MAKING GUNS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 January 1940, Page 7

MAKING GUNS

PROGRESS IN AUSTRALIA — | VAST GROWTH OF NEW ' INDUSTRY, j I TRIUMPH OF ORGANISATION. A remarkably fine job is being done at Maribyrnong, where, under the direction of the Department of Supply and Development, anti-aircraft guns and shells are being produced to standards of the most exacting precision in vast factories that have arisen only in the last two years. It is a triumph of organisation, and the munitions are the pride of Australian workmanship (writes Norman M’Cance in the Melbourne "Argus"). In July, 1937, the experimental first shell was fired out of the first Aus-tralian-made A.A. gun. Tested at high tide on the shallow beach of Port Wakefield (S.A.), the projectile was recovered, and r preserved as a memento, for it shows the perfection of the gun that fired it. That is the feature of the Australian gun —its precision and perfect craftsmanship, conforming to the highest standards of the British War Office, to the patterns and specifications of which it is constructed. Since July, 1937, the Maribyrnong factories have completed a' batch of anti-aircraft guns now strategically placed in'the defence of Australia, and are busy, very busy, turning out a larger and better gun, some of which are ordered for the War Office. Thus, within a few years, Australia has not only organised her gunmaking works to produce high-grade weapons for the whole of Australia, but actually will be sending them to England. That 10 years ago would have been too fantastic to think about. BUSY FACTORY SCENE. There is a strange and most unexpected beauty about the place where guns are made. Light from high, class serrations- gives an almost cathedral effect to the amazing scene of industry around the machines. The prevailing tone might be grimy black or rust red. It is not. It is soft dove grey, of smooth neutral paintwork, and the grey of turned steel, or polished cutting surfaces in shadow. Men who tend those huge machines that turn a gun barrel in the making as easy as you would spin a pencil in your fingers, are the typical Australian mechanic, grim, intent, and highly efficient. There are about 1,350 of then, of all ages, making the guns and the shells that feed the guns. There is beauty, too, in the smooth symmetry of turned steel, in the squat bulldog grimness of gaping depth charge throwers, in the curling spirals of hardened steel as they writhe from the lathe, in the pyrotechnics of the magnetic grinding machine reducing silvered trunnions to a micrometer gauging, and in all the orderly and ordered activity of men and machines. All the more amazing in this orderliness and efficiency—seeing that it has grown up in a few months out of blueprints and specifications—for it was an entirely new Australian industry that was organised with men erecting and tending machines they had never seen before. Why, it is not so long since practice shells were turned out in the stables of the Light Horse encamped at Maribyrnong, still standing, but dwarfed by the great factories that now surround it. A GUN’S BEGINNING. Gun jacket and breech ring, barrel, cradle, body, and sighting—thus separately, but with absolute precision at all points, the component parts of a modern A.A. gun are taking shape. The steelworks at Newcastle deliver the gun barrel in the form of billets, 20in. in diameter, and about 30ft long. That is the very beginning of a gun, and at that stage there is no beauty in it at all. All those silver curves and polished precision lie hidden in a shapeless block, and just as Galatea grew from a marble block, they now begin to reveal themselves. There is a marvellouus electric furnace that aids in the tempering and a 1,500-ton hydraulic press that shapes both ends and the middle. An Irishman’s recipe for a gun is to take a hole and wrap steel around it. Weil, at this tempering and shaping stage at Maribyrnong there is plenty of steel, but no hole. It goes from the forge shop to the machine shop, where they roughturn it into something more like a gun, and bore a rough hole through it. Then back to the forge shop for heat treatment and oil baths to harden it. So they proceed with cutting and testing and analysing, turning, boring and screwing, polishing and rifling. On this silvered barrel is forged the breech ring that takes the charge, and the cast steel cradle body on which the gun is vertically pivoted. A mounting and traversing ring, like a couple of cartwheels, gives it lateral movement, and the delicate sighting gear, by which the percussion equipment is controlled from afar is added to complete the work of art. BALANCE AND EFFICIENCY. It is indeed a work of art. and however you may deplore the perversion that demands such instruments of death, you cannot deny the consummate skill that brought it into being, nor the beauty that now invests it, a shapely weapon in its balance and its trim alignments and its sheer efficiency. For that, when you come to think of it, is the spirit that has guided a great organisation and turned i; to high-pressure production in the forcing house of war —balance and efficiency. The man they praise for the far-sighted organisation of all this activity is Mi A. E. Leighton. Control-ler-General of Munitions and Supply. The man who makes it all run smoothly, co-ordinating a hundred different processes and the labours of a thousand men, is Mr M. M. O'Loughlin, manager of the ordnance factory, who has the imagination to see the romance of it all and the enthusiasm that is in itself an inspiration. Yes, at Maribyrnong there is a remarkably fine job of work, being done.