Reading Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, which is about the Confederacy gaining access to AK-47s through a time-travelling white supremacist group. Got me thinking - the world’s most famous assault rifle is known for its simplicity and robustness, designed to be used by illiterate Russian peasants. Assuming one could provide working models to go by along with detailed schematics, where and when are the earliest places that could construct them independently in sufficient quantities to equip an army?
But you could have teaching materials explaining what an assembly line is and how to set one up. I don’t think the technology was so lacking in 1850 that you couldn’t do that, the real reason was that culture dictated that things be done a certain way.
Interestingly enough, I was in Harpers Ferry, WV not too long ago and it was mentioned that, at an early point, the arms factory didn’t even have work shifts. Workers could come and go as they pleased and make as many guns as they wanted to make, and they were paid by the number of guns they made. So if John wants to step out at 1pm and go to the pub for a few hours, no problem, he just won’t make as much money as someone who kept working. Later on, the factory transitioned to shift work where you were expected to start and end work at specified times.
Civil war revolvers were fairly complex, If you could make those with interchangeable parts, you could probably make an AK-47. The AK uses 4130 alloy steel in a number of places, and I am not sure what advances in metallurgy, mining, etc. would be needed to get something comparable. Also fairly sophisticated smokeless powder would be needed to keep the thing functional long enough to empty a magazine. You’d also need to develop deep-drawing technology to make the brass (or harder yet, steel, like the russians use) cartridge cases, and gliding metal jackets for the bullets.
Once you got to cartridge arms and smokeless powder, it would just be a matter of building them. Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles are as mechanically complex as an AK…possibly a little fussier, especially the revolver timing.
Actually, I recall reading in an article many years ago that an aqueduct powered assembly line was invented in ancient Rome. No one copied it though, so the idea died out until the 20th century.
A gas system requires a clean burning powder. Smokeless powder started being used around the 1890s. Aside from that, I’d think that even if one particular type of steel wasn’t available back then, something else could have been substituted to provide a rough equivalent.
“In sufficient quantities to equip an army” is dependent on the availability of labor and capital and how much you can exchange the latter for the former. During the US Civil War, plenty of Springfields were made and later modified without Taylorist production methods.
Well, the question is how much infrastructure can you build? For instance, the quality of available steel in 1861 (especially in the Confederacy) is nothing like that of 1950. So I’m not sure that you could mass-produce AK-47s in 1861 without also building a steel factory that could take poor quality iron and make steel suitable for stamping parts (part of the reason muskets were large-bore and heavy was that a big fat barrel is more tolerant of imperfections in the metal; a thin, light barrel needs much better material). Likewise, even if you knew the process for making modern gunpowder, how far up the supply chain would you have to rebuild everything in order to get chemicals pure enough to make gunpowder reliable enough for rapid fire? Also consider the, I believe brass, for the ammunition, and all the other raw materials you’d need in good enough quality.
Finally, there’s all the metal working tools – the presses to stamp steel parts, and so forth. You’d need plans and expertise in building them, a steel works to make hardened steel suitable for presses, and enough time to first build the tools you need in order to make the machine tools for the AK-47 factory.
Even with all that know-how, consider the expense. The confederacy was just about able to afford rifled muskets for most of their troops and rounds of black-powder paper cartridges, but had to start giving up on things like shoes and food for their soldiers as the war went on. Where are they getting the resources for the millions of rounds of brass cartridges that they’d need to make AK-47s useful?
Anyway, my wild guess – I’m no expert on metalworking history – is that the earliest an AK-47 could be economically built would be around 1910. But if someone said that the metal-stamping technology really wasn’t there until WWII, I’d believe them.
Again, I don’t think it’s the single idea of an assembly line that makes the difference (didn’t Eli Whitney make interchangeable parts a reality in the early 1800s, for muskets?), but all the vast upstream chain of supply that simply didn’t exist until the 20th century.
There are two things that made the modern machine gun type of weapons practical. One is smokeless powder, which was already mentioned, and the other was dramatic improvements in the production of brass which happened in the decades after the Civil War. Without the latter, you won’t be able to produce high volume cheap ammunition, and if you don’t have anything to shoot out of it, your whiz-bang AK-47 is just a cute novelty. They had machine guns (of sorts) in the Civil War. They didn’t use them because they didn’t have enough ammunition for them (and they didn’t realize what they could do, either, but even so the ammunition issue is often overlooked by folks arguing about it today).
So maybe around 1890 or so you might have been able to cobble something together, though manufacturing the weapon would probably be a bit difficult. If you want to make enough of them to supply an army at a price that they could actually afford, then you’re well into the 1900s.
And really, if you consider the ammunition issue, the AK-47 probably couldn’t have been introduced too much earlier than it was, if you want it to be issued in large numbers. Ammunition was such an issue during the first half of the 20th century that they intentionally designed the M-16 to fire a much smaller round (which was a bit controversial at the time, and is one of the points some folks still argue about today).
Having a great weapon doesn’t do you much good if you end up running out of things to shoot out of it very quickly.
I would say the best bet for looking at the lowest level of technology for the production of the gun itself would be to look into Khyber pass copy manufacturing techniques. That is probably going to be a good real world example of people producing things like AK’s with not much more than blacksmith level equipment.
Of course it’s going to be pretty far from a production line output level and the ammunition is still an issue plus of course the whole quality issue of the available steel.
In the late 18th century, in addition to standard-size blocks, Bentham had the dockyard make the yards on bigger ships be interchangeable not only with ships of the same size but with smaller, where they’d be the masts, and so on down.
Not incorrect, but “caliber” can refer to measures in fractions of inches or millimeter, but usually, a “X caliber round” is in inches. So 7.62x39mm is a .30 caliber round.
But if the requirement is that this rifle be almost identical to current AKs, then the round could be a limiting factor. Wouldn’t we need to discover smokeless powder and casing technologies? As well as automatic fire, or at lease semi-auto. If there was a copy for Confederate scientists to look at, I don’t know, but the ammo would still probably be difficult.
Assembly lines aren’t necessary. The Kyber Pass makes handmade firearms. Quality control and “no blowing up in your hand” control would be an issue.
Learn something every day!
I mean, I know 7.62 and 0.3" the same; I was not aware that “caliber” is essentially a synonym for “inch” in (English language?) weapons’ jargon. In Hebrew jargon the same word, or just the word for “diameter”, are used interchangeably and do not imply units.
Yeah, what you said is not technically incorrect at all, but at least in US, it is shorthand for inches. “7.62 mm caliber” would sound odd. And of course, 7.62x51mm is almost* the same thing as .308 caliber, and either term can be used no matter what the box says.
*Interchangeable often but not always, depending on firearm, YMMV, and so on. Same with 5.56x45mm and .223, the former is not recommended in a rifle marked .223, but the opposite is fine.
The first few million AKs had milled receivers, so the only stamping needed would be for magazines, and that shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.
Assuming a modicum of common sense in adapting the design to use appropriate technology e.g.milled/lathed parts rather than stampings, and to tweak the ammunition a bit for ease of production, I reckon you could achieve reasonable production volumes around the late 1880s, which was when the first modern cartridge came in. The gas-operated Hotckiss machine gun went into service in 1897, based on work done in the previous decade or two, so the principle was fairly well understood by then.
Not sure why you would bother with an actual AK though - something simpler like the MAS49 would be a much cheaper option and plenty good enough.
There is a second definition (or connotation?) to the word caliber: it simply refers to the width of the bore of the gun, as a unit. Thus, when discussing a WWII 75mm anti-tank gun, you can say that the barrel length is “46 calibers,” or 46 times the 75mm width of the bore, or 46 x 75mm = 3.45 m.
