Return to Home / Index page

 

What exactly is "handmade"?

 

Please excuse the large photo - you needed to be able to see the detail. This is "Handmade". Look around the photo a bit . . every part was machined, forged, sawn, or filed from raw materials.

One part, one step at a time.

 

If there ever was an "abused" term, the descriptive word - "handmade" - has to be at the top of the list. It's THE term which advertising people know you LOVE to hear. Therefore; they go to any lengths to make their products APPEAR to deserve the title. They try so hard to conjure up the image of skilled craftsmen, patiently plying their trade.

I'm certain you are familiar with advertising which goes on about the accumulated years of experience possessed by their staff. You know, the fifty people who work in the two year old factory, thus; the hundred years of experience they possess? Nonsense.

Often, companies offer a particular series, claimed to be "handmade". Perhaps an actual experienced crew applies extra care to the assembly of production parts into a "custom shop" version. They hone off the rough spots. They might actually tune the surfaces which mate, and there you are - handmade? I don't think so. It produces a product of greater merit but hardly a "handmade" product.

To deserve the title, "Handmade", the component parts need to begin with raw industrial materials. Bars of steel, planks of timber, rolls of spring wire, drawn tubing, that sort of thing. Saw off a length of cold rolled steel shaft. Bore it out and cut in a valve seat on a machine lathe. Polish out the seat with lapping abrasives. Turn the correct diameters, back cuts, o ring seats, and thread the stud ends on the lathe. Drill in the ports and port seats. Cut in the retaining ring grooves. Drill and tap the mounting points. NOW, you have a "handmade" valve body . . . with nothing in it - you have to make all that too - one pc. at a time.

Over the next hundred hours or so of concentrated machine time, you accumulate the parts required to assemble a very simple pcp rifle. Most of mine will take twice that long. Then, you start testing and tuning. This is what a "handmade pcp rifle" is all about. This is why they are unique and, if you own one, you'll never see another exactly like it.

 

These parts began as solid steel shaft - that's "Handmade"

That's what you wait for . . .

 

 Link to related page entitled .... "Please Don't ask..,"