few others) from scratch. And a very few like Wells (now deceased) from Prescott, AZ who started his rifles with a block of steel and a blank of wood using a milling machine, lathe and an old armory rifling machine. Well's work was clearly "Best" quality and,on a different plane, so is Houses.

Whew! This one is going to end up without a consensus of opinion. I've thought about it and can't even begin to give a strict definition. But I know one when I see it....somehow. There's an intrinsic "something" about a "handcrafted" gun that defies a definition but is there. Good luck! Gonna be interesting.

Hand fitted would be a better definition.

Another attempt at defining a complex process, with a simple word or phrase, that spanned litereally hundreds of years (Beretta has been making guns with the aid of machines for what ... 500 years?)

Define "machine" first, then you can set about this task.

I think you will find that all guns as we know them, had machines in their manufacture. And all doubles as we know them, had hand fitting or assembly in their manufacture.

I think the attempt to define this coloquialism is futile. You are ultimately going to get down to drawing a line in the sand and say that all guns with this much hand work or more are "hand made" and those with less hand work are "machine made". IMO, the use of the term "hand made" is just a self-stroking euphemism.

If you look at a firearm as a group of interdependent systems, you may find that in hand made firearms the craftsman works across all of the systems, and in machine made they do not.

Singular, linear processing vs parallel or batch.

Graham Greener in his book,�The Greener story�
refers to �hand made guns� right through to 1999.However he also lists �guns mostly machine made but hand finished and assembled�as of 1910.
These were lower grade guns /rifles and guns by Webley and Scott.
Interestingly W.W. Greener has to say in 1881:
�in military arms the advantage of the interchangeable system is apparent;but for sporting arms,where in every case individual taste has to be considered,their production must ever be fraught with formidable obstacles,and perfect as works of art they never can be.�
I suggest you read the whole chapter,�The use of machinery in gun making� page 283 �The gun and its development� ninth edition.

I think the definition you seek would have meant one thing in WW�s day ,another in Burrards and different again today.

GDU

I handmade and hand fitted, several improvised weapons in my early teens, they were by all accounts quite crude.

"Handmade" describes process, the product of which could be anything from a zipgun to a Purdey.

Good luck with your quest.

I believe it's well done hand fitting and finishing.

They did have cnc back in the day, used to be called an apprentice. Can anyone point to a significant maker who did sole authorship. Maybe, HM Pope, but probably none of the famous British Gunmakers?

I like jOE's suggestion of "hand fitted" as the most appropriate term for the kind of gunwork we all seem to enjoy here. Parkers were hand fitted from machined parts, so were the other American high grade makers, and most of the British, French, Italian, Spanish and German guns as well. Higher grade guns in each marque had more hand fitting, and lower grades had less. I have a Model 10 S&W new in the gold box from 1949 and the wood and metal fit is as nice as any gun I've ever handled. It appears to have been "hand fitted". Alas, no more except maybe at the custom shop. Even Hacker Martin, the longrifle gunmaker of Foxfire fame, used a handmade boring machine to bore and rifle his barrels. I think the difference we seek to make here is between guns that lack most of that "hand fitting" and those that employ a lot of it. It is not all or none, just more or less. Even my $200 Eibar special had sear notches that were hand stoned--just not very well. JMHO.

There has to be a "break point" defining hand made, but I don't know what it is. There have always been machines involved, but hands turn those machines.

For my part, I don't care if a gun is "hand made" so long as it's of good quality. CNC is fine by me, and I think can make a gun as fine mechanically as any hand fitted....well, not as "fine" but as good.

This is the 21st Century, the age of the Jetsons, and hand fitting just isn't affordable. It's going out of style, and you can grieve that if you want, but remember all the junk that came out of Europe in pre-WW I Belgium and Europe, and maybe England, and make the comparisons there.

I guess I would say that if it spends more time at the bench than it does on the machines, it's close enough to hand made for me.