The Making of a Big Gun.

Manawatu Herald, 4 January 1900, Page 3

The Making of a Big Gun.

■ ♦ Mr W. J. Gordon sketches WoolJim wich Arsenal in the November " Leisure *^ Hour." Among a host of interesting descriptions may be selected here what he says about the making of a gun :— In their eariy stages these guns are unexpectedly long and slender things, owing to their being without the coils and jackets that build them up to such bulkiness. They look their longest during their wiring, that modern process which enabled us to reduce the bulk of the gun so much that the podgy Woolwich infants have developed into graceful boys. There is something startling in finding a gun being treated like a bat-handle., the only difference being that instead of waxed thread you wind 6% a thin flat strip of steel having a breaking strain of ioo tons to the square inch, and wind this on in several layers instead of one. The gun revolves in a lathe as the cricketpat does, but much more slowly, and in place of the wooden spool of thread there stands, at right angles to it, a huge ifon reel, from which the riband or wire, as it is called, which is about a quarter of an inch wide, is wound on spirally at high tension, the spirals being knocked up tight to each other with a punch whenever they fail to ;~ wind on closely together. The gun is T^thus wrapped with literally miles and miles of wire, mostly in the region of the powder chamber. Over the wire jacket come the hoops of cast steel cut out of ingots as disks, and forged into rings just a trifle smaller than the finger they are to fit ; ~-r and when these are finished, they are i one^hg one, for there are many of ~~~r^_ theml neated just enough to expand them, and slipped over the gun to shrink and grip it as they cool, the gun being upright at the time, with a stream of water flowing through its bore to keep its temperature down. In this way the wiring is all hidden, and the gun looks as though it were built up entirely of these massive hoops, as it used to be. The lathe work and other operations necessitated by all this may be imagined, and we ceas,e to wonder why it takes longer to make a heavy gun than it does to build ' the ship that carries it. ! •