Pac-Nor barrel manufacturing plant burns

[Beetlegeuse]

The plant was in Brookings, Oregon.

Update - Photos / Structure Fire: Flames destroy local rifle barrel plant

“We had a part wore out on a lathe and were waiting for a replacement part,” he said. “As one of the guys moved the electrical conduit attached to the lathe that comes out of a box in the wall, some sparks flew.”

Dichter said other employees pulled the main breaker to cut the power off and shortly after that, fire burst from the wall.

“I’d never seen anything go like that,” Dichter said. “It blew up with smoke and fire. It sounded like a tree fell on the plant.”

Employees witnessing the incident immediately grabbed fire extinguishers and attempted to put the flames out. Seeing that they could not stop the fire, they all quickly exited the building.

“There were eight or nine of us that got out,” Dichter said. “Just like we had trained. Everybody had an assembly point and got out safe. No body got hurt and I congratulated them on that.”

Dichter estimated that the building and machinery is valued at between $4 to $6 million.

Whether he will rebuild is still unclear.

“I am 66 years-old and I don’t know if I have the time left,” he said. “It took my lifetime to find all the machinery in this plant.”

Dichter opened the plant in 1985. The facility is insured, he said.

The plant supplies customers all over the world.

Pac-Nor makes a decent product. It's the gun world's loss if he doesn't manage top rebuild.

Regarding Dichter's remark that it took him a "lifetime to find all the machinery in this plant" stems from the fact that a lot of the the firearms industry runs on old, old hardware because because modern developments like CNC and CAD-CAM haven't moved the needle on down-range results. So you don't run down to the local Harbor Freight and buy all the tooling you'd need to outfit a gun factory. Instead you spend a lot of time at flea markets and government auctions and such shopping for bargains in "experienced" hardware.

This is particularly the case with barrel-making because some of the old school methods just haven't been improved on. The boutique barrel manufacturing industry, for instance, runs on a steady diet of barrel rifling mills that were made during the two world wars.



This is a Pratt & Whitney sine bar rifling cutting mill that's been in use for 124 years, pretty much identical to those that would have been used during WWI. The reason it isn't obsolete is that no one yet has figured out to cut more nearly perfect rifling.

The M1903 Springfield rifle was a marvel of precision manufacture. They were so good they remained in service as a sniper's rifle through the early years of the War in Vietnam. Because their barrels were rifled on P&W sine machines.

The rest of that story is that the high quality standards made the Ought-Three slow to manufacture, too slow to keep up with the wartime demand. So instead of lowering their standards on the Springfield, the US began manufacturing the M1917 "American" Enfield, a Pattern-1914 Enfield chambered in .30-06. Before the war ended there were more American servicemen carrying the American Enfield than the '03 Springfield.

Which prompted to Brits to parrot the story that "The Yanks brought a target rifle to war (the '03), and the Huns brought a hunting rifle to war (the Mauser G98), but the Brits brought a proper battle rifle to war (the SMLE)."


But I digress.

P&W made a shit-ton of the sine bar machines in WWI, which were dumped onto the civilian market the instant the war ended because everyone knew there would never be another.

And these things were made to last forEVER. The frame is cast iron and the whole shebang weighs more than a ton. Massively over-built, as things tended to be in 1895.

Between the world wars, P&W only made two significant changes to the design:



They added hydraulic power and a second barrel mill. And they made three shit-tons of these. And they remain the gold standard of cut rifling.

Lilja has a bunch of these. And the Canadian sniper who made the (suspicious) 2-mile shot in Iraq in 2017 was shooting a McMillan brother's Tac-50 rifle. And McMillan buys its barrels from Lilja. So there's a distinct likelihood that the world record sniper shot was fired from a barrel that had its rifling cut by a 70-year-old P&W milling machine.

The more I learn about firearms the more I'm amazed how smart those old farts were.


If I were Chris Dichter I'd be sorely tempted to pocket the insurance money and move to an island in the south Pacific.

[Obs]

that sucks.
Sad story