If no menu
or buttons show
ensure you have
scripting enabled
Please give time
for menu to load
|
|
Duane's
Factory Visit - October 2004
Whilst this
feature is written up on the Rohrbaugh
Forum as a thread, the pictures are
very large to download plus, it seemed useful
to archive this as well, seeing as it is a
most informative look into the Rohrbaugh original
''inner sanctum''!
Note - this is of course the old Farmingdale
factory - the company has for most of 2005
been relocated to Deer Park, a bigger and
better facility. I hope we can have a new
factory tour from there eventually.
The text is reproduced as in the original................ |
|
Part
I
The Rohrbaugh Firearms
factory in Farmingdale, NY is just a 45 minute train
ride from Mid-town Manhattan.
I was lucky enough to have an invitation to visit on
October 6, 2004. Eric Rohrbaugh was waiting for me at
the train station in Farmingdale. I recognized his voice
- he was answering customer calls on his cell phone!
The factory is a nice, modern, high-security, but very
non-descript building in an industrial park.
Here is a picture of Eric and Karl in front of the building:
|
Inside the secure front
door is a small office. The desk you see is Maria's
desk - but she wasn't there. (No that is not a photo
of her on the left!).
On the walls are lots of R-9 promotional materials,
photos from the SHOT shows, etc. There are also photos
of Eric and Karl's family dating back several generations.
The Rohrbaugh crest used in their logo is an authentic
family crest in use for many generations - not just
a marketing gimmick.
|
| Eric also has a small
desk up front where he fields phone calls and works
on the computer. Note the reading material on screen!
|
| Moving back farther
into the factory is a metal detector - and a nice welcome:
|
The hallway opens into
the largest room in the factory, which contains the
majority of the machining equipment. This is where the
slides, barrels and frames are made. I will probably
get some of this wrong, but here is the process as best
I can recall.
An R-9 starts as three blocks of metal (two stainless
steel, one aircraft aluminum) that are cut, shaved,
drilled, filed, polished, bead blasted and anodized
into a high quality handgun. The frames, of course,
are aircraft grade aluminum. Here is a picture of some
of the aluminum blocks.
Each block will become two frames. The holes you see
are cut by the metal supplier and are for mounting the
block inside the machine for processing.
|
|
Back to Top
|
