Question on Luger manufacture techniques
 

Fellows

In the days before CNC machinery, were Lugers manufactured by skilled operators with each part manually produced and hand-checked for adherence to spec?

How great was the level of automation in the production of parts, especially frames, uppers and toggle mechanisms?

I suspect that Lugers were fabricated from "ordnance steel", an analog of 4140 steel. Am I correct?

How common was subcontracting major assemblies to smaller manufacturers? I realize that there were likely many changes, especially during wartime.

See below in red:

Not common, if at all. DWM made all parts in house, as did Erfurt. An exception may have been magazines.

Very little books have pictures of production - the book on Mauser lugers by Weaver, Speed, et al (not Joops and Don's) has pictures from WW2. As Don said above, parts were made to specification, but were still hand-fit. They were not to USA specifications during WW1 and during WW2 probably closer to less hand-fit.

Ed

Erfurt did use subcontractors. There is evidence that Pieper in Belgium made several small parts for Erfurt.

Large gun companies usually had a network of smaller subcontractors and home workers.

Production of parts was divided in steps, performed by individual machine operators. The machines were set up with specific jigs if required and the step was checked with go/no go gauges. Workers were paid by step and only for the correct ones.

Machines were basically lathes, drills, milling machines, cutters.

I have a copy of the post war Mauser Parabellum production book. Copies are not very good, still need to find time to clean them up digitally.

Steel types varied per part. There is an overview of steel types used by Mauser in the 1930, Swiss steel types and 1970s steel types in our book 'The Parabellum is Back!'.

Vilm,
what were the small parts?
Screws, springs?

Have to look it up, but I thought side plates as well.

Were complex parts, the breech block for example, made from castings?

Not until the 1970s when toggle parts were cast. The breech block, receiver, frame were all made from forgings.

Most parts were made from forgings or steel stock, depending on the size and complexity.

Not Lugers, but Mauro and Gerben's book contains pictures from the Mauser Oberndorf C-96 production line. I doubt there were a great number of changes to production techniques through production fo the Luger.

The work was done in batches, drawing from finished parts stocks sourced from other lines or stocks from prior operations.

Of great interest is a set of books on the Nickle M1910 and M1914 pocket pistols in the Mauser archive. These books document the workers that were fabricating parts as well as the time and cost involved for each part. Of particular interest, we see Mauser's master gunsmiths including Nickle also worked on the production line to makes parts for the pistols.

You'll find limited documentation of the production steps for Lugers at Mauser during WW-II in Jon Speed's book on Mauser Pistols. See the process sequence document on page 227.

The post war frame needed 107 steps, not counting the actual forging.

Does anyone here have any insight into the percentage of Luger assemblies that was rejected for being out of spec?

If you go by the Crown/RC markings, probably the majority of Erfurt guns were reworked, and very few DWM.

I expect that apart from records that might be discovered in archival caches, only August Weiss would have known.