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HISTORY
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James H. Rand Jr. of Rand Kardex Bureau,
acquired the Remington Typewriter Company in
1926 and formed Remington Rand in January 1927.
They primarily manufactured typewriters and
other office equipment. The Remington Typewriter
Company was originally founded by E. Remington
and Sons, predecessor of Remington Arms Company.
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Remington Rand
was awarded its first order on March
16th, 1942, for a total of 125,000
1911A1 pistols. The company had no
experience building pistols at the time
it was awarded the contract. Remington
Rand formed a new division (Remington
Rand "C" Division) to take charge of
building the pistols. Remington Rand
"C" Division converted a vacant plant
into a modern pistol manufacturing
facility. The plant was located on
Dickerson street in Syracuse, N.Y and
was once used for building typewriters.
Initially some manufacturing equipment
was not available. This caused Remington
Rand to acquire parts from other sources
to complete the early pistols. They
purchased barrels from High Standard,
Colt, and Springfield Armory;
Disconnectors from US&S; Grips safeties
from Colt; and Slide stops from Colt and
Springfield Armory (2,865 left over from
WWI). Remington Rand "C" Division
inherited much of the documentation,
tooling, and machinery that originally
was used by The Singer Manufacturing Co.
in their Educational Order.
Consequently some of the parts of the
early pistols were made using Singer
supplied tooling and fixtures. Careful
examination of Early Remington Rand
pistols will reveal striking
similarities in some of the parts to
Singer made parts such as the triggers
and mainspring housings. The first 255
production pistols where accepted by
ordinance inspectors in November of
1942.
Initial shipments appeared to perform
satisfactorily, but subsequent tests
performed by Ordnance Inspectors
revealed serious problems with parts
interchangeability. In March 1943 James
Rand Jr., stopped production due to a
high rate of Parts Interchangeability
Test failures. Only after a change in
management and a thorough review of the
inspection and manufacturing operations
was production finally resumed in May of
1943. When Remington Rand did resume
production the line from under the "O"
in "NO" in front of the serial
number was removed (see
IMAGE), this transition started at
approximately 955,000
and either prefix can be seen as late as
serial number 1,016,000.
Throughout production Remington Rand
aggressively attempted to innovate and
improve the production of 1911A1
pistols. According to Charles Clawson
books the ERRS (Experimental Remington
Rand Series) pistols were created by
Remington Rand for conducting
experiments to improve their product.
They were later presented to officials
and employees of the company.
By March of 1945 they where building the
lowest price pistol in the war effort
and quality was considered second to
none. By the end of the war Remington
Rand had produced over 875,000 pistols,
almost as many as Colt (628,808) and
Ithaca (335,467) combined. [Reference
Charles Clawsons “Colt .45 Service
pistols”] |
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