How's It Made: A Giant Machine That Makes MG Links 

I for one would love to see more gat-related "How It's Made" type videos like this.

This is one of the best episodes of how it's made I've seen!

This is fantastic. As an engineer myself, I could not have explained it any better. Would love more content like this!

Back when the A-10 Warthog was coming into service, several small private companies were given contracts to manufacture the ammo links for the big 30mm cannon. These links are molded of a semiflexible white plastic. Then people took boxes of these separate links home to hand-assemble them together. Colony Corporation was the local company doing this, and two buddies of mine did the at-home assembly, among many others, basic "piece-work", almost a cottage industry. Eventually the contract is completed, and ends. Colony Corp's next contract was manufacturing the then new feild radios for the US Army.

Now I would love to see how the linking machine works to create the belts

Would love an extended version of this showing each stage.

Now the only thing I'm missing is a belt feed machine gun =) Thanks for sharing this glimpse into the process.

The things you never think of, yet can't live without. Well done!

The 360 deg Fahrenheit heating stage after quenching is TEMPERING, not annealing. Cool vid, hell of a setup. Keep on cranking 'em out

As a machinist/toolmaker this fascinates me

I must say, this feels like a segment from Modern Marvels, Ian.

Love the Ziga cameos. Great episode of how it's made.

This is a winner! I loved the perfect amount of depth and the literal walk thru. More of these please.

Thanks for this! More things I’d love to see: -How armor piercing ammo is made (how the tungsten etc cores are made and how they are put inside projectiles). -How auto cannon shells (20mm Vulcan, 30mm for the A-10, 25mm bushmaster, 30mm for the AH-64, etc) are made (How the projectile casings are made, how explosive filler is put in, how fuses are made and installed, how AP cores are made and installed). -How 50 BMG AP, API, APIT, HEI (raufoss) is made (similar details to the ones above, how AP cores are put in and how the payload of HE or incendiary compound is made/added to the projectile). -How spam cans are made, loaded with paper boxes of ammo, vacuumed and then sealed.

Can we have more "How It's Made" episodes with Ian? There are a ton of companies worldwide which would be awesome to see!

I’d love to see the process behind loading ammunition into those links to form complete belts of ammo. Great video Ian, thank you

I can see how Ian would get invited into the factory, yet how did Ziga got inside?

I would love for a "How its made" kind of series. Especially for the more obscure things that youd normally not think of and take for granted.

Probably your coolest off the wall video! Thanks a million.

There is a sideshow to this, that You might find interesting. The recycling of scrap. The price of scrap metal depends on how much treatment it has to undergo. The best price the foundry gives is when there is a casting error - here the prime objective of the manufacturer is to avoid putting work and mashine time into castings that are flawed. We have been casting bronze for thousands of years and yet there is still occational flawed/failed specimens. The Ötzi (the Iceman from the alpine glazier had an axe with a casting flaw) - and we are still not perfect there. If you know what you are doing: You can often get a considerable discount on a replacement part if you send back the broken part to the manufacturer, because they know PRECISELY the composition of the alloy and can put it into the right bin when returning scrap to the foundry - and get a better price for the scrap. Floor sweepings are more complicated if you have to separate copper alloys from iron, but each will normally have to be refined. Which is costly - to say the least. so the price pr. pound is much lower. But a good chief is also a manager of the scrap. Steel is a particular chapter, as the contents of impurities in steel is so high - the most rotten quality goes into cars. But generally the more recycled a metal is, the better the quality. The airblasting is the same way medicinal pills are sorted, as it goes by weight. If there is steel impurities you might have to blast them over a magnet.

air tables are used over regular conveyors quite a bit with lightweight parts. you get a much faster throughput of material with less maintenance. with a normal conveyor, you have tons of motors to maintain, belts to repair, etc. with an air table, you have to repair local damage to the air seal, and maintain the compressor and cleanliness. metal forming production machines are always an interesting time, thanks for showing us!

This was a super display of link manufacturing. Thank you Ian for explaining the machines. That was a very modern shop; not done like in the old days.

Yessssss please keep bringing light to this awesome company. Have the zero 1s and a Delta M and they're easily my favorites in my (admittedly) small collection.

I love the recent diversification of content between stuff like this and little history videos and other QA stuff. Amazing work Ian. Stay healthy!

This is awesome, I love factory tour videos!

I love the manufacturing processes videos. Thanks Arex for opening up to filming these vids, and thanks Ziga for your hard work and impeccable timing photobombing all of these clips.

I work in a scrap yard part of the time. We're forever seeing little piles of links like those. I presume they come from Joint Base Lewis McChord which isn't all that far away. Our trucks run all up and down the I-5 corridor in Washington and Oregon, and we get truckloads of scrap for the shredder from as far away as Vancouver B.C. and Idaho. We get rail cars from our facility in Colorado too, as well as the one in Tacoma.

I remember seeing machinery for making 23 mm ammo links in one Polish factory, it was all a bit older than this here though. They had these casing-shaped metal bars to check if the finished products are within the tolerances, pretty cool stuff

thanks for pulling the curtain back and letting us see how the "magic" happens

Very cool! Seems like the Arex folks are pretty excellent to let you film so much there.

"I ran into this machine" now imagining Ian running around a factory looking for video ideas and then it hits him....

Awesome, kinda figured that's how it worked. Nice to see it in operation. The fact that that it's almost totally automated is also interesting.

That you did a Link production video places you at the top of the weapons ‘Geek’ family. I carried an M60 for years in training and never guessed on the process - just the damn weight. As a former Army officer, I enjoy every one of you very-random deep dives.

My work takes me to a lot of factories, from small mom and pop places, to huge nationally known companies. These types of machines have always fascinated me, and i get to see a whole lot of "behind the scenes" of how the things we use are made. And you find machines like this making all kinds of things. My two favorite weird machines were the scrambled egg machine and the mini baby bell machine. Because i find food manufacturing to be especially interesting, because of the complexity and food safety aspects. People are going to potentially ingest this, so it has to be not only high quality, but safe to eat. For example, the mini baby bell machine had to use nothing in it (lubricants, hydraulic fluid, compressed air) that would be unhealthy to consume. And that machine not only had to work 24/7/365, it also had to be cleaned every 4 hours, and deep cleaned every 12 hours. And by cleaned, i mean the entire machine was basically power washed with extremely potent cleaning agents. The deep clean, iirc, was the same plus a very strong mix of anti bacterial and anti fungal treatments.

Must confess, that I always found machine-gun links strangely fascinating!

Perfect content cross over of manufacturing and firearms, more of this please!

I'm impressed that the heat treat doesn't warp the links too badly. Neat.

That was a lot of fun to watch. Love your enthusiasm for every detail of your sufject matter.

Nice. Always wondered how they were made. Exactly how I thought it would be.

This is amazing, it would be cool if you did a series like this.

Thank you very much much Ian and Arex Defense for this video!

There is still another aspect to the production of MG links. When you make 100 mio. mashinegun links annually on expensive equipment the production quality goes exponentially up - simply because the mashines will have to be operated to precise tolerances. Same thing with ammunition production. That means less hangfires and malfunctions in akward moments.

This should be its own series!

I would love to see how the cloth belt type is made. The pitch between drive bushes and just the correct amount of slack on the bullet clamp strap.

What a great episode! Thank you very much Ian for showing how they are made. I had flashbacks to spending hours in the CDN infantry constructing belts with used links and boxes of rifle ammo LOL.

Thanks to the company for showing us!

More like this, please. I'd love to see how barrels are made, from blank to finished.

It's really cool to see those being mass produced, and to think that ~100 years ago, it was largely done by hand. Over 100,000,000 per years means roughly 273,000 per day. Over a quarter million per day. Phenomenal.

The "bin" is usally called a chip hopper, love this.

I love videos like this showing how the bits and pieces are made. When the reality is that a simple part such as a link can keep the mg up and running. But a bad or poorly made link can gum up the works of the mg. The same thing can be said about the magazines for the various small arms. I would definitely like to see more videos like this covering the critical components of the various platforms. As well as the various factories that are producing the various arms of the world. But I am a bit of a geek when it comes to the manufacturing of said parts and accessories for the weapons systems.

Logistics and manufacture are one of my favorite topics from this channel.

Industrial automation is fascinating. More videos like this would be welcome!

Ziga ambling in the background is a blast

Wow, that factory floor is so space-efficient. That's a huge output for a factory the size of a restaurant.

You can never have enough machine gun links. Especially in times like these.

I noticed right away: The factory is in Europe, no requirement for safety glasses. I was in Ireland many years ago and went to the Waterford crystal factory there, and the lack of safety glasses was the first thing I noticed.

I have to clarify that that is not an annealing oven, which is a process for fully softening metal. Its a tempering oven, with relieves some internal stresses in the hardened part, keeping some hardness but allowing more strain before failure.

its fascinating how much care and effort goes into something so functionally disposable

This is great! More of this type of content please. Show us more detail about how the machine does the thing.

Dude these video topics are so damn interesting, keep up the great work Ian.

It is really cool to have seen you so interested and explain it so well. I hope we get more videos like this, if it be firearms, ammunition or accessories if and or when you can get access to manufacturing sites. As you talk about alot what lets down alot of the forgotten weapons you show is the manufacturing failing in one capacity or another. And seeing modern capability and capacity is really an interesting section to see.

I use metal links on my Browning 1919-A4, wandered how they were made and why they last forever

I love Ian’s compressed air sound.

It's always good to have reminders of the tradeoffs between mass production factories costing a fortune to set up, and individual CNC machines or 3D printers which can produce immediately but slowly.

It's a great type of video to do when you don't want to register or make a new video or you're simply tired. Also, from the vewer end it is a really good format becouse you can wach it on the go and still learn something!

Interesting. Whilst many people are asking to see how teh belts are filled, what would fascinate me is how the links are arranged to be the right way round for loading. That must be some ingenious apparatus!

I kid you not but the first time I saw a belt link the first thought was how it was made. It was a very busy looking stamped piece of sheet. Thank you for showing the process.

This video brings me back to my teen years. Reminds me of watching shows like how it's made and modern marvels. I personally loved the monster garage and junkyard wars shows now forged in fire. I love creating things myself. Was a tinker kid. Got a toy grabbed a screwdriver and wanted to see how it worked. People don't think about the other components that make a thing do what it's designed to do. Like the feeding mechanisms in belt feds. I always thought the round got showed through belt and there were just 2 rollers pulling thd belt out. I was wrong the bolt comes back and pulls a round from the belt while ejecting the spend round then drops the live round in a channel then into the barrel. All in a split second.

Kind of surprised that steel strip isn't better guarded from the walkways. I know most places aren't as risk adverse in a factory setting as OSHA, but, it always surprises me when I see a factory that hasn't been safed to the very edge of hurting production. (I mean, any factory is dangerous, but running a neck height dull bandsaw of a steel strip at neck height with nary a guard widges even my risk acceptance levels. And I do risky crap recreationally. 🤣 Cool process - I wonder whatbthebscrapnrste from heat treat losses is (it honestly has to be super low on such a low markup part - just *inspecting* for production faults would rapidly eat profits like tribbles in your grain silo.)

100 million links per year, from one single machine. Staggering!

I'm sitting here, looking at a metal strip I reckon would have been turned into links for the MG34/42 back in the days, if somebody hadn't pulled it out of the machine before the links were complete. From what I can tell, they went through at least 11 different stamping processes, well, more likely 8 as three of the links look identical, before being parted off, heat treated, and connected with that little coil.

This is the type of video where a collaboration with manufacturing/fabrication creators would be nice, from CAD to production, deburring and finishing, to assembly, fitting and inspection. Not for everyone but for the true maniacs.😊

This is actually really cool, I'd love to see more factory videos on this channel!

super cool, I've been spending the last couple of years being jealous of Ian. It seems he's been really killing it in the life department lately.

As ex-British Army, I always wondered how the 'Links: MG: Disintegrating', - for my 'GIMPY' - were made. I assume the links can be made in various sizes, to accommodate different calibres. Let's have a few more of these 'How it's Made' videos.

I was literally just thinking about this the other day and the infrastructure of mundane stuff we don't usually think about about like machine gun links and how rounds and links come together in a final product that a soldier will use.

"This machine makes a million links per year" - What Ian forgot to add is that it takes him about 15 minutes to go through all of them when he is out on the firing range xD

Looks like everywhere I've worked before I got into the hospital! Cool video!!!! Giving the stampers some credit

very interessing! didn't expected something as "consummable" as links to be heat treated!

That's pretty cool 😎. I was talking today to someone about this channels videos and sometimes the tours around engineering companies. 😀

That was really interesting! Thanks Ian and Arex!

Ian moves around the factory pretty much like in the brutality matches...

Always interesting to see other countries manufacturing processes. Thanks Ian 🤝 🤝🤝

Incredible to see how far industrial processes have come

Thank you for sharing Ian that factory is amazing. In my opinion the links are one of the most overlooked things.

Cool! All that's left is to get Huggbees to dub this particular How It's Made episode.

0:40 in automotive we call those slugs and that chute is the slug drop

Looks like a Bihler machine! Phenomenal equipment for high volume thin stamped parts.

So so cool how the links just get shot into the oven with compressed air. pretty smart.

Man I used to work at an Army-Navy surplus store and I would spend days sorting through huge wooden boxes full of links of all kinds and sawdust.

You made not only a how it's made video, also a wildlife documentary! In this fine episode we saw 2 fantastic specimens of the Jiga kind! Wonderfull

I would love to see a barrel making video including how they cut the lands and grooves.

I would love more of this content with your depth of mechanical knowledge. Maybe tell us more about the history behind the links they're making too.

Always fun to watch how thing are made, me being a mechanical engineer I have designed machines to automate production before. Great video 😁🐻‍❄

Oh! We need more videos like this!

Excellent!!! Another "How It's Made" video idea: the production of centerfire cartridges.

Over the years I've been watching this channel, there has never been a video I haven't learned something new

Who would have thought there would be such a demand for that many links?

A while back i predicted that Ian would be showing more manufacturing processes before long. I appreciate being right! Lol

Ian's Forgotten Factories is something I never knew I needed until now.