Billy Mitchell’s Winchester Model 94. (Photo Jaclyn Nash, Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History)

By George E. Kontis, PE

Whenever I go through any collection of firearms, I always feel lucky when I find a gun with someone’s name on it. A scrawled name or message on a gun gives us clues as to who owned it and where it was used. A lot more history dots could be connected if there were just a few more guns with names and other information on them.

Take the example of Billy Mitchell’s Winchester Model 94. It’s easy to identify as his name and date are carved into the stock. The date tells us that his rifle wasn’t too old as it had only been introduced six years earlier. In 1901, Billy wasn’t very old either. At age 22, he was stationed in Alaska, serving in the Army Signal Corps following a tour of duty during the Philippine insurrection. Since the name and date are rather crudely carved, and upside down as well, it’s pretty certain Billy didn’t do this to enhance the appearance of his rifle. There is a far more interesting story.

Anticipating the thrill of a big game hunt, Billy found an Eskimo who agreed to go as his guide. Considering modern communication methods were absent in those years, it was a huge leap of faith to travel far out into the Alaskan wilderness and accept a guide’s famous last words: “You hunt here. Don’t worry; I’ll be back for you later.” But, Billy had faith that the guide would not be too far away, and would return as promised. After a couple of days had passed and the guide did not reappear, Billy began to lose hope. Not only was he sure he would not live to see his friends and family again, he was certain there would be little left of his remains. Then it occurred to him that at least his rifle might survive. If he took action, it might serve as a means to help identify whatever was left of him.

Besides his name and the date, on the opposite side of the stock he carved a picture. It might be a stylized sun, as some curators at the Smithsonian Institute believe. Others, like me, think it’s a picture of the guy that left him there – a wood-carved wanted poster. Fortunately for all of us, the guide did return because Billy Mitchell went on to play an important role in American military aviation, and today is recognized as the father of the United States Air Force. He’s the only person in history to have an American military aircraft with his name on it – the Mitchell B25 bomber.

In the case of Billy Mitchell, the name on the gun was to identify the soldier. During the Civil War, a soldier would sometimes mark his gun so he could tell which gun was his. This was particularly true with Confederate soldiers who often supplied their own firearms. Should you survey any group of Civil War guns, you’ll likely find that more Confederate guns are personalized than Union ones. It’s also probably true that Union soldiers then, as now, had to obey regulations that prohibited defacing U.S. Government property, like their assigned rifle. Firearm collectors and resellers will tell you that unless a person is famous, having a name on a gun decreases its value. If you came across an old .68 caliber muzzle loading rifle with a cut down 18-inch barrel, you may not consider it to have much value, considering it had been extensively customized. But that same rifle, with the name of the Confederate soldier and the unit he served in becomes an item of historical significance, like the Hub Coob rifle that rests today in the Milwaukee Public Museum. There are two other names on the stock that look like they were added at a different time. After the war ended, Union soldiers burned many of the Confederate records so research becomes more difficult but not impossible. At least with the names and date, there is a place to start.

Unfortunately, many of the Confederate firearms with names don’t give the complete name which makes the historical identification challenge difficult. The Milwaukee Public Museum turned up a nice Confederate rifle, a .72 caliber Austrian percussion carbine that was nicely fitted with sling swivels, cavalry bandolier, rod and ring. The stock is incised with an encircled cross and name or initials JEHCB. Literacy wasn’t then what it is today, so the Museum calculates it was his best attempt at JACOB, which was a very common name in those days.

If you’re important enough, somebody just might give you a gun with your name on it, but don’t be surprised if there are strings attached. Henk Visser headed up a Dutch firearms manufacturing firm, NWM, and was always on the lookout for new business opportunities. Henk saw merit in the Stoner 63 machine gun and obtained a license to manufacture it outside the U.S. intending worldwide sales. He was hot on the trail of a $35 million dollar contract with the Army of the Philippines, and as a marketing ploy, decided to present one to the Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos. Henk’s personal touch was to have it nicely engraved with
Marcos’ name.

Henk almost had it right. President Marcos did have a particular affinity for collecting serialized things with famous people’s names on them. The names he preferred were names like Lincoln, Jefferson, Grant, and Franklin, and those he liked unmarked and preferably in small denominations. Honest and honorable, Henk was only prepared to go as far as the engraved machine gun so he lost the business. The gun never did get to Marcos and the specially marked Stoner 63 has become part of the collection at the Institute of Military Technology in Titusville, FL.

Today there are a lot of good reasons why someone might want their name on a firearm. It might be to memorialize service with a military or law enforcement unit, or possibly to commemorate an award or other recognition. There are plenty of places where you can get the metal on your firearm professionally engraved and there are new laser engraving machines that do the job at a reasonable cost. For the AR series, I personally like the option of having an engraved ejection port cover. These fit on any AR rifle and can be easily removed if the rifle is sold or if the owner prefers it on a different firearm.

My engraved ejection port cover was purchased from Leo Armory where I was able to communicate my design and pay for it through Leo’s easy-to-use web site. Within a day I received a proof back that offered a couple of options for lettering fonts and proposed layouts. I made one design change that added a day and one more proof to approve, but the following day I was notified by email that my custom ejection port cover was on its way to me.

Whether used or owned by famous people, ordinary folk, or real knuckleheads, I like to see guns with names on them. While any kind of message can be engraved, historians like me would appreciate your name, spelled correctly, if you don’t mind.

GE upper management was well aware of the development problems with the gun and between them were now calling the Army-funded gun “Minigun A.” The development of Minigun A was not going well and management recognized the importance of this Army contract. The decision was made to spend Company money on a back-up plan. They selected one of the company’s most talented engineers, Robert (Bob) Chiabrandy (pronounced Sha-Brandy) to complete an alternate 7.62 Gatling that would come to be known as, Minigun B. This would mark the second time Bob was asked to design this gun.

In the early 1960s, the General Electric Armament Systems Department in Burlington, Vermont was actively engaged in the production of 20mm cannons for gun pods and internal applications for fighter jets like the F104 and F105. Insurgency actions in Vietnam, including the movement of weapons by personnel along the Ho Chi Minh trail, suggested a fast-firing small caliber Gatling might be an effective anti-personnel weapon when fired from fixed wing aircraft or helicopter. Glimmers of interest from both the Air Force and the Army got GE’s marketing department excited about the prospects of such a gun. When Advance Design Engineer, Bob Chiabrandy went to his boss with the idea to design one, there was plenty of companywide support. Chiabrandy offered them a deal that was hard to pass up. Give him a designer to help him work out his concepts on a drafting board and he would perform the engineering analysis. In three months he promised a complete design.

Before the design began, Chiabrandy set the design goals. The most important one was that all barrels would be clear of live rounds at the end of every burst. Safety was key. There would be a safe way to arm the gun and a safe way to disarm it as well. There would be as few moving parts as possible, particularly in the gun bolt. Springs were allowed, but only when there were no other reasonable options available. When used, pins and other fasteners were trapped or otherwise secured so there was no chance they would loosen during the tremendous vibration expected during firing. All load-bearing components would receive a thorough stress analysis to assure long life and all rounds and cases would be under complete control throughout the cycle.

Talented designer, Dick Eaker, was assigned to work under Chiabrandy’s direction on the program. While Dick began laying out the design on the drawing board, Chiabrandy conducted complex dynamic and stress analyses using a slide rule and design charts. Stresses in the gun bolts were analyzed to assure a sufficient margin of safety. Other hardworking components were analyzed for strength, fatigue, and wear. There was no guesswork and no cut and try. If there wasn’t a way to find the forces and other data needed to conduct a proper analysis, Bob would base his calculations on sound predictions or tests he designed and conducted. Nothing was left to chance because that was the way Chiabrandy worked. He was highly regarded in the company, particularly by his colleagues in the Advance Engineering Department.

The starting point in the design of any Gatling is the elliptical cam in the main housing. Depending on the length of the round, the number of barrels, and the desired firing rate, this cam determines the diameter of the gun. The elliptical cam Chiabrandy developed was no ordinary textbook design. He custom tailored the cam corners to give smooth acceleration and deceleration of the bolts to assure smooth operation and long life. The stroke of the cam was ideal for the 7.62mm round.

A six-barreled Gatling gun is made up of six individual gun mechanisms secured to a common rotor. A bolt for each gun completes a stroke feeding rounds in and fired cases out while pausing at the front and rear only long enough to fire at the front and extract at the rear. Since the rotor is rotating at all times, the length of the forward dwell is of utmost importance. It must be long enough to allow for complete chambering and locking and of sufficient length to allow the firing pin time to fall. After primer ignition, even more dwell time is needed for pressure in the chamber to rise and then fall to a level that is low enough for extraction. After that, even more time is needed to unlock the bolt before the elliptical cam engages the bolt roller to bring it to the rear. If the forward dwell is made too short, the gun unlocks under pressure from the round, working the extractor hard and possibly even creating a case separation or other unsafe condition. If the dwell is too long, the diameter of the cam is unnecessarily increased and the all-important gun weight increases rapidly. For a six-barrel Gatling, the forward dwell was sized to reach 6,400 shots per minute (spm) at start up in order to average 6,000 spm at steady state.

After three months the design was complete. Unlike the multi-piece bolt of the 20mm M61 cannon with its tilting lock block, Bob’s bolt was easily machined from a single block of steel. From the top it looked like an arrowhead with a fixed extractor at the point. After chambering a live round, a fixed cam on the gun housing forced the front of the bolt down into a pocket in the rotor where it remained locked as the round fired. When the chamber pressure was low enough, another cam on the housing engaged a hook on the front of the bolt and lifted it out of the locked position. There were no moving parts, no wing locks or bolt rotation. The bolt body was a single block of hardened steel. The bolt design included a unique safety feature that had never been tried on Gatling guns and might have even been unique to firearm design. The firing pin and the primer were not in line with each other at any point in the cycle except for that one time when the bolt was fully locked. There was no chance that a round might fire inadvertently from a broken firing pin or a sudden stop in the gun rotation. It was genius.

During the design review mandated by GE company policy, the manufacturing team reviewed the design package and pronounced this gun would be inexpensive to machine and easy to produce. The Manufacturing department had often struggled with building complex design shapes, being limited to some extent by their conventional lathes and mills. They welcomed this new design because every one of Bob’s parts was easy to produce. What many of them didn’t know about Bob was that he was also a talented machinist. Before he would affix his signature to the drawing title block, he would review the placement and tolerance of every dimension. He imagined how he would set it up to machine it and had his draftsmen dimension the part accordingly.

As Chiabrandy took the gun through the early development stages he was fully on board with its eventual transfer to Product Engineering. GE split its developmental engineering into two parts. The Advance Engineering Department dedicated most of their time to Research and Development projects, while the rival Product Engineering Department followed production and developed new systems primarily by modifying or scaling existing designs. There was plenty of bickering between departments, and not all of it good natured. Advance Engineering was viewed as a bunch of overpaid eggheads who rarely came up with a saleable idea. Product Engineers were accused of performing little to no technical analysis, designing “by eye,” or “trial and mistake” as they jokingly called it. In truth, there were huge talents in both departments and a lion’s share of the world’s most innovative and reliable gun and ammunition handling systems developed in the last century came from one or another of these two departments.

Soon after the design was complete, Bob’s big opportunity came when he was invited to present his design to the engineers at Springfield Arsenal. Traveling with Bob were the marketing representative, Dick Burke and Ray Patenaude, a hard-charging engineer from the Production Engineering Department who was poised to take over after the gun was released for production. When it came to engineering, Bob and Ray were complete opposites, and as far as company politics went, the mild-mannered Bob, was no match for the intimidating Ray. Their briefing would be to none other than Otto Von Lossnitzer who headed R&D at Springfield.

Bob explained all of the proposed weapon functions that included a de-linking feeder, safing and arming means, and a method of clearing to assure there was no round left in the chamber lest it would cook-off at the end of a burst. Von Lossnitzer and his team listened attentively as Bob did most of the talking. Suddenly Otto blurted out: “Now I understand,” he said, looking directly at Bob. “You represent the technical approach.” Glancing at Ray he said “…and you are a politician.” Then turning to the salesman who had contributed little to the discussion he said: “What is it that you do?”

After the paper design was complete, GE sent the final report to Springfield who responded three months later. It seems Otto was not too complimentary on the design. He felt there were unnecessarily complicated functions, like the end stripping feeder, and the clearing action that diverted 6 to 8 live rounds out of the gun after each burst. Bringing live ammunition into the battlefield and dumping some of it overboard after every burst? This had to have affected his German sensibility. Considering his former experience with revolver cannons, Otto was not a big fan of the Gatling. Bob was devastated by the negative report. Jack Harding, manager of the Product Engineering Department wrote a strong rebuttal. As politely as he could, Jack pointed out to Otto that all the design features he was shown had been thoroughly worked out and were essential to the design. In spite of that, Springfield’s interest waned. At that point in time, nobody in the Army wanted to fund a 7.62 Gatling gun development.

It must be noted that in those years, all of the services, were supporting the development of various gun designs that included caseless ammunition, case telescoped ammunition, and liquid propellant guns. Each service wanted industry to investigate new gun and ammunition concepts and often provided funding, but their interests were never in sync. To a developer and producer like GE, it meant that if they had a design that one service no longer wanted, interest from another would not involve a long wait. True to form, it wasn’t long before Eglin Air Force Base, led by Dale Davis, said they wanted a 5.56 Gatling gun pod. Since Bob Chiabrandy was working on an important project at the time, and because so much development work had already been done, a scale down to the 5.56 Gatling design was given over directly to Ray Patenaude. To assure continuity in Bob’s absence, the hapless Dick Eaker was made part of their team. While the design was in process, Eglin’s interest faded and suddenly Springfield responded with renewed interest, reiterating their requirement for a 7.62mm gun, not the 5.56mm. Due to an embarrassing, but what now may be recognized as a fortuitous engineering error, Product Engineering had made the length of the elliptical cam on the 5.56mm Gatling far too long. It was so long that it could accommodate the larger 7.62mm round. Patenaude, his engineers, designers and draftsmen were able to make adjustments for the larger cartridge.

Chiabrandy quietly monitored the progress of Patenaude’s design. Chiabrandy, who would drop by Dick Eaker’s drafting board from time to time, was surprised to see a huge departure from their original concept. “That doesn’t’ look anything like our design.” Sizing up the design features, Chiabrandy could tell these new innovations were not going to work. Dick responded that he was only doing what he was told by the guy in charge of the project. Chiabrandy was worried, not only for the Company, but for his reputation as well. He knew it wasn’t his business to interfere, but he was the one who pitched the initial design to Springfield and he was concerned that the Army would associate his name with the final result.

Sure enough, as soon as the new gun was put into test there were major problems. Chiabrandy had predicted that the breech would fail and it did. It required a major redesign. There were no provisions for safing the gun, none for clearing the chambers at the end of a burst and there were other essential features missing as well. Problems with the new design reverberated through the company. The heads of Product and Advanced Engineering met with their boss and the decision was made that this project was too important to fail. GE’s upper management decided to let Chiabrandy build Minigun B as a back-up to Patenaude’s Minigun A.

Chiabrandy’s gun required certain long-lead items, so he went ahead and ordered them. Castings for the feeder and the main gun housing were ordered, as were the drive motors. He had been allocated a budget with sufficient funding to build three sets of everything. Oddly, no barrels were ordered, ostensibly because he could use the ones from Minigun A – if Patenaude would allow it. He did not. That didn’t bother Bob in the least. Even without barrels he could prove out a lot of the design by cycling dummy rounds through the system. He would check for round control and any signs of excessive wear while putting the gun through all of the design cycles and carefully working up to full cyclic rate.

In early March, Minigun A gun was experiencing problems. Top management decided to give Bob money for barrels in order to get his design turned back on. However, they decided to keep the existence of Minigun B from the customer. By the summer of 1961 Minigun B, had fired 20,000 rounds. Weekly meetings were held between the heads of Advance and Product Engineering along with Chiabrandy and Patenaude.

Much of the source of the problem with Minigun A was its complex two-piece bolt. The back half of the bolt was a casting where the main roller was mounted. A cam slot in the aft bolt portion accepted a finger from the front bolt portion. After a round was chambered, the front part of the bolt would stop forward motion while the aft portion continued to be driven forward by the roller engaging the elliptical cam. Forward motion of the aft bolt caused a rotation of the front part in order for its locking lugs to be rotated to an engagement point for locking into the rotor. In order to accommodate the extra forward motion required for locking, the elliptical drive cam in Minigun A had to be made extra-long. Many questioned the wisdom in selecting this bolt design. Not only was it complex, it was extremely difficult to machine. The finger extending from the front bolt was long and flexible – difficult to hold steady to allow proper machining. The Production Department was quick to dub it “the fickle finger.” Many in the Company asked why he’d made it so complicated. Patenaude would explain that it needed to be difficult to manufacture, otherwise even the most unsophisticated of our enemies would be stealing the design and shooting guns like these back at us. Surprisingly, some management warmed to this idea.

In time, Patenaude and his engineers fixed their problems and Minigun A was running well. The decision of which gun to continue with was left up to Patenaude’s boss, Jack Harding. Jack announced that he’d decided to go into production with Minigun A. Patenaude had won. Chiabrandy made it known how displeased he was with the decision. It was more than just sour grapes. Chiabrandy had started the project and interfaced with the customer. Now he no longer wanted to be associated in any way with Patenaude’s Minigun A.

Jack Harding’s decision was not well received by the Manufacturing Department. They had already expressed displeasure when charged with building the Minigun A prototype parts. Many of its complex parts were seen as a production nightmare. When production did start, Manufacturing found that the dimensions on the drawings did not necessarily make acceptable parts. They were forced to set up dedicated machines that would make bolt parts to a point where they could be tested. If they passed, the manufacturing would continue. It wasn’t just the bolt that was complex. One of the secrets in getting the main gun housing through production was the deburring operation on the elliptical main cam. Deburring is normally a point in the production cycle to remove sharp edges and eliminate cut hazards. The elliptical cam of Minigun A was “deburred” until a bolt could be smoothly cycled through, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

In spite of the difficulties experienced in building the components of Minigun A, when the gun was sent to the field, it worked great. Minigun A was an enormous success on the battlefields of Vietnam, making the ever increasing heap of scrap bolts and other parts worth the effort. Years later, when Production Engineering head, Jack Harding, left GE for another company, he confided to upper management that if he’d had it to do over again, he would have selected Minigun B.

Bob was very concerned about the morale of the dedicated Minigun B team. He consoled them by reminding them that at the end of the day they could at least say they’d had a lot of fun. Probably unbeknownst to Bob, the team had few regrets. They had gotten to work with one of the best mentors in the business, Bob Chiabrandy. Everyone who ever worked with him recognized how much better they were at their job afterwards. Each member of his team had acquired a new appreciation for the importance of dynamic and stress analysis, the need to think about how a part will be made before describing it on a drawing, and best engineering practice. Not long after the Minigun A and B saga ended, I joined GE and had the opportunity to work under Bob’s direction.

As one might have predicted, the Air Force revisited their interest in a small caliber Gatling. It was a pintle version of the 5.56mm Minigun they sought. This time there was no question in the minds of top management that design responsibility would remain in the hands of Bob Chiabrandy as long as possible. Only after the design review and successful testing would the newly designated “Minigun C” be turned over to Production Engineering.

Minigun C did look slightly different than big brother B, but the bolt design remained the same. Considering a potential aircraft application where short time on target necessitated a high firing rate, Bob designed the forward dwell to reach 11,400 spm for a steady state firing rate of 11,000 spm. When the gun worked flawlessly, it was passed over to Product Engineering, again under the direction of Ray Patenaude. One of Patenaude’s technicians, Dave Hathaway, was a huge fan of the design, believing that Minigun C gun could exceed its design rate, possibly even reaching 12,000 spm. One day during development testing, under no authority but his own, Hathaway charged up the 24 volt batteries to their peak and added an extra one for good measure. Minigun C fired several bursts at 12,000 spm. Bob Chiabrandy had designed the fastest firing gun in the world.

The Air Force ordered a small quantity of these that were delivered and deployed in an undisclosed application. The Company named the 6,000 spm pintle system the “Six-Pack.” No one can be found that knows exactly where they went and what they were used for, only that they were deployed somewhere on a classified project.

27 June 2009, Titusville, Florida at Knight’s Armament Company

George E .Kontis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1945….

Kontis: (Interrupting) Wait a minute, Dan, we can’t start The Interview like this. I was indeed born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but that’s a little misleading. I was conceived in North Florida, in a tiny town called Carrabelle, my father was in the service there. He was a lieutenant in the Army. My mother had come down to stay with him in Carrabelle, and my mother got pregnant while she was in Carrabelle. Just before I was born she got on a train, went to Pittsburgh, and I was born in Pittsburgh. She then turned around and came right back down and raised me in North Florida where I was immediately labeled as a Damn Yankee. And all these years it’s been tough being a non- native born, native Floridian…

OK, now that the record is straight… George Kontis was born in 1945 to a family that started in the Greek community in Smyrna, Turkey, and left for Athens during the 1922 genocide. He’s been married to his wife Marcy for 38 years and has four children, Cherie and West, Alethea, and Soteria. George has been involved in the small arms business for all of his adult life. His designs include GPU-5A 30mm Gun Pod, numerous single barrel machine guns including the GE150, liquid propellant weapons, and improvements to ammunition handling systems.

He worked variously with Colonel George M. Chinn (who thought so highly of George that he included him on the inside cover of The Machine Gun Volume Five as one of the most promising small arms designers of modern times. George worked at General Electric’s Armament Systems Department, At FN Manufacturing, Inc. in charge of engineering for the M240, M249, and M16A4, was operations manager at HK-USA, and is currently Vice President of Business Development at Knight’s Armament Company in Titusville, Florida. George is a mentor to many of the young engineers in our community, and was the 1998 recipient of NDIA’s Col. George M. Chinn Award.

SAR: George, was there a firearms influence in your life when you were very young?

Kontis: My father was quite interested in firearms, even though he was an immigrant. Actually, he was an “illegal.” He didn’t have a country anymore; the Germans had occupied Greece, so he jumped ship in New York. He worked on a barge line for a number of months as a chief engineer even though he couldn’t speak English.

In those years, illegal or not, everyone had to sign up for the draft – those were the rules. When he passed his physical, they immediately snagged him into the Army. Why the Army and not the Navy? Well, because he didn’t understand the directions that they gave him, in English, for where to sign up for the Navy so he ended up in the Army. As a private he learned English, shortened his name from Kontaridis to Kontis, and he got his citizenship. He was not a shooter in Greece, but when he came to the U.S. and joined the Army, he loved to shoot, and he served in the Philippines. He was very proud of his military service and always liked shooting and above all, taught me safe gun handling.

SAR: What was the first gun you fired?

Kontis: I was five years old and it was a .22 rifle that was given to my dad to give to me by one of the barge line captains. Even at age five my dad used to take me out to shoot rats at the dump near the Ohio Valley General Hospital in Pittsburgh. We also went “plinking” there in the daytime. My .22 rifle was made in Chicopee Falls, I think it was like a Stevens, I can’t remember the exact name, but it was a dropping block .22. It was a great little rifle.

My uncles all went shooting and often went with us. One day at the dump, one uncle shot himself in the foot, and that taught me a very important safety lesson about shooting. He put a very clean hole right through his foot. Luckily, he missed all the bones. I learned to be extra careful after that. When I was in the third grade we moved to Tallahassee, and shooting is what I did almost every day. I didn’t go to soccer camps or any of that stuff. The money my parents spent on me was for ammo. My friends and I were in the woods all the time shooting, hunting, bringing home rabbits, birds, whatever. There was a lot of game there. I finally got a shotgun, and started buying up guns, even at an early age.

I also received an M1 Carbine as a hand-me-down from my Dad. It was “service” gun; he had the bring-back paperwork for it. It had a carving of a dog on the stock, done by a GI, quite a nice carving, and some hand-done checkering. I still have it. I restocked it because I wasn’t crazy about that dog being on my hunting rifle. One day I ran into Pete Kokalis, and he was telling me about trench art and explaining how valuable it was. I said, “You mean like if you had this rifle and there was a dog carved on the stock and some really nice checkering?” Kokalis’ eyes got really big so I knew this was something special, and I went home and threw that other stock away and put my original stock back on.

SAR: When was the first time you were around a machine gun or a silencer or anything unusual?

Kontis: Well, that didn’t come until I finished college at Georgia Tech. I went there to study Mechanical Engineering. My father was a marine engineer; it sort of was in the blood. As I kid, I always played around with a lot of mechanical things. My favorite TV show was called The Big Picture. Probably nobody remembers it, but it was put on by the government. They would go from one factory to the next and they would show how a helmet is made, they’d show how a rifle is made, show how ammunition is made. I was just fascinated by that. I liked to fix things, take things apart and fix them and play with them. I got Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. I was a big reader there and spent a lot of time in the library. I used to read books on how to make things yourself. I was particularly fascinated by Henley’s Twentieth Century Book of Formulas, Processes and Trade Secrets; it was a book that taught to make various compounds with different formulas. There are about 20 types of gunpowder formulas in there.

My friends and I did a lot of experimentation, too. We made some gunpowder and other things: bicycle spoke guns, firecracker guns, you name it, we did them all. We were pretty safety conscious for a number of reasons. One of the kids I knew had made a bomb and blew off most of his right hand. None of the girls would hold hands with him at the skating rink, so I decided girls were more important than bombs. And then of course, there was always the lingering memory of my uncle, screaming and hopping around the dump on one foot, with blood everywhere. Guns and shooting were my primary hobbies. I spent all of my spare time with them.

SAR: When was the first time you ran into a machine gun?

Kontis: That would’ve been my first day of work, my first day at a real job. It was as a design engineer at the General Electric Company in Burlington, Vermont, 1967. My first machine gun was a 20mm Vulcan cannon. We were the engineers in charge of testing, but not allowed to push the “fire” button. There was always this nagging thing that you really wanted to shoot that gun, but you weren’t allowed to. Finally, after a few years, I got an opportunity to go to an NDIA function, which at that time it was called the ADPA (American Defense Preparedness Association). There were some machine guns available and I got to shoot an M3 Grease Gun. I was impressed by the simplicity. It was such a clever design, but I was also amazed by how uncontrollable it was – for me anyway.

Georgia Tech had been an amazing experience. It was a very, very tough engineering school. I never worked so hard at anything in my life, and it taught me hard work, perseverance, how to take a problem and look at all the aspects and filter down what’s really important. They taught us how to identify the problem, focus on that alone, and then use the laws of physics and engineering to solve the problem.

I was at GE for 15 years. When I started, it was in the middle of the Vietnam War era, so they were making M134 Miniguns and M61 20mm cannons for all of the fixed wing aircraft, some helicopters, and gunships. The M61 started its life on fixed-wing aircraft. While I was there, they removed three of the barrels and developed the three-barrel M197 to arm helicopters.

I spent a lot of my time in R&D. We had developed the 25mm caseless program. That was going to be an aircraft cannon. We worked on case-telescoped ammunition, and I worked for about a year on liquid propellant guns. I spent about another year working on gun barrel improvements, trying to figure out why gun barrels fail and what we could do to extend the life. A very, very difficult problem, not well understood even today.

SAR: Did you work on the 5.56x45mm Miniguns, the Six Pack?

Kontis: No. That gun was invented by my boss, Bob Chiabrandy. He was probably the most brilliant engineer and designer I’ve ever worked with. That project started just before I got there, in the early 1960s: Bob had developed that weapon, a very, very clever design. There were no moving parts in the bolt, other than the firing pin. Although it was designed to fire at 6,000 shots per minute, they accidentally increased the power causing it to fire at 12,000 rounds a minute. This set the world record for the highest rate of fire of any machine gun. It fired linked ammunition, which was always a problem. Those links weren’t designed for side stripping, which would have been more ideal.

Preceding the 5.56 Minigun, there were two 7.62mm Miniguns that were being developed, A and B. The A gun was designed by Ray Patenaude – it’s the gun we know today with a two-piece bolt. There was a B-model Minigun designed by Chiabrandy with a one-piece bolt with dropping-block action same as his 5.56mm Minigun. That gun fired great – it was fantastic. The Army would come to review progress on the A model, which wasn’t firing, and they’d hear the B model firing. “What was that?” they’d ask. “Oh, that’s another project down at the other bay. We’re not allowed to talk about that one.” That was the B model. The A gun was continually failing, one problem after another, which they finally straightened out, of course.

SAR: What kind of problems did you see?

Kontis: The Minigun bolt from the A model that the military adopted, was difficult to make. As the two-piece bolt compressed to lock, there was this little finger that stuck out from the bolt head that followed a cam path in the rear portion. We used to call that thing the “fickle finger.” Because it was a casting, it was hard to maintain the dimensions, and it was a nightmare to machine. That was part of the problem. The rest of it was mostly in feeding, because to feed the round required something that looked like a gun with the sole job to delink the round: it was a tricky design.

SAR: It was always interesting to me that the geometry worked out where you had to have seven pushrods in there to coordinate against the six barrels. Did you ever get any feedback from the field?

Kontis: That was the beautiful thing in those years, and the thing that we’ve complained about just in recent times. GE used to get daily reports from Vietnam and even non combat areas, on what worked and what didn’t. It was fantastic feedback from the end users. They were reports, similar to faxes, providing important information that gave us a head start on finding solutions.

SAR: Did you ever go out on a military site, looking at the weapons?

Kontis: Yes, but remember, I worked mostly in R&D, so most of my time was spent on the research side of things. GE had a very big single-barrel cannon program. I worked on these for a number of years. The first one was the GE-120, 20mm, dual-feed cannon. The basic design was an inspiration of Dick Colby – he’s famous from the SPIW program. Then we went to the Hispano-Suiza 20mm. I was a project engineer on a 7.62x51mm version, the Armor Machine Gun (AMG.) That was on its way to becoming a successful program. We thought we were going replace the M73/M219 machine gun.

SAR: Good idea.

Kontis: Fantastic idea. That was overtaken by events because of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. They canceled all of the development programs and selected the MAG58. Those single barrel programs were fun, and I learned a lot about taking a weapon from inception, right through prototype design, to pre-production. On the AMG program my technicians and I developed a new instrumentation technique. We found it very useful and we had never seen it done before. Usually in firearm development you instrument the bolt to develop a time versus displacement curve. This lets you “see” how the bolt is moving through the cycle, and you measure its performance against time. We placed two transducers on the bolt: one to measure time and the other for velocity. In the end we developed a velocity versus displacement curve, getting rid of time altogether. This “VD” plot tells the engineer the velocity of the bolt throughout the cycle. Since velocity is related to energy, a sudden dip in the curve and you know you’ve lost energy. Using the VD information, you can find the exact spot where energy is lost and identify cycle problems easily.

SAR: What was the inspiration for doing the Armor Machine Gun; was that trying to shorten up the receiver?

Kontis: Yes, it was to replace the M73. Everybody, including the Army, knew the M73 was a dog and had no future. The M1 tank was coming along, so we needed a gun with a short receiver. In 1968, Springfield Armory closed and during the first part of 1969, GE took over the Springfield operation that included production of the M73 and M85 machine guns.

Bob Chiabrandy was named as engineering manager and I was one of the guys working with him. Bob and I spent all week down at Springfield operations working production problems.

The Armor Machine Gun appeared to have a promising future. It was recoil operated using the Browning short-recoil cycle. It had a very interesting triangular accelerator that worked in a cam on the receiver. The accelerator pivoted in the barrel extension and kicked the bolt to the rear during recoil. It could feed from the right or the left and the feed components were right there in the weapon. It had a neat little built-in solenoid, and it could fire using a solenoid or manually with a little palm trigger. The gun worked really quite well.

It was able to fire the two ammunition types including A127 that the M73could not fire. The case of the A127 was very soft and had a high incidence of ruptured cartridges, but only in the M73. The Army had to come up with special hardened case ammo for the M73. Like the M60 machine gun, the AMG could fire either ammo.

GE had a great prototype shop. When you completed a design, it was reviewed by manufacturing engineers, production engineers; it was textbook John Pederson. Tolerances were studied, the manufacturability was studied, and the drawing was not released until a manufacturing engineer, the big guru, Charlie Tudhope, signed off on it. Only then was it released, even if only a few units were to be made.

The engineer was responsible for designating what the significant characteristics were. Those were the dimensions that were inspected by Quality Assurance. If you had 10 dimensions specified as significant, you could be assured that those 10 dimensions were inspected 100% on every one of those parts.

The Burlington GE plant was formerly a Bendix operation that made turrets during World War II. GE went up there to build the Mark 12 reentry vehicle – a nose cone for a missile. At the same time, GE Schenectady was working on an Army project for Gatling guns and the project was moved up to Burlington. That’s when it all started. Vietnam hit, and it was just, “Katy, bar the door.” We went all out on designs. GE developed the linkless feed system from a design that was conceived by the Roy Sanford Company, in Connecticut. GE took the concept, solved all the problems and made it work in production. Those 20mm linkless feeds were used on all of the major aircraft, starting on the F-105. They were in the F-4, the A-7 and the F-111. They had refined the linkless feed systems to be scalable – even the 30mm GAU-8 round for the A-10 aircraft. That was one beautiful design from start to finish.

SAR: You worked on caseless ammunition there?

Kontis: 25mm caseless. The weapons system was for aircraft and the idea was to go to 25mm. They figured 20mm was going to be limited down the road, so they wanted to go to 25, and they developed a 25mm caseless round. It was a coffee-mill gun, much like a Gatling gun, but had ten chambers for six barrels. Rounds were fed into empty chambers under the gun, which were moved to line up with barrels and fired. The empty chambers rotated out of the gun so more rounds could be fed.

The round used compressed propellant and a percussion primer. The case telescoped 25mm was the same idea, when caseless didn’t work, case telescoped was tried next. Case telescoped is basically taking what you normally think of as a cartridge and replacing that with a cylinder. Everything is packaged into the cylinder, including powder, primer, and projectile. The difference is that the projectile is not seated right there at the origin of rifling. The projectile is back inside the cartridge case, so when the projectile gets launched, it flies out and then contacts the origin of rifling and then begins to spin up.

SAR: So it has to transition from its own case into the rifling? Did you use progressive rifling on that?

Kontis: Yes. In order to get the projectile started up so it didn’t jump right into the full rifling. That wasn’t the design challenge, though. The big issue with these weapons is sealing the high chamber pressure.

SAR: You were there 15 years. Any other projects you worked on at GE?

Kontis: I designed the GE-150, an externally powered .50 caliber machine gun. We were going to replace the M2HB and the M85 with a .50 caliber externally powered gun. This gun would use a two-rotation cam, unlike a Gatling gun that moves a bolt back and forth in one rotation. The GE-150 cam turned two times and translated the bolt all the way to the rear, and all the way into battery with a firing dwell at the front end and a feed dwell at the rear. We made the feeder in such a way that it would handle either link; the rearward end stripping M9 for the Browning style, and the forward end stripping M15A2 for the M85. Ammunition linked either way could be fired using the same feeder: no changes, no adjustments, just load in the rounds and shoot.

We actually built that and tested it at full rate and it worked great, so we were pretty excited about it. There were two drawbacks to this design. One was that the heat from the barrel would head right into the drive cam and that could lead to problems. The other drawback was the fact that the M9 link is a pull-to-the-rear link. There is no other way to get the round out of the link. Pulling the round to the rear, feeding it into the bolt, then chambering all takes time. The time to fire the first round fired was lengthy, all due to the link, and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

For sure, the most exciting job and the most fun I had the design of the GPU-5/A 30mm gun pod. The success of the 30mm in the GAU-8 type round in the A-10 was something that we thought would be good for every one of the aircraft to have, so we made a pod that all the fighter jets could carry.

Lew Wetzel and I worked on that design together. He was the project lead – it’s surprising when you look at the GE Gatling designs and realize how many of them he designed. One of the things I learned from Wetzel was the way you to make a new design successful. The trick is to prove out the high risk areas first by building prototypes and testing them. For complex designs, we’d start with simple prototypes then continued to refine them until finally all of the high risk design issues were proven out. By the time you go into the first full prototype you’ve only got the small problems to clear up.

The GPU-5A was a very unique design. GE never had anything quite like it. Wetzel came up with the ammunition handling system concept. All the rounds were stored and transported in little conveyor buckets. Wetzel and I spent a lot of hours trying to figure out how to make the thing work.

What we did was to spiral the ammunition around the full length of the pod. There were two layers of conveyor buckets that moved up and down the pod taking a helical path. The inner layer went toward the gun feeder and outer layer of conveyor buckets moved in the direction of the muzzle – turning around at the end and becoming inner conveyor buckets.

In the center of the pod was a four-barrel GAU-13/A not the seven-barrel GAU-8. (The five-barrel is in 25mm.) My part of the design was the feeder, the recoil mitigation system and some of the feed storage system components. Since it was a gun pod, everything had to be as small as possible, yet be rugged enough to handle those huge 30mm rounds.

The tricky part of the gun feeder was that the four-barrel gun needed the ammunition to be spaced apart somewhere on the order of five inches. In the conveyor system the rounds were spaced with a “pitch” of about two inches apart. This level of acceleration of the ammunition was needed to match the speed of the bolt, and conversely to decelerate fired cases from the gun in order to place them into empty conveyor buckets. This was common practice in aircraft weapon systems. Round acceleration was always done the same way – with a sprocket. The sprocket would pick up a round at a slow speed and while rotating it would accelerate the round from the root of the sprocket out to the tip of the sprocket to gain speed. If I had used this conventional acceleration technique, I would have had to use about nine sprockets passes to get the rounds properly accelerated. There just wasn’t room in the gun pod.

That’s when I thought about using elliptical gears. I went through the equations for the elliptical gear calculations and theoretically it appeared everything would work perfectly. All I needed was a four-lobed elliptical gear pair, and by God, the round would be accelerated up to speed to match the speed of the rotating bolt, and using only one sprocket, not nine.

My next step was to figure out how to construct the gear and it was then I realized something was bad wrong. I found out the gear couldn’t be cut with a standard gear cutter. Now I was stuck so I decided to contact the guy who developed the elliptical gear equations I was using and ask him, “Hey, what’s with your equations. They don’t work for my application?” I found his number and called him. His name was Fred Cunningham; the guru who wrote all the equations and lots of articles about elliptical gearing. Cunningham told me, “What you’re trying to do won’t work because gear teeth have to be symmetric and in your design, the gear teeth will be asymmetric.” He made a suggested design change but it would require a lot more gears and sprockets and there probably wasn’t room for them.

It was no cause for worry; I knew just what to do. Whenever I was faced with this level of problem, I did have one more option. Go see Bob Chiabrandy – which I did. Bob listened attentively to my problem, looked at my equations, and seemed rather amused that I had actually called Cunningham and challenged his design methods. A couple hours later Bob hands me a table of numbers and says, “Here are the x & y coordinates of your gears.” “You need to figure out how to make them, but I think these will work.” We cut the first ones out of a piece of sheet aluminum, filing them here and there. The technicians mounted them on a nice board with a hand crank and they ran together perfectly. In the pod they picked up the rounds at the 2 inch pitch and fed them right to the bolt….

SAR: …Making a proper presentation….

Kontis: … matching the bolt velocity perfectly for a smooth transition. That was just one of the gear pairs! The second pair picked up the fired case from the bolt and decelerated it, dropping it back into the conveyor bucket so no fired cases were ejected overboard. The conveyor bucket held live rounds and fired cases. When the pod fired the ammo handling system, and it went from totally full of live rounds to totally full of empty cases after it fired out. Nothing was ejected overboard.

SAR: That’s a thing of beauty.

Kontis: It was a fun design project that worked really well. It was used in Desert Storm. The other part that I designed was the recoil system for it. When you’re designing a gun pod, you’re trying to make everything as absolutely small as you can. This big cigar was going to be far too fat unless Wetzel and I figured out how to compact everything. That’s why we put the gun inside, wrapped the ammunition around it, and then put the skin around that. It’s also why the elliptical gears had to be made to work.

There is a tremendous amount of recoil from the 30mm cannon firing in an aircraft. We designed what we called a strong-back; it was like a skeleton to take the loads. Much of the recoil energy from the gun was converted to friction using two recoil adapters and this reaction was taken from the strong back and into the aircraft mounting hooks. Recoil adapters for a system that big use ring springs: concentric rings have high energy-absorbing friction when compressed. To that point, all ring springs used on Gatling guns operated inside a tubular housing. We had no room for a tube, so I figured out how to put a “housing,” if you will, inside the rings.

The spring pack was double acting, so that when it was pulled apart the stack of ring springs was compressed and when the ends were pushed together, the ring stack was again compressed. This was kind of a wild idea I had. We made some prototypes and we played with them with some coil springs, and by golly it really did work. I refined the design from prototype stages, and ended up getting a patent on the design, and they still use this particular design today. It was quite successful.

SAR: Did you have any problem with GE when you got patents? They didn’t claim your work?

Kontis: Oh, they did claim them. When you work for a company, generally your patents are assigned over to the company. Now, I must say GE was very good about giving you an honorarium for your patent that involved a nice gift, an expensive dinner, and a monetary award. It wasn’t all that bad.

SAR: You went to an ADPA meeting, which was the precursor to the National Defense Industrial Association and the Small Arms Symposium.

Kontis: That would’ve been in the ’70s and early ’80s. In those years, it was a who’s who of small arms people. Berge Tomasian, who ran Saco Defense, was chairman until Jay Trumper from GE took over. From the government side, there was Frank Marquardt who designed the Marquardt 20mm Navy Aircraft Cannon used in the Mk11 gun pod. Gene Stoner was there quite often, as were the guys from Saco: John Rocha and George Curtis. I took advantage of these opportunities to get to know people like Uzi Gal, Israel Gallili, and Bill Ruger, who showed up once in a while. They were all a great bunch of people to associate with.

We held yearly meetings just like we do now as NDIA, with papers presented. Usually one year it was east coast, one year it was west coast. They were rarely held at Picatinny. I was a participant, but later on, I was more active in the organization.

The Colonel (Chinn) and I had gotten to be pretty good buddies. You’d see him there all the time and as well, Rod Spies who was the head of marketing from Hughes. The Chain Gun was a Hughes development that wasn’t ready in time for the Armored Fighting Vehicle (Bradley) competition, so TRW with Gene Stoner’s 25mm cannon won the competition between GE and TRW. Out of nowhere came Spies, who figured out how to get his chain gun considered. In the end, it was the 25mm Chain Gun that won out. Spies was an amazing marketing guy – he won the Chinn Award too. As I said, ADPA was a great experience.

SAR: Any other projects or programs at GE?

Kontis: Near the end of my days at GE, I had an idea for a new project, a .50 caliber Gatling gun. It just seemed like that was something that could be a hot seller. It would be something that was needed to replace the aging aircraft cannons. The concept was for a six-barrel gun or a three-barrel gun. I would make the rotor big enough to be a six-barrel gun for fixed wing aircraft armament, but start out by making a three-barrel gun, since that would be more saleable. As the design progressed and proved itself, three more barrels could be added to make a new product. Just the opposite of what was done for the 20mm from the M61 to the M197. A lot of people liked my .50 caliber concept and I got money allocated for it, and I was ready to lead the design team as the project engineer. That was the time frame where I decided that I wanted to get into management; I didn’t want to be a design engineer anymore. I felt like I was getting pigeonholed; and I really liked working with people. I also thought I’d like to work in sales some day. I liked the whole NDIA (ADPA) scene and being inspired by all those great gun designers, and I felt like it was time to move on. I left that project and in 1982 I took the opportunity to go to FN and be the Product Engineering Manager. FN was having trouble getting the M240 off the ground and I was sure I could help.

SAR: Where had FN come from with the M240 program?

Kontis: The M240 was brought on by the failure of the M219 (M73) during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis complained to the U.S. what a terrible gun they had been sold. There was even a congressional investigation. There were other candidates being trialed but the money for these got canceled. My Armor Machine Gun was a casualty along with others. The GE AMG and other guns coming down the pike weren’t ready yet. Congress demanded a worldwide competition with the objective to pick the best gun to replace the M73.

FN won that competition with the MAG58 Coaxial machine gun. It was the tank version of their Infantry MAG58. They were given a contract for a limited number of guns as well as providing a Technical Data Package (all the drawings) so that the guns could be built in the United States. FN in Belgium began delivering the guns from the Herstal, Belgium factory, so the immediate need for a reliable tank coax was filled.

Then FN won the competition to build the same gun (now called the M240) in the U.S. Since they didn’t have a U.S. factory, they built one in Columbia, South Carolina. They were in quasi-production for one year, but it was a huge mess. From the engineering side, they needed an engineer who could interact with the Army representatives and convey the Army message to the Belgians. The converse of this was also needed. I used to jokingly say my job was as a translator – converting English to English.

The U.S. factory, FN Manufacturing, Inc. (FNMI) suffered from growing pains: a new factory with inexperienced personnel, the language barrier, and inexperience in understanding exactly what the U.S. military wanted. I was only on the job a few days when I realized how bad things really were, but we had a good group of people, and I felt pretty confident we’d get things moving in the right direction. After all, they had a nice factory and had some decent new manufacturing equipment, and a reputation for building good stuff.

It took a long time for the workforce to understand what was needed, as many of them weren’t experienced gun people or machinists. The Belgians had sent quite a contingent over to get production going. The first year they had built some M240s, but not to the Army’s Tech Data Package that they had drawn to U.S. format. The Army demanded the gun be built to their new tech data package, but the Belgians wanted to continue to use theirs.

SAR: Because they knew those worked.

Kontis: Exactly. This was how they built the guns in Belgium. The U.S. didn’t buy the manufacturing package; they only bought the technical data package, and there’s a big difference. I had a great engineering team and we finally got the Army drawings into a condition where both the Army and the Belgians were happy with it. The FNMI manufacturing engineers made new manufacturing drawings that worked best for the new factory.

You know, even though these were tank guns, the Army did something very, very smart when they redrew the drawings. It would’ve been so easy to eliminate all of the infantry features of the original MAG58 that allowed those guns to be used on the ground. It would have been cheaper too.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about. The back sight bracket had steps that were used for the rear sight. Those steps were hardened so that they wouldn’t wear, and here we were at FNMI, installing back sight brackets with hardened areas where the steps were, and no sights on the gun. We also hardened the area where the dust cover latched underneath, even though there was no dust cover on the coaxial weapon. We did all the little infantry nuances, from the MAG58, even though these guns were going into tanks. Hats off to whoever decided that, or we would have never gotten the M240G and M240B off the ground.

There is an interesting story of a problem we had to solve right off the bat. Product Engineering’s job was to go through the M240 design dimension by dimension, comparing the Army drawings with the Belgian’s manufacturing package so that we could accommodate both. In doing that, we were very successful with one major exception.

One thing that didn’t work very well at all was the feed tray, and this is the very heart of every automatic weapon. The ammunition links were digging trenches in the top of the tray causing malfunctions. The FN Herstal design was made out of nine components that included an investment cast round stop, rivets, and stampings. The first U.S. made feed trays looked just like the ones from Belgium, but ours didn’t work well at all and nobody could figure out why.

The feed tray started out its life as a stamping of very soft steel, “tin can steel” we used to call it. Then it was masked for certain areas that we didn’t want plated, and then it was chrome plated. After it was chrome plated, then it was phosphated black. This was just an inordinate amount of time to manufacture a part, requiring a lot of handwork. They’d sit there painting the masking on these things. It was an awful, awful part.

My idea on that was that we’ve got some really good casting companies in this country, so let’s get a couple good houses to make us a casting. We called in Hitchner and some others and said, “Can you guys investment cast this?” They said, “Sure. What material do you want?” I picked a good material that I knew would come out harder than the links and we ended up with a nice hard feed tray. It was absolutely beautiful. The Belgians were screaming, “What are you doing? The part’s fine like it is.” They weren’t real happy with the American team at the time. We took that thing out and fired it and we couldn’t fail it. It just shot and shot and shot. That was one of the first times that the American engineering team there “grew legs.”

SAR: Did you get to go shooting at FN if you wanted to?

Kontis: All the shooting you wanted [laughter]. That was a nice part about FN. We got to do all the demos but we engineers were authorized to shoot all the time for testing, it was great. We did lots of demos, and our first demos were something we called the GMAK, Ground-Mount Adaption Kit. I always have to be selling and I figured, “You’ve got a great design. Let’s put this thing on the ground.” The number one M240 complaint from the tankers wasn’t anything about the gun or how it worked or functioned, it was that you couldn’t take the gun out and put it on the ground. We decided the thing to do is sell a ground kit for it, use it as an infantry weapon, basically a bipod and butt stock to dismount with. We couldn’t get any buyers. We heard asinine comments like, “If you take the gun out of the tank and put it on the ground, you decrease the fightability of the tank.” Wait a minute. The tank is already dead [laughter]; you’ve got no more fightability. Get the hell out of there! Put the gun on the ground so you can get moving and keep fighting. At NDIA, Ed Gripkey our marketing manager, would be holding the weapon, with me doing all the soft-shoe dancing and verbiage for the demo. We had the wooden stock from the MAG58, but wood could not be decontaminated in an NBC environment. We had developed a pipe stock with a rubber pad on the pack and it worked well. It was comfy to shoot and troops really liked it, but we couldn’t sell any of them. The GMAK went nowhere at the time.

We got pretty busy at FN because we won three major contracts at once. We won the M16A2 rifle, we won the M249, and then the Mk19. These represented all of the major contracts in U.S. small arms – all won within a period of about three months. We figured, this is never going to fly. Number one, the politicos from all the other states were screaming. Maine was screaming, “You can’t have the Mk19. That’s for Saco.” Although Sako had never built one, this message came from the Navy. About the M249, FN diehards were saying, “Oh, that’s our baby; we want to build it.” As for the M16, FN had hired a lot of ex Colt employees including the head of manufacturing and some other top people. Their mantra was, “We need to bring the M16 into FN.” In the end, we let the Mk19 contract go to Saco and the rest is history.

The Mk19 was Colonel Chinn’s baby. I hired an old friend of mine named Charlie Mooney, who worked with Chinn. Charlie was another one of the best engineers I ever worked with. Charlie is now deceased. It was sad to lose Charlie at a young age. Charlie took the Mk19 from a gun that wasn’t working very well, although the concept was there, but the details, where the devil lives, weren’t there. He made it into something that would work. Then Saco took it and made it into something that could be produced as well. Just because you have a drawing that works out and a prototype that works, doesn’t mean you can produce it and have mass quantities work: it takes a lot of time. I was working in product engineering for about half of my career, and by the late ’80s I was getting a little tired of working in engineering and I saw a lot of marketing opportunities that we weren’t taking advantage of. And I always want to get new things into the hands of the troops. When I saw a need, like this GMAK, it was just driving me crazy.

I had to get it out into the field. When we didn’t succeed, I had to go somewhere else and get something else out into the field. FN had a lot of products over in Belgium that weren’t being sold in the U.S. and they came in and gave us an orientation on what they had. When I saw the list I said, “Wow, those are some really cool products. We could sell those in the U.S.” Without anybody asking, I wrote a marketing plan, the first one I’d ever written. I didn’t even know how to write a marketing plan, and there was no Internet to search. I showed it to my boss and he said, “I don’t want to see that anymore. Don’t show that to anybody.” FN was pretty good about hiring consultants and they hired these top-notch consultants to come in and look at business, and while one of them was interviewing me we talked about the new products. He saw I was excited about the new products and he said, “There needs to be a marketing plan.” At first I held my tongue, but then I remembered what Julien Labeye, the president of FNMI, told me. He said, “Tell these guys whatever you want, no holds barred.” So I said, “Well, sir, I wrote a marketing plan, but I was told to hold it close.” He said he wanted to see it, so I handed him it to him. He said, “This is a pretty good marketing plan.” The next thing I knew I was sales manager of North America for FN, and I was off selling FN products in Canada and the U.S.

That was really a great experience for me. It expanded my horizons. I went to Belgium, to France, and up to Canada. We really started things moving and got FN products on a roll. We had the M249 in production, the M16A2, and the M240. Now there was the opportunity to product improve, do R&D, and hopefully sell the GMAK, but now my goal was to sell it on the ground and not just for dismount, which I finally succeeded in doing.

I wanted to sell the Para kit for the M249 and to bring over the quick-change barrel .50. Another pet project was the adaptation of the M3P .50 caliber to the Boeing Avenger. The origin of this system was the FN HMP (heavy machine gun) gun pod. FN was real unhappy with my proposed plan because they wanted me to sell them a complete gun pod, but it just didn’t make sense on a ground vehicle, particularly with the weight constraints (the Avenger had to be air transportable.) What I had in mind was to sell the guts of the pod – gun, charger, mount, feed system, etc., without the rest of the HMP system, the bulk of which was the big “cigar” that enclosed everything. Some of the FN Herstal people were really against breaking up the gun pods to sell components, so I arranged for a meeting with both the FN Herstal and FNMI people, including Julien Labeye.

At first my presentation was a comprehensive, multi-page report to show which parts of the gun pod would be used and which not, with technical discussions etc. Then I remembered somebody told me that most company presidents won’t look at any more than one page of anything. I decided that a 1-pager would be my whole presentation. For each of the dozen or so attendees, I made black and white photocopies of the page in the HMP brochure that had nice isometric sketches of each of the HMP components. There was no such thing as a color copier back then, so I took the black and whites home to my young daughters, aged 7 and 9. I offered to pay them to color in red the parts Boeing won’t need, green for the parts they would use as is, and yellow for the one part that needed a slight modification. The girls, both very artistic, did a beautiful job with colored pencils and everybody at the meeting was impressed not only with the good sales prospects of a new gun system for the Avenger, but for some good ingenuity in using “available resources” to get the point across.

SAR: George, you just rolled through a whole lot of stuff there. Let’s stroll back down the line a bit. You were there when FNMI bid the M16?

Kontis: I went to Rock Island Arsenal and sat down with a gentleman, I believe his name was John Irons. He was the project manager of the M16. And I said, “John, we’re from FN. We’ve got a great factory in Columbia, South Carolina, and when that M16 comes up for competitive bid, we want to be there and we want to bid on it.” This was the M16A2, right out of the JSSAP program. I had worked with Jim Ackley before and I had met (Lt. Col.) Dave Lutz and some other folks, but basically this was more oriented towards “We’re a firearms factory and we’re eligible to bid on this, and by God, we want to bid on it.” M16A2 was now in the production arena and we were to get a TDP. FNMI’s ex-Colt guys were ecstatic because, “Hey, we know these parts. We can bid.” At FNMI, we put together a really good package and we bid it and we won. There were only two bidders, Colt and FNMI, as I recall. There was a $14 per rifle difference in the bids, or something close to that. It was quite a challenge for FN to build those parts; I remember that. I don’t think it was a moneymaker for a number of years for them.

In 1917 an unusual device was trialed that gave the soldier a means to quickly convert his slow firing bolt action M1903 Springfield rifle into a higher rate-of-fire semiautomatic weapon. The bolt action mode was proven to be effective at long ranges, whereas the semiautomatic conversion was intended to improve his effectiveness in close combat. The Pedersen device, as it was known, was classified “Secret” and generated tremendous interest from the military, but was never used in combat. The inventor of this device was a Danish immigrant from Wyoming named John Douglas Pedersen.

Before introduction of this conversion kit to the Army, Pedersen was enjoying a very successful career at Remington Arms. He already had several successful designs under his belt, and had gotten to know John Browning when they worked together on the Remington Model 17 shotgun. Browning was so impressed with Pedersen he called him, “the greatest gun designer in the world;” potentially the definitive case where “it takes one to know one.”

More than his design prowess, it was Pedersen’s vast knowledge of mass production and the resolution of production problems that had impressed Browning. After World War I, the Army lured Pedersen away from Remington with a lucrative contract. The Army never revealed their reasoning, but it is likely they had more in mind than just bringing a clever gun designer into their fold. His eventual contribution was something so significant we might not have won World War II without him.

Mass production of firearms and other mechanical devices had been well underway since the Civil War. Henry Ford pioneered this technology in the automobile industry and other industries, like the country’s armories, were trying to turn out guns and other ordnance the same way.

In a typical gun factory, huge ceiling mounted shafts rotated leather belts that reached nearly to the floor. These belts rotated pulleys to power the milling machines and lathes that made the parts. As each part was removed from the machine, its configuration was checked by a set of gauges. If it passed the gauging, it was considered “good” and went on for further processing.

In the early years of the 20th century, the learning curve for mass production was still in its infancy. Problems on the production line were numerous and difficult to solve. When parts were finished and sent to the assembly line, some of them assembled perfectly, while others required rework. Other parts assembled well enough but it was later found they would not function in the firearm.

The problem parts caused engineers and machinists to question if the components had been specified correctly. When John Pedersen encountered these problems he knew what had caused them and lamented, “The sins of faulty production design now overtake us.”

Pedersen explained what happened next:

We now begin to realize the import of the word “trouble.” A detachment of “trouble shooters” is hastily organized, many suggestions considered, some adopted, and changes to equipment are started. The production schedule has already been “badly bent” but hope lingers that by extra effort we can yet swing in with the final quota. The necessity of frequent “explaining” to the head office does not add to our peace of mind or ability to secure results. Yet important decisions must be made, for – to continue machining may accumulate a mass of useless component – to stop will result in no components for the assembling department to practice upon.

Pedersen went on to explain that after design and manufacturing changes were made, production was restarted and parts with the newly adopted changes came to assembly. Generally the old problems were solved, but it wasn’t long before new ones would crop up.

There were cases where more than one factory was producing the same product. But instead of sharing solutions to production problems, each factory tended to resolve its own issues, with their own unique solutions. Very often this killed any chance of parts interchangeability between production lines. Production problems were so commonplace that everyone involved in the production from the engineers to the assemblers believed they were unavoidable. Except, that is, for John Pedersen, who not only understood the problems, he presented logical and workable solutions to fix them.

Pedersen’s solution began with the dimensioning of the parts. He insisted that the upper and lower size limitation, or “tolerance,” of every dimension on each part be specified. This was a practice started by French military engineers in the late 1700s, yet well into the early 1900s tolerances were specified on only a few dimensions on U.S. military ordnance components.

Pedersen studied the machining methods of the day and determined the accuracy of every machine tool. He presented this data in a table designed to serve as a reference guide for production supervisors and machinists. Pedersen even realized that in wartime it would be necessary to enlist machinists of a lesser capability than the bevy of master machinists working in the peacetime arsenal. So to his recommendations he added that the tolerance specified also be achievable by the lowest skill level of machinist expected.

As an example, let’s look at a drawing of the Extractor Collar from the 1903 Springfield rifle. This part fits in a groove on the bolt to retain the extractor and must be in clearance with the receiver so the bolt can be drawn back and forth. First notice there is no indication of the allowable maximum or minimum on any of the dimensions. From the dimensions marked by my arrows, you see where the outside diameter 0.6985 (OD), the inside diameter, 0.602 (ID), and the wall thickness, 0.04825 (given twice) are specified. It’s easy to imagine that if the OD is too big, there could be interference problems moving the bolt, but from the drawing there is no way to know how big is too big. Pedersen’s table tells us there’s no way to achieve any dimension perfectly every time regardless of how we machine it.

Another issue is that the allowable concentricity between the ID and the OD is not specified. If you know this part or understand the application, it’s easy to see how fit or function might be adversely affected if the ID and OD are not in close concentricity.

Specifying too many dimensions, as in our illustration, gives the machinist too many options for manufacturing the part and can cause a wide variation in the uniformity between parts. This situation is known today as “double dimensioning.”

Double dimensioning and lack of dimensional controls, result in another problem called “tolerance stack-up,” and is usually uncovered only after parts are put together. Pedersen recognized that the accumulation of tolerances was detrimental to designs and illustrated the concept with the following example: The result is analogous to that obtained by the amateur workman who, in sawing off boards for a picket fence, uses the most recently sawed picket as a measure for the next, and finds that the final picket has acquired surprising stature.

Pedersen understood that production problems went far deeper than merely specifying maximum and minimum limitations for every dimension. When a part was drawn, rarely did the designer give much thought as to how it was to be manufactured. Pedersen recognized this as a failing and observed that … neither in production of ordnance materiel nor in industry in general, has adequate study been devoted to designing the component parts with the expressed purpose of facilitating their mass production.

The draftsman’s job was to make a dimensioned “picture” of the component and that’s where the problem started. A draftsman rarely considered that the machinist had to have some way to hang on to the part as it was being shaped. Draftsmen might, for example, dimension some features from the left end of the part and others from the right end, never realizing that the left end wouldn’t even exist until the very end of the process when the machinist cut the part away from where it was held while being machined.

Pedersen’s understanding of the complete problem led to his advocating of a new thinking that revolutionized not only the production of small arms but other mass produced items as well. A good machinist would take great pains to set the part up in the machine correctly and tried to maximize the features to be cut on each setup thereby minimizing the number of setups. Machinists and draftsmen worked in the same factory but might just have well been on separate planets. Someone had to get them together if U.S. small arms production were to be successfully mass produced, and John Pedersen had a plan for that too.

Pedersen proposed that experts with production experience would shadow the inventor, making rounds in the drafting room to determine how each part would be made, making sure it would be dimensioned in a way that would allow it to be manufactured accurately and with the fewest setups as possible. Simple tooling would be designed to hold the part on the machines in the workshop and the set of tooling would be duplicated for production lines in other factories. He even came up with a name for the work these experts would do. He called it “Production Design.”

Having a maximum and minimum dimensional study as well as a Production Designer reviewing each drawing would be added cost to the manufacturer but Pedersen stated: … no pains should be spared to reduce the design to the forms best adapted to production and to define precisely what each component shall be.

Once a “production engineered” part made it to the manufacturing floor, Pedersen advocated that every machined dimension would be checked by simple gages. This was to account for wear in cutting tools and possible dimensional variation from one set up to the next.

Following World War I, Pedersen recognized there was a need for great speed in producing weapons with interchangeable and interoperable parts. His lengthy essay on production theory was published in the June 1935 issue of the American Ordnance Magazine. The article received widespread acclaim and was recognized by the prestigious American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Not surprisingly, his paper became the bible for everyone involved in mass production. Someone had finally identified the cause and the cure for production line problems.

In 1935, not even Pedersen realized that only four years later we would need to be successfully producing war materiel at breakneck speed. Without this important contribution by John Douglas Pedersen, “Rosie the Riveter” might have very likely ended up with a file in her hands and today we’d all be speaking German.

It was spring of 1942 and the war was going badly for Allied forces. In March, American, British and Dutch troops surrendered Java to the Japanese. Just one month later the Japanese would capture Bataan in the Philippines and send 75,000 men on a 65 mile death march with only 54,000 to survive. There was no good news coming from the German front. The Germans captured the Greek island of Crete in an impressive vertical envelopment completing their occupation of most of Europe. In each newly conquered country, the Germans started rounding up Jews and began sending them to concentration camps.

Americans were enlisting in record numbers. War refugees from Europe, Africa, and Asia were anxious to join in the fight, and were looking to the Americans to supply them with rifles and equipment. The Government facility at Springfield Armory and privately owned Winchester were producing rifles in record numbers, yet they could not produce them fast enough.

The big bottleneck in rifle production was manufacturing the barrel and of this process cutting the four groove rifling was the largest time consuming element. Running at full speed, the rifling operation alone required between 10 and 15 minutes per barrel. On existing equipment, there wasn’t any way to speed things up.

In those years, there was only one way to manufacture an accurate rifle barrel: a hole was drilled in the barrel blank and then reamed to the exact dimension of the bore. Afterwards each groove was individually and painstakingly cut on a very special rifling machine. In a high volume production environment, rifling only 6 barrels an hour equated to an eternity.

It’s not that the best, state of the art equipment wasn’t available. Most of the rifling equipment in use at that time were top notch machines, manufactured by Pratt & Whitney – today a name that is synonymous with high-quality jet engines. There weren’t enough machines and there wasn’t enough time, which always led to the same conclusion: not enough gun barrels to keep up with the production of other rifle components.

As always, the firearms industry worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. Government, making available their finest engineers to support any effort to improve weapons or produce them faster. In the spring of 1942, one idea that surfaced was to eliminate cutting two of the grooves in the barrel. If this could produce an acceptable barrel, the time to cut the rifling would be reduced to almost half. The Industrial Engineers at Remington’s Ilion, New York facility and the Ordnance Department from Remington’s research division at Bridgeport, Connecticut stood ready to answer the Government’s question: would a two groove rifle barrel be as good as the current four-groove barrel?

Cutting two groove barrels wasn’t necessarily a new concept. Since the mid-1800s, the British had been using two groove rifle barrels on their percussion rifles. But this was the mid-1900s and there was a more strict demand for accuracy from the military, not to mention smokeless powder and spitzer bullet forms. Before any rifles could be shipped, a U.S. Government inspector would be on hand to check each production lot, inspecting parts and checking records to assure that each one met specification. The performance standard required every rifle be tested for accuracy and that at 100 yards five shots must fall within a three-inch circle. Failure to meet this “extreme spread” requirement was cause for rejection.

The state of the art rifling machine of that era was the Pratt & Whiney 1/2 B, available in two different models, one capable of producing 30-inch long barrels and the other for barrels up to 50 inches. Two other models of the larger 1 B could produce barrels up to 74 and 98 inches. These Pratt & Whitney 1/2 B and 1 B rifling machines were high precision , well designed machines, each having two spindles that could operate independently of each other. This meant that two different gun barrels could be made on the same machine at the same time.

The rifling operation on the P&W is simple, and is essentially the same process that has been used for centuries. The barrel is held stationary while a rifling rod is pulled through the bore, turning as it travels to give the required twist. Protruding from the rifling rod is a cutting tool set to a fixed depth in order to cut one groove on each feed stroke. At the end of the feed stroke, the pressure of the cutter plunger spring on the cutter plunger forces the cutting tool back into the rifling tool head so it no longer protrudes. This allows the rifling rod to make the return stroke without marring the bore or cutting additional material. After one groove is cut and the rifling rod has returned, the barrel is indexed 90° for cutting the next groove. This process is repeated until all four grooves are cut to the same depth.

Next in the process is the deepening of the cut. In this stage, the tool support wedge forces the cutting tool to increase its depth of cut. The feed screw, having been previously adjusted to control the depth of cut, advances automatically to the next cutting depth increment. Now the P&W is ready to make another series of cuts. The process repeats making the grooves progressively deeper until all four grooves have been cut to the required depth.

Rifling Tool Head for P&W 1/2 B Rifling Machine

The maximum cutting stroke speed for the 1/2 B is 50 feet per minute and the return stroke maximum is 65 feet per minute. To keep the cutting tool and barrel cool, oil is pumped through the rifling rod and into the rifling head. Keeping the cutter free of chips from the material removed is important. The P&W 1/2 B takes this into account before making a new cutting stroke. A small motorized brush attachment cleans the cutting tool, removing the chips of cut away barrel material. The M1903 barrel drawing specifies a groove depth of .004 inches, or just about the thickness of a normal sheet of notebook paper. With all this speed and sophistication, cutting four grooves, each one only .004 inches in depth doesn’t seem like it would take any time at all, but that wasn’t the case.

In order to run the P&W efficiently, the deepest single cut that can be made on a barrel of .30 caliber is only .0001 inches. Why? Simply because making a deeper cut creates a larger chip that can potentially clog the cutting surface resulting in a rough surface finish or a broken cutter. This limitation means that cutting a single groove to the specified depth of .004 inches requires 40 complete strokes. Just to make a single 4-groove barrel took 160 cutting strokes and 160 return strokes. In the spring of 1942, there was a lot of incentive in reducing the number of grooves to two.

Springfield Rifle Bore
Dimensions Ref:
RDR-42-12 Remington Arms
Company Report 1942

Remington engineers worried about the potential negative effects on this proposed change. There would no longer be four small lands in the barrel, all four totaling to about 0.2 inches in width that would dig into the projectile jacket to impart spin to the bullet. Now there were two huge ones, each one almost 0.3 inches wide. Would these two wide lands create so much additional bore friction that the projectile would be significantly slowed? Nobody knew for sure. Lower velocity and increased pressure were a concern.

Firearm experts knows that after primer ignition, any delay in getting that projectile moving causes the chamber pressure to rise quickly – sometimes to dangerous levels. Would the wider lands make a serious increase in chamber pressure? How much additional pressure could be expected? Would the 1350 barrel material be able to withstand the amount of increased pressure?

Accuracy and barrel life were also a consideration. Would the rifle be as accurate with two grooves as it was with four? It would be counter productive to find out the two groove barrel would meet all the performance requirements up front and later learn that barrel life was so greatly reduced that the new barrel would need to be replaced sooner. Again, extensive testing would be required to find the answers to all these questions. Through their years of experience, the Remington engineers knew there was something else to be considered. They knew that if it runs on gunpowder, they could expect the unexpected.

On March 1, 1942, the Remington Arms Company of Ilion, NY was awarded a contract to investigate the two groove barrel. The study was to be a joint effort of the Ilion Industrial Engineers of the Ilion Development section, Remington’s Research Division in Bridgeport, CT and the Army’s Ordnance Department. In their test plan, the Remington engineers proposed there – barreling of twenty seven Spring field ’03 rifles with the two groove barrel to be used in the test.

Manufacturing a two groove barrel at the Remington facility was accomplished by indexing the barrel by hand, bypassing the automatic indexer so that two grooves and not four would be cut. If the testing turned out to be successful, it became immediately apparent there would need to be a modification of the indexing mechanism for volume production should the two groove barrel be adopted.

The accuracy test was performed at 100, 200, and 600 yards. The 100 yard test was conducted indoors. Each rifle was hand held using a muzzle and elbow rest. Remington’s Mr. R.A.A. Hentschel described the test res ults : “Twenty-seven guns have been built with two groove rifling. All have passed the Government inspection standard for accuracy at 100 yards. This standard calls for five shots to be within, or cut the edge of a three inch circle. No difference in accuracy was noted between these guns and regular production.”

Following those encouraging results, Remington proceeded with the 200 and 600 yard testing. Two of the two groove test rifles were fired along with s/n 1283325, a standard 4-groove barrel used as a control sample for comparison. Again, the rifles were hand held, shooting from the prone position with a rest at the elbow and muzzle. As a baseline, four groups were fired with each rifle at 100 yards with the average group size indicated in the included table.

The two groove barrel was performing very well next to the four groove standard. Maybe the endurance test would give some indication why up to this point the service rifle barrels were designed to have four grooves in stead of two. The weapon selected for the endurance testing was Springfield , s/n 3030571. The endurance schedule required the firing of 16,000 rounds with three 5 round groups fired for accuracy after each 1,000 rounds.

The extreme spread was averaged at each 1,000 round interval. Other than an occasional foray slightly outside the 3 inch circle, the results were considered exceptional.

The results so far looked great with only a few tests remaining. Accuracy requirements were equal to or better than the four groove barrel on new guns and the endurance gun. Barrel life indications were also good. The bore of the rifle with 16,000 rounds was measured using sulfur casts. Although this barrel was badly fouled and significant heat checking evident at the breech, there was no measurable wear.

Two tests were left that still might keep the two groove barrels out of military service: pressure and velocity. Pressure testing was performed using the copper crusher method. It was the latest technology in those days but not highly accurate, giving not much more than a good approximation of the actual pressure developed.

Test results showed the expected: The pressure to force the projectile through those huge lands did increase the pressure with the two groove barrel, but fortunately not to a huge extent. The biggest concern was with the armor piercing ammunition that showed chamber pressure was unquestionably higher with this ammunition. Quick calculations showed the current barrel material could withstand the increase provided there was not extended firing with the AP ammunition.

Those two huge lands caused a small drop in muzzle velocity, but again the difference was not of great importance. With all testing complete, Remington concluded: “On the basis of tests made to date, the two groove rifling equals the standard four groove rifling in performance. Tests show an increase in pressure from 3,000 to 4,000 pounds when using armor piercing ammunition in the two groove barrel. Since armor piercing ammunition is seldom used in the Springfield rifle, this latter result is not particularly significant.”

On 22 October, 1942 the Ordnance committee met to review the results of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds testing. No one could argue with the performance of the two groove barrel. The recommendation for the two groove barrel was sent to the Ordnance Department for final approval.

When the approval was received, the following rifles were designated to receive the new barrel.

• U.S. Rifle Caliber .30 M1
• U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30 M1903A1
• U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30 M1903A3
• U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30 M1917

The Remington engineers described their testing and disclosed their findings in a concise report, No. RDR42-12. Upon completion, the report was classified “Confidential” to keep these results from reaching the enemy. Twenty years after the report was written, the security officer in charge downgraded each copy to “Unclassified” by scratching out the “Confidential” stamp and initialing below it.

Just over 300 Pratt & Whitney barrel machines 1 B’s and 1/2 B’s were produced, preferred for volume production over the older Pratt & Whitney sine bar model. Many of the 1B and 1/2 B models are still in use today. Most remained in the U.S. while some were sent to Australia and other countries – including Border Barrels Ltd. in Scotland.

Rifle barrels produced today use a variety of techniques to form the grooves, most being much faster than the single point cut method used by the Pratt & Whitney. But unquestionably the most accurate way to make a barrel is with a single point cut. The P&W 1/2 B is the preferred machine tool for this operation from the time it was introduced up till now. It is for this reason that the Pratt & Whitney 1/2 B and other models are currently used in the production of today’s competition and military sniper rifles.

The M1 and Springfield rifles with two groove rifling are scattered around the country and the world. Their accuracy, reliability, and durability is enjoyed by shooters everywhere. However, few people recognize the major impact on the war effort that resulted from this minor configuration change to the rifling – a change that made the two groove barrel one of the unsung heroes of World War II.