THURSDAY, 1 JA N UARY 2026 The Pratt & Whitney decision suited Australia’s primitive manufacturing base and its lack of skilled people. Pratt & Whitney had perfected a production regime which not only involved precision mass production and the The Lithgow Small Arms Factory in 1919. From the SAF Museum Archives. interchangeability of parts, its workforce needs were less, with lesser skills as the machines did the ‘repetitive work’. In contrast, the British model required a much greater workforce with higher skills. The challenges facing the Factory were intense, starting from a ‘blank sheet of paper’. The fact that Pratt & Whitney had never built and supplied an entire factory complex anywhere outside the US and that they had no experience whatsoever in their machines ‘punching out’ parts to comply with British War Office specifications, didn’t go unnoticed in both political circles and the media. The Lithgow plant was to be Pratt & Whitney’s showpiece internationally – and it was to be, at the time, Australia’s largest arms factory. Construction got underway in late 1909. Usual construction-related issues emerged in terms of insufficient labour, material supply issues and the Lithgow weather conditions. The Factory was designed for a one-shift 48-hour working week, producing 15,000 rifles and bayonets a year. Pratt & Whitney supplied the various machine tools (340 in number plus 11 forge hammers and 22 oil furnaces), the jigs and fixtures for making, measuring and maintaining the cutting tools and gauges to check sizes after each machining operation (6370 gauges were ordered). 6500 tools and 9000 spares were ordered, including 2250 cutting tools – the remainder being tools used for making, measuring and maintaining the cutting tools. Optimistically, full factory production was originally expected to be achieved in late 1910 – this pushed out to early 1911, then to late 1911. The Factory finally opened on June 8th, 1912. When is an Inch not an Inch? To retain operational and supply compatibility between the UK and Australian armies, the US-designed Lithgow plant was going to make rifles to the UK SMLE 303 design, ie the then British standard Short Magazine Lee-Enfield .303 inch bore, bolt action rifle, soon to be widely used by Britain and British-allied armies (like Australia) in WW1, and used again later in WW2. The first major hurdle became evident during the production trialling phase at Pratt & Whitney, prior to the machinery being sent to Lithgow from the US. The issue was that, unbeknown to anybody outside of the Enfield Factory in England, the British were using two different measurement standards. Anything below 2 inches was measured against a local Enfield standard that was ‘four tenths of a thou’ (0.0004 of an inch) shorter than the true Standard Imperial Inch that was used for dimensions over 2 inches. (More details on this can be found in the book titled The Enfield Inch & The Lithgow .303 a tale of metrology from Australian firearm folklore / Tony Griffiths copies of which reside in the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum. The UK designed SMLE 303 required over 2250 special cutting and forming operations to make the 173 separate parts of the rifle. It soon became evident that due to the two different “standard” inches, and poorly chosen British manufacturing tolerances, interchangeability and compatibility of parts just couldn’t ‘come together’. To overcome the problem, Pratt & Whitney designed and manufactured a perfectly toleranced version of the SMLE 303 rifle and used it to develop a whole new set of drawings, tolerances and specifications. The batch of compromise-design rifles which P&W along with Clarkson 1 developed in 1911, after knowing of the sloppy British specifications, were taken to the UK for inspection and approval. The P&W rifles had been modified to allow interchangeability of parts, and following approval, the P&W Maggie Marriott's nom de guerre Page 35 of 41 Maggie Marriott
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