The Enfield Rifle

Chambers's Journal, 16 April 1859

the bow - brown bess - minie

ordnancy factory - processes - bayonet manufacture

finishing room - copying machine - stock manufacture

barrel making and finishing

workforce - the enfield rifle

The finishing-room is entered from the smithy, and is about two hundred feet square. Wheels and men, cranks and levers, leather bands and iron, are moving apparently in the greatest confusion, but yet all is regulated with the accuracy of clock-work.

At one end of the room are a set of offices, in which the foremen carry on their duties. In front of these, and commanded by them, are avenues, down which the raw unfinished work is conveyed. Passing from hand to hand, from machine to machine, the bayonet, ramrod, or lock starts 'in the rough,' and returns complete, tested as it travels between one machine and its neighbour, and again as it arrives at its destination. Improvements are frequently being made in the various machinery, by which expensive hand-labour is saved. By means of a huge iron stamping-hammer; £1500 a year has been saved in the formation of the exterior of the lock. The filing of the trigger-guard by machinery has saved five guineas a week. If this rate of saving be continued, the Enfield rifle may soon be made for a very trifling sum.

The machine called the copying-machine is extensively used at Enfield; this was invented by an Englishman some years ago, for the purpose of copying the fine lines of statuary. The Americans were the first who employed it to the purpose of gun-making. It is simply that one instrument moves round an iron model, whilst another moves in exactly a similar manner over the iron or wood which is to be cut. Thus perfect similarity of form is obtained, and a particular part of one lock will fit into the similar part of any other which has been made at this manufactory.

Arrangements are made so that the portion of work which may require the greatest time may be given the greatest number of machines or workmen. Thus each portion is finished at exactly the same time, and is brought to the workman who puts them together.

The execution of the wood-work is even more wonderful than that of the iron, not that the machines are more ingenious, but the results appear more magical, on account of the rapidity with which they are obtained. During the examination of the construction of the lock, we have gradually arrived at the conclusion that the teaching of our early youth as regards the hardness of metals must have been very false.

We were formerly impressed with a belief that iron and brass were hard; this we now find was entirely a delusion. There goes a piece of brass into a machine, down comes a spike and bores a hole through it as calmly as though the brass were butter. There is another bit having bristles shaved off it far more readily than we can shave off our own bristles on a frosty morning. Here are iron, steel, and brass, in the shape of lock plates, triggers, tumblers, bridles, cocks, sight-leafs, and swivels, being stamped and cut, and scraped as though they were bits of cream-cheese. Quite a popular error it must be to consider that iron is hard - apparently nothing can be softer. So lifelike do the machines appear; and so automatically do they do their work, that we feel as the man Friday must have done when he asked the gun not to kill him; if the opportunity offered, we should much like to have a quiet talk with some of those wise machines. With these ideas we enter the stock-making department, and there we find three machines on which is stamped 'Ames, Massachusetts' - thus shewing that our cousins across the Atlantic have contributed their share to the works at Enfield. From Italy, Belgium, and France, the walnut-wood is sent to Enfield in the rough, just outlined in the proper form, and ready to be handled by these machines. The first machine saws off pieces, and rounds ends and sides, pushing the stock away when the work is finished. The second rounds the ends from the muzzle-end half-way down to the stock; this is done on the copying principle. The third finishes what the second left undone, and these three machines leave very little to be done by hand as regards form. The excavations for the bedding of the lock and other parts are accomplished in a few minutes at separate machines.

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