Seriously though, she demonstrated machining methods used to make those parts on simple machinery I always wondered how they did back in the old days.
Howdy
Not to belittle this extremely talented woman's skills, but that is not quite exactly how they did it 'back in the old days'.
Frames were not hogged out of one large block of steel. They were first hammer forged to what we call today near net shape. After hammer forging, the part had the rough shape of the finished part. This was more efficient than machining so much metal away from a large rectangular block.
But hammer forges are huge pieces of equipment, and no one is going to have one in a modern machine shop, so she did the next best thing by machining away all of the metal that did not look like a SAA frame.
Also, 'back in the old days' parts were mass produced, rather than being made one at a time as she is doing. Mass producing parts introduced efficiencies into the manufacturing process.
To facilitate mass production of parts, some pieces of equipment were designed to do one operation only. Many of these machines were pattern following machines. A master pattern part was clamped onto the machine, then the operator manipulated handles on a pantograph so the cutter would duplicate the shape of the master pattern. Operators of these machines did not have to be highly skilled machinists, they only needed to know how to operate the machine. Parts would be made by moving them progressively from one machine to the next until the lot of parts were completed.
But I say again, this young lady is an extremely talented machinist and I am very impressed with what she produced.
I did get a kick out of her saying she did not like the 'straight' trigger from the original Colt she used so she made an offset trigger to keep the trigger centered in the frame. If you look at the trigger of a Colt or Italian replica, they are always offset to one side.
