Inside America's Robot-Run Gun Factory

All right. Oh, you got two of them right on that square. Maybe I'm not too into that after all. Welcome to Sig Sauer. Today we're in Newington, our Sig Sauer headquarters. 50% of the facility is doing manufacturing. Specifically at this site we're focused on pistol slides and fire control units and then the other half of the factory is doing final assembly and then our range testing. Our capability here is for a hundred thousand pistols a month and then from an assembly perspective we have the ability to build pistols, rifles, suppressors, and of course machine guns. There is not a firearm that we build that we don't test. We've invested heavily in coordinate measurement machines across SIG. I was in the automotive industry for 16 years before coming to SIG, and I've never seen anything like the quality management system we have here. These shop floor Duramaxes, we have 80 of them in use just in New Hampshire. The Army contracts or any of the military contracts insist upon interchangeability. You only get interchangeability if you have a high level of process capability, so having the ability to measure parts in a precise way allows you to shrink down your variable manufacturing tolerance which then improves your opportunity for that stack-up tolerance and allow for interchangeability ultimately in the completed firearm. John here is a one of our CNC machine operators. He's running this bank of machines that you see in front of you. And these are four spindle horizontal milling machines. The big box on the top is actually their tool changers. And these are tended to by a robot. John is able to run hundreds of slides in a shift across all of these machines, each of which have four spindles each. So he's running 12 spindles all by himself. And it converts bar stock into a finished slide. Because it's running so fast and there's so much going on, John has to monitor his dimensions digitally. How he does that is the robot actually hands off the parts to measurement machines. So it automatically tells him where his product quality is at. All of our tooling is also on a preset frequency. In that machine, there's four horizontal spindles, but we only get one offset for all four spindles. So that means every spindle needs to be identical, and the tool that that spindle is using has to be identical. So this is an example of some tooling. The reason why this is discolored, is we this is the most advanced type of tool holding you can get we heat this up to red hot and then insert the tool and let this cool there's no collet or wrench opening it's like one piece of metal this investment in automation is another part of that quality management system for barrels we start out with a blank that this is how we make what we start a pistol barrel from you can see robotics same type of equipment also uh sw we Go from that to this, all in one machine. As we've increased volume, we want everything to be identical. So instead of hand polishing our slides, we have these robotic polishing cells that are sanding each slide the exact same way so that we don't have tool lines or imperfections. There's all kinds of things on the internet and in media about our striker fire pistols and how SIG cheaped out on going to fire control units. The thing about this is that this is the blank for a fire control unit, okay. This is made with a process called metal injection molding. Look at all the complex geometry on this part. This is made from a material that I can barely machine. It is an exotic alloy that you're really better off using that metal injection molding process because it's kind of hard to manipulate it after that. What we are able to do are cut the rails that the slide interfaces with and we finish some of these holes. And if you look at it, it looks pretty nice now that we came from this to this. So all we do is very precision machining. All the roughing operation to get this near net shape was done with the metal injection molding process. This is the firearm ultimately. This is the serialized item. This is an area that's near and dear to my heart. I've been here for a long time and I've spent all of my time in assembly. I'm going to walk you through some of the areas of interest and some of the reasons why it sets us apart from the rest. You'll see different machines such as you know our automated sight press. This machine is designed just to put our dovetail sights onto our slides. When I first started we were pulling with a manual lever right and so you didn't really have a lot of you know idea of how much force you were using because it's a fulcrum. So now we have four sensitive pushers that are in this machine that can tell you how much exact force it takes to push the sight on. So you know what your sweet spot is and you know what it needs to have in order to stay on forever. And so what it does is if it sees too much it'll stop the machine before it breaks the slide. If it sees too little it'll push it off and say hey you got a problem you got to look at this. 100 percent of all of our slides are run through this machine. So we have our 320 cell that's set up right now. The cell is designed for a Time-to-customer based cell, so instead of a larger line, we have a smaller cell. That way we can do multiple jobs with multiple cells at once. So if you order firearms, say 365 or 320, for instance, we had Australia and Canada at the same time, and they all wanted their 320s at the same time. So we ended up putting these cells together and making it so that they would get their guns at the same time. So instead of a larger line that takes 10 to 12 people, now we're doing one to four, and we can stay efficient that way. This is new for this year. What we want to do is be able to... cross train in different areas and build different types of firearms and so what we've done is in order to retain all that information it's quite a lot and so what we've done is we have a digital version of our work instruction and it's all captured live and so you can update on the fly if need be and as my employees bounce around from station to station they don't have to memorize all the Loctite specs and torque specs because it's in their document in front of them the tack clock is what we call it some people may say that that's for me to start Beating the team down, cracking the whip, whatever, that's not what it is at all. And so all of the years of data that I've collected on how to operate the assembly line, how fast it moves, is all recorded. So if my leadership team sees as they walk by that we're running a little slower, it's my leadership team's. Good job to step in and figure out what our issues are. So this machine was developed in-house by our manufacturing engineering team to do all of the quality function checks that we need to do to that firearm before it goes into the range. What it does also is it's going to record all the data that's collected from this machine and send it to the cloud. And then the manufacturing engineering team reviews this data every two weeks. And they can see anomalies from force pressures, increased force pressures on certain components, to tracking failures through the machine. So something that could go wrong in the machine? Machine? Well... If you're going through, you're going to see that we're going to do magazine catches, slide striker, reset lock, safety lock. Any of these could fail in the process and fail to function, and if that happens, it's going to flag it, it'll go red, and kick the gun out of the machine, and then our associates will know where to look and how to diagnose it, where to start diagnosing it. This is one of our newest pistols. We launched it last year at SIG Next, and it's a fully metal entry into our 2011 category, so double-stack 9mm 1911 variant. We build a lot of different types now, we're getting into more defense type weapons with this model. So anyone that loves the nitty gritty, the harder builds, that sort of thing is going to be on this assembly line. These weapon systems are pretty advanced in the way that they're very adjustable. And so you can adjust your trigger pull weight to what you want. The complexity of that in a firearm that's mass-produced is we want it all to leave the factory at a certain rate. And so we'll adjust your trigger set. It'll go down to the final assembly line, and we will measure it on an Instron trigger pull machine to measure the pull and the take-up. That way our customers get the same one, same pull every single time. They are very customizable, but they're also competition. So this one would be the GTO model, which is going to be your full open gun. So it has your compensator at the end. And so we're actually taking 3D printing technology from our suppressor line and applying it to a compensator. And what that does is you can create cavities that you can't machine, that would be very difficult to machine. Now you can create them and then do a final machine op through Dave's team and then we get a compensator that's the most effective in the market. And what it does is it'll keep your pistol flat. for your recoil so that way you can stay on target and in a competition it's really fun to shoot. So this is AJ, he is leading our NGSW program and our assembly on first shift. I heard that two years ago SIG did not know how to make machine guns, so how do you go from zero to this? I went over to special weapons department over in R&D and I worked with those guys for a few months and they gave me the full breakdown from start to finish of how to build this thing from the ground up and then we went into it deeper and brought it here to the assembly line. What is production volume looking like? Well, let's see, the machine gun, that can range anywhere from 30 a day all the way up to 50, I think. Yeah, that's the record. And then the M8, that's anywhere from 90 to 120. 120? Per shift, per day. Last year, we blew out all of our records. We built over 800 machine guns in a month, which is pretty awesome. We're now inside the command center. The function traps are designed to put a weapon inside and then that way you can watch the ejection pattern of the weapon, watch the function, make sure it functions correctly. Lane 1 through 6 right now is a 25 meter tube and so what we're doing is we're actually testing our pistols, we're target shooting our pistols. We'll actually save those targets with that firearm and be able to capture that data forever. So one of our tricks with that program is if anyone has a serial number, if you guys have a serial number. I can show you, I can look it up, I can tell you who shot it, when they shot it, what they shot it with, what the target was, the lifetime of that firearm. That black tube is where we originally ran all of our targeting for the 100 meters. We shoot it by a robot as well. As you can see, we have M8s lined up up there. What we'll do is we'll put it into the fixture, we'll lock it into place. It has a camera facing down a scope that you can target with the joystick, and you can set it up, and then you can run the program and it will automatically collect the data that you need for both. Velocity targeting. Sand that's pumped into the back of that. So you have a certain amount of sand that's always in that threshold behind that big rubber red tarp behind the target. And so you'll shoot into the sand. The sand will capture the projectile. A lot of people think that, you know, because we have our own ammo plant. We use only SIG Sauer ammo, so certain requirements for different LEA agencies and world contracts are going to use their own ammo, right? They've already had that allotment of ammo given to them in a contract or whatever. We want to make sure that that firearm that we're selling them will work with that ammo type. All of the guns that we build get shot in the range, and they come out to the quality team. What they do there is they physically inspect every single firearm, all kinds of different firearms have different requirements, things that we want to ensure that are working correctly. The most important thing to us is any safety features, safety critical components, making sure that those interactions work well together and as they should. The other thing that we're looking for is fit and form and then obviously cosmetics. So to our left is our packing facility. So this men and women team are going to pack out the weapon systems after we shoot them. We want to make sure that our customer gets a clean weapon system. And then also we're oiling it just in case it does end up in some sort of storage for a little while. Everything that we ship to our customer is going to be heat sealed and heat wrapped. All right. So through the suppressor, magazines, cleaning kit, the whole nine yards sights, everything goes in here and the weapon system will finally lay on top. I've been here for 13 years and even now coming in, From the back entrance, I always look up and just kind of admire what we've done here. And that's the big difference is that, you know, we're really a company that really wants to innovate and really wants to grow the firearms industry, and we're really proud of having this many products. So we just checked out the manufacturing floor, and now we're here with Josh Shoemaker talking about an Army priority, which is lowering the toxicity for suppressed weapons. So can you talk about the innovations that Sig Sauer has made? So I think a lot of things have led to the development of a low toxicity suppressor. Everything from the DMLS printing technology, direct metal laser sintering, that has allowed us to create these complex labyrinths where we can really control and direct the gas and make the gas do what we want it to do to minimize the toxic fumes exposure, but that coupled with a lot of the testing methodologies. It would be one thing to be able to change the path of the gas, but it's another thing to know what that's actually doing and what the effects of that is. So SIG has worked really closely with a lot of the military units and military testing agencies to develop some solutions that you can get real quantitative numbers that I can feed back into our designs to really manipulate those gases to do what we want them to. We could minimize that toxic fumes to 90% to 100% mitigation of toxic fumes. We could probably get there. But it's gonna come at the cost of how quiet is the suppressor? What is the flash signature produced? So it's all a bit of a balancing act. I've never been involved in a program that has had more soldier feedback than this one. About 25 minutes down the road we're here at the SIG experience. Being the second largest firearms manufacturer in the world, we have quite a lot to show off. You get that sense of community and that support and then like everybody's like okay we're all learning this together. It's a culture that that's growing and we're really happy and excited to be a part of that movement. Here at the SIG Sauer Academy we host classes for anybody who has a firearms training need from civilians who have never touched a firearm before. All the way up to some of the world's most elite military units. We could fill this whole range with all of those products. We tried to narrow it down to a few of like our key platforms. We also were really focusing a lot on suppressors. So on the rifle side, there's typically two types of rifles. There's direct impingement and then there's piston driven rifles. So this is our direct impingement. When I say direct impingement, all it means is that the gas goes straight up from the barrel through a tube straight back to operate the group. It does mean that there tends to be, it's a little bit more efficient, right? You don't have to rely on a whole piston moving part system. The gas is just direct flow. But all that gas does come back on your weapon system, so you get a little bit more gas sometimes at the shooter's face. Versus like a piston driven system that we have here in the 516, what happens is the gas comes up into a gas chamber, that gas expands and it pushes a piston into an op group that then drives everything back. So ideally, a lot of that gas isn't coming back into the operating system. Sometimes the suppressor changes the function of the weapon system. If you put a suppressor on it and you have some back pressure, it can make the bolt carrier group run a lot faster. So you're able to tune that with the adjustable gas position. So the SQX is our suppressor designed for 300 blackout. So we developed a purpose-built suppressor for those 300 blackout weapon systems. When I talked about how we have the weapons, the ammo, everything coming together, we designed this to be a very compact, short, small weapon system, right, that can fold up, everything stays small and compact, suppressor is removable, and then you can go ahead, expand the stock, fire that, and you'll see how quiet that is. Compared to some of the other systems. Since these are subsonic rounds, they're already going slower than the speed of sound. Add the suppressor on there, it makes it super quiet. You can see some of the smoke coming from the outside, but I can just hold this. And from here, it's very hot. But this shield is what, and you can feel it, it's light. That's what's reducing all of your thermal signature. Just this sound right here, which is the action closing. That's about 135 db. So your action is actually the action of the gun just cycling doing that is louder than the noise you're producing from firing. Let's move on to the M8, M17 pistol. Did you notice a difference between the gas on all these guns? Which one was the most gassy? I mean, I feel like this one was. You're absolutely right. This is the most gassy, but it's also the most quiet. And that shows that triangle that we're talking about where I can get something extremely quiet with a combination of ammunition, weapon system suppressor, but it normally comes at the cost of that gas. So the end users that are using this are guys that are going in doing CQB, hostage They're trying to be in and out and extremely quiet. Their biggest concern is not toxicity. It's I don't want to be seen or heard. Yeah. Whereas some of these other products are more geared towards, you know, running, gunning, being loud and fast. Most machine guns that you're maybe used to, when you push this open, they open up forward in this way. The machine guns were designed before modern-day optics and one of the problems when you lift it up forward is right now if I had any of those fancy thermals or night vision optics on here and I had an optic here they would crash into one another. Now this just opens up and it rotates to the side so it wants to stay there it's not trying to fight you and fall on itself and then when I load this I just push this on and there's a belt retention here so it just holds it so now it's staying on the feed tray that's just secured to my feed tray And then I can close it. I don't have to have three hands. It's really easy, simple to do in the dark. There's a recoil reduction system on this gun that makes it super controllable. So even though it's a bigger gun, bigger round, it'll have less recoil than all those guns that you just shot. It should be illegal, but it kind of is. It kind of is for most people. Thank you all so much for having us here at SIG today. This has been such an experience. We really appreciate your time.