Thomas Blanchard – Gunstock Duplicating Lathe Inventor

Thomas Blanchard’s life as an inventor focused not on creating new things altogether but on making existing things faster and easier. His first invention was a machine that produced tacks at a rate of 500 per minute, far superior to anything a human could ever hope to hammer out. Blanchard soon began working with firearms. His first experience was with government contractor Asa Waters, who made flintlock muskets to supplement those made at Springfield Armory. While there, he invented the machine that would uniformly cut the exterior surfaces of musket barrels. The Armory adopted it. Blanchard then turned his attention to gunstocks. In 1822, he finalized the “Blanchard Lathe.” The machine used a large iron gunstock as the master over which a guide wheel rolled, transferring the contours to the cutting wheel on a stock blank. Within a few years, the lathe was in use at both Federal armories in Springfield and Harper’s Ferry. Eventually, the two armories had more than a dozen of these machines all performing different aspects of gunstock production previously done by hand. The only surviving example of an original Blanchard Lathe is on display in the museum at Springfield Armory National Historic Site. Blanchard held at least two dozen patents in a wide variety of industries. However, his gunstock lathe is probably the most important and influential of them all because his concept is still in use in the arms industry today. Several companies make stock duplicating machines, and they can be seen in use by modern arms makers and those who look to the past for creating historical replicas. For example, here’s a clip from a video made at Springfield Armory during WWII with a Blanchard Lathe turning out stocks for the M1 Garand rifle: https://youtu.be/PVljNGittno?t=580 And here’s a clip of a worker at Turnbull Restoration using a machine inspired by Blanchard’s Lathe to duplicate a gunstock: https://youtu.be/VqdmgZqSXiQ?t=84

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