Despite the plethora of different makes and models of AR15 pattern rifles, there are actually very few places where the upper and lower receivers are actually forged. Many manufacturers buy unfinished receives and then fit and finish them for their rifles, throwing whatever logo they desire on that receiver after the fact. One of the things I learned yesterday on my S&W factory tour is that Smith & Wesson actually forges their own AR upper and lower receivers in-house.
While this may have been common knowledge to dedicated AR guys, which I am not, I was actually pretty impressed to find out that with regards to their AR15 pattern rifles, S&W controls the manufacturing process from forging to shipping. One of the other interesting items we discussed on the factory tour were the quality control methods that S&W used on their M&P15 line of rifles to ensure that the best product possible is what ships to the consumer.
While they couldn’t give specifics, S&W forgings are apparently used by “quite a few” other manufacturers of AR15 rifles. In fact, because S&W has a tremendous capacity for pure industrial machining, they also manufacture high quality metal parts for other industries; for example JayG might be surprised to know that his Harley has a little bit of Smith & Wesson inside it, since S&W manufactures a couple of small parts for Harley Davidson. They did actually tell me what parts, but I was too busy taking pictures of forged gun bits to remember.
Taking a factory tour was a very neat experience for me as a shooting enthusiast, much less as a reporter. Seeing the process of how a gun comes into existing from bar-stock to finished product was absolutely fascinating, and how old world machinery is blended with modern computing power was pretty impressive.
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