Pictures Of the Factories
 

I see lots of information here, about every thing about a luger, but no pictures of the factories. Were there never
any taken because of secrecy in the manufacturing process
or all of them lost in time?
If anybody has any pictures they could post, I would appreciate it.
Thanks
Paul

There are photos of DWM and Mauser.
Will look some up when I get back home.

Both the DWM buildings and the Mauser buildings are still standing today.

there are few - all in books and copyrighted that I have seen

I'm sure with the amount of research that has been done, there are members that have pictures tucked away they could share. Would give you an idea of where they were built.
Could you imagine buying the old Mauser building and redoing it to apartments or something. Would be a historic place . Would beat collecting lugers. lol!

Actually, the old Mauser buildings are in use.

• The Cloister and Cloister Church are now offices for the city of Oberndorf and a beautify concert hall
• The Swedish Bureau is now offices for Oberndorf and contains a library and meeting hall on the top floor where the C96 pistols were made, and the Oberndorf Weapons Museum on the third floor. This is well worth seeing.
• Building "C" (the K98 manufacturing site) is gone, as are the Upper works and Turkenbau (which is now the site of a school)
• Building "D" where the Lugers and P.38 pistols were made is still standing. It belongs to Rhinemetal now and is subdivided into a series of industrial and office spaces.
• The Outer works are also divided up into a series of industrial and office spaces.
• Paul Mauser's mansion (which he never lived to occupy) stands just over the factory site, and is occupied by the Oberndorf City's finance and taxation department.
• The Research Shop building is still there, but I have not been in it.
• The old original home of Gebruder Mauser & Co. where they made sights for the original rifle contract was there in 2012, but has since been torn down and replaced with a shopping venue.
• Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer's home is still standing above the Mauser factory site. He was the technical director of Mauser during and just prior to WW-II. This fascinating man came to the USA after the war under operation Paperclip and worked at Springfield Armory, and then as a consultant in Racine Wisconsin where he died.
• The bases of the cable system installed across the Neckar valley at Oberndorf are still visible above the city within a small drive and hike. These held cables that interfered with planes flying over the valley during WW-II.
• The site of an impressed labor camp is now a memorial to those that died during WW-II, and the site of a RHSA "re-education" camp is marked a few miles from town. Workers during WW-II traveled on foot and by bicycle between a number of nearby camps and the factory each day.

The Mauser Archive book just published by Mauro and Gerben has photos taken inside the C96 manufacturing line and in the Mauser Research shop where many of the prototype designs were made. There is a particularly nice one showing both apprentice and experienced gunsmiths working together. It's also in the documentary.



Oberndorf is a wonderful place to visit. It's about an hour from Stuttgart by fast train. The Mauser family is interred in Oberndorf's cemetery, as are the Feederle brothers and other famous Mauser personnel.

Here are a few pictures I have taken:

The Swedish Bureau. Added for the Swedish rifle contract. C96 made on the top floor.

http://forum.lugerforum.com/attachme...1&d=1497462894


Library on the top floor, where the C96 pistols were manufactured:

http://forum.lugerforum.com/attachme...1&d=1497462894

Overview of Oberndorf centered on the Cloister building. Research office is behind it (creme color building):

http://forum.lugerforum.com/attachme...1&d=1497462894

Overview of Oberndorf.

http://forum.lugerforum.com/attachme...1&d=1497463221

Thanks mrerick, For all that. Looks like a nice place now. Wonder how it lasted
without being bombed constantly?

rebuilt I am sure.

Pictures of Aachen or Koln show most buildings damaged, but when you go today, they were rebuilt after the war in the style / using bricks or stones (such as old churches)

Oberndorf was well protected against bombings.
It was hit twice only with relatively minimal damage.

It is situated in a valley over which steel lines were mounted, with steel lines suspended from them, creating giant steel curtains that would shred a plane to pieces.

They also had a decent blackout scheme and fog machines. As well as AA platforms all throughout and around the town.

In WW1 they built a fake factory in a nearby valley. It was bombed by the French several times. When the French discovered the scheme, they bombed it with fake bombs :)

Vlim that was very interesting. Guess I need to schedule a vacation too.
Do they still have lugers around the area for sale?

Here's a picture of the bombing damage on the cloister building (it was exactly where Paul Mauser's apartment was)...

Wow , not much left of that. Guess it messed up lots of pistols too. Maybe that
is where all the spare parts from the VOPO's came from.

Actually Oberndorf is quite near France in the Western part of Germany. The other fellows (the vopo) worked on the East side. :D

The cloister building was just offices. Mauser himself lived on the top floor on the corner that ws damaged.

The cloister was rebuilt and renovated over the years.

Many parts were collected and left on a train for the center of Germany in April, 1945. There is good documentation of this attempt to move production in the book about Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer.

Got to buy me some books. Yall have learned a lot.
Where were they going to move the parts too? Maybe Switzerland?

Switzeland is to the South, and moving parts there would do the Germans no good. The Swiss were neutral, and enforced their neutrality fiercely. As an example the Swiss kept all German airplanes that landed on Swiss soil during the war.

I was hoping someone would have pictures of the inside of a working factory
making guns.
I don't know how to say don't point that at me in German, but I bet it was one of the most common used phrases in there.

Here are some old pics from Mauser shop. I have bunch others from factory but can't post them due to the file size limitation of this forum.

Ok here is more on Mauserwerke, had to find different host. Click on the link then click on the image to see it in full size.

Those pictures are all from the Mauser history anniversary book Geschicte Der Mauser-Werke, 1938. It was published 100 years after Paul Mauser was born and 125 years after the king's armory was established in Oberndorf at the Cloister.

Thanks those are nice.

Thanks,
I see rifles, M1896 pistols, and Mauser typewriters and sewing machines too!:eek:

Those calipers you see being used are most likely also Mauser made.

Thanks so much for the photos. Interesting to note, the one picture with the "lines" of milling machines. Notice only one guy in between each of the lines of four or five machines? When I was a machinist in the 70s we had one "operator" per machine. I talked once to an old guy who had been a machinist during the depression who spoke of having to run multiple machines at once. You had to start a cut on one and then while the cut was being made you went on to the next and so on. You can see that in this photo, that is why there is only one guy per each of the machines in that line.

My recollection of historical progress was that somewhere around 1890 to 1900 was when machine tooling really began, and in some respects it was. I had thought that prior to that era even Colt SAA had to be assembled from parts that were hand forged into rough shape, filed, then hardened and ground into a final "Go-No Go" piece for assembly. Turns out early mills were around some 30 years or so before that so perhaps that 1860 to 1890 and the process of machining was really in evolution on conjunction with metallurgy to provide some steels for cutting and others for products.

I guess "W-group" tool steel was the first. I wonder if they even really knew why it was harder. Perhaps all they knew was "some ores produced harder steel" and they could use that for cutting softer steel. Then "high speed" steel in the 1910s really opened things up, and carbide in the 50s.

Also notice the one picture of milling machines where only some of the machines have belts running from the overhead drives and the rest have electric motors.

Colt was a pioneer in machining tools and tooling. Most of the machines were produced in Hartford and exported throughout the world. Here are some of the early Colt's machines produced in Colt's armories. Most of the black powder revolvers were produced on those type of machinery.

For those who would like to know more here is interesting article from 1857 describing Colt's armory at that time.

Armory

Pictures are courtesy of Connecticut State Library. I have many more but getting tired of resizing them just to be able to upload to server.

Enjoy!

It looks like that collection is online at:

http://cslib.cdmhost.com/cdm/landing...n/p128501coll6

with images from Colt digitized and indexed at: (but I don't see the machinist photos you posted. Are they in different collection?)

http://cslib.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/...r/title/ad/asc

Thanks for the Colt photos. The lathes were more advanced for the time than I would have guessed. That second machine, I don't even recognize, maybe a key cutter or broaching machine for the frames. I am guessing (since the black and white photos don't show the color of the metals) that for the most part they used cast iron and brass for these machines since they didn't have good tool steels. Fascinating. Notice the "mill" hadn't really been introduced yet. I would imagine they needed really good tool steels to make that step. Wiki mentions an early "file mill" which was really a lathe with a "face cutter file". And that hadn't even been done in 1854.

Mauser factory in Fred Datigs book

Krieghoff Factory Tour~ http://www.shotgunworld.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=426910

If you hover your mouse over pics it should give you a name of each machine depicted in it. Back in those days they run many mills but not as mills as we know them in todays typical configuration. Back then mills were mostly of horizontal type mills and they would wary in sizes. Typical operation for such mill would be production of percussion musket lock plate, for example.

http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/m...ive/img118.jpg

Also, shapers , played big role in production of various parts back then. Horizontal, vertical large and small shapers were utilised in production of many parts.

I wonder what kind of machine they used to cut the rectangular hole for the safety bar.
Its already thin and they cut a perfect hole for it to ride in. I can't imagine how they did it. I have a mill and doubt that I could do it.

By broaching on vertical press after drilling initial hole. Custom made broach would be used for this. That is one possibility, another way would be shaper tool.

A round pilot hole drilled and a square reamer pushed through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1r5XfVkyk

Way back then they had umpteen machines in a long row each only doing one operation.

Here's a complete article (from 1942) on the manufacture of the Colt M1911a1 Automatic Pistol:

http://www.gunlab.net/wp-content/upl...anufacture.pdf

Thanks Marc,
super article- and amazine the number of machines, cutters , and steps needed!:thumbup:

Thanks, mrerick. What I woldn't give to see a similar article on the Luger...

IIRC, somewhere on the web there is a great presentation of a guy making a 1911 100% from SS billet. Can't seem to find it at the moment.

Think about this, chickenthief. In that photo, those machines are all sitting on wood floors and bolted down or even just screwed in. Can you imagine the chatter in the cutting? It must have been frustrating as can be to try to run one of those machines. And "letting up" and cutting lighter/smaller don't help chatter, it frequently makes it worse.

Something else to think about. We may have dreams of making "one" of something (1911, Luger, whatever). I remember my days as a machinist. When you are assigned to a new job doing one part of a multiple operation sequence, the first dozen or so you do are usually crap because you haven't figured out all the little intricacies. It ain't until you have done several hundred when you really start to get the hang of it. With respect to how many rough passes? What feed? Is a finish pass necessary? Are there factors that complicate getting a great finish (do you have to wait until the Bullard in the next bay is finished his rough cut?)

Think about it, some 53 pieces in a 1911, 162 individual operations on the frame alone. Almost all these operations an individual step, and each step has to be mastered by the operator with regard to all the little intricacies, many of which can't really be explained and taught verbally. Mind boggling.