For artillery barrels, I'm curious how many millions to get a plant set up, and what the minimum crew would be to keep it ticking over on a knowledge creation/preservation basis.
It all depends on how you are doing it.
But for a barrel drill, polish/honing station, cut rifle or button broach - all of those will be 225% the length of the longest barrel you want to do, and figured a good 10ft wide - and need to be properly shock isolated from each other.
A Hammer forge doesn't need to have as much length as the rotary hammer assembly travels down the length - and the mandrel is a short length and for longer barrels you can add push segments to the mandrel rod, larger capital cost than button broaching, or cut rifling - but generally a faster and more uniform barrel, as well as longer lasting due to the compacting of the material around the mandrel.
You could do it for a tad under 20M USD, but that would be a highly manual process and require a bunch of skilled machinists, as well additional laborers. You'd need about 5 master machinists / shift, 15 or so machinists, and probably near 45 laborers - plus 10-15 QA/QC folks
For around 120M USD you could get a fairly automated system that doesn't require a lot of manual work - and barrel blanks could be loaded into the feeder and a finished (chambered, profiled, polished, threaded both for muzzle break (if wanted) and bore evacuator etc) at the end of the station. You could get away with a much smaller team there - probably 12-20 folks/shift - and some QA/QC folks (4-5)
You then most likely need a heat treat vacuum oven that is large enough to take a lot of barrels - as you will want to machine the alloy in an annealed state - and heat treat it to a harder state.
Then add in coating - most are extremely hazardous so a separate area of the plant to internally coat the barrel - and an exterior coating application of a CARC etc type paint *another hazardous material that needs to be isolated - plus a drying oven to cure the paint
None of that account for the land/building. Hence why I think a Crown Corp would be the only viable way.
DND used to own the GFM's at Diemaco, I would assume nothing has changed there with the Colt acquisition, and rebranding to Colt Canada, then the CZ acquisition of Colt - none of those would do anything this size - but there does exist a precedent for the .Gov owning the machinery.
If there was ever a time to wave current events under the government's nose and encourage a National Armaments Strategy, it's now. There's likely also a vague. diffuse increase in public awareness of what various bits of kit can do, even if only from HIMARS and St Javelin memes.
Yup still sure the old set up is sitting in the warehouse. As the new requirement would be different a new one could be manufactured and or bought. Same as Australia is doing right now
We have Hammer forges across the country, the largest I believe are in Quebec. Again Australia is tooling up to do this same thing.
We have some of the largest coating systems in the world here in Western Canada, depending on the coating required and the specs. If we don't have it guess what it can be built. Same as Australia is doing. I am pretty sure we already have capacity for this.
We actually have lots of heat treating systems across the country, wet and dry, inductive etc. As the requirement gets bigger so does the equipment. That's how all that fancy high pressure, specialty treated Oilfield/ industrial equipment gets manufactured. Some of the facilities are enormous. I walked into a heat treating building one time. They had different setups for different treatments, coatings etc inside with smaller ovens, dip bins. The building itself was built for heat treating metals flanges. It was big enough to put six tanks inside or maybe bigger.
Their other building was made to heat treat small vessels. They also had a cryo system.
Again Australia has started from scratch in 2017, building, buying and installing the equipment for their fleet of Abrams. last I looked we have more Leopards then they have Abrams.
All of this comes down more to political will and the Military understanding their requirements and pushing for them then the actual cost of the project. Just look at the shipbuilding scam going on. They are throwing money at the system when we could just buy from some where else that already has capacity.
We actually (can) have the capacity expertise and facilities in short to produce, build, forge and manufacture Heavy Armored vehicles. We could produce parts etc. We do for many of the electronic systems, engines etc for other Military projects around the world. It is a change of mindset required at various levels. ,
There is a big difference between doing stuff under license with the support of the OEM and original host nation, and starting from zero.
I do not see a viable market for this in Canada, as there is no DND/GC buy in.
The key to your whole argue is your ending sentence - it does require a mindset change -- until then, I don't see Canada being a viable nation for any of that.
