Yep… that is just one of the milestones that we have reached and passed in the last couple of months. Before I get into some of the details, I want to say that we took a deliberate setback on our schedule over the last few weeks; if you read that last entry, you saw that we were able to secure all of the original blue prints, engineering notes, designs and data from the original Dornhaus & Dixon pistols – including never released designs.
We chose to use that opportunity to audit all of our designs and ensure that the external appearance and ergonomics of our designs matched the original drawings as closely as possible… they do, the Fortis is a carbon copy of the original Bren.
So, where are we at with building it?
The good news is that we are cutting steel… we have many of the internal parts done, we have developed special tooling and fixtures, have finalized selection of outside suppliers and hard parts for the Fortis pistol are on the bench!
The designs have underwent literally days of Finite Element Analysis, and the results show that the Fortis is strong… the Fortis is more than up to the challenge of handling the full power 10MM Auto cartridge. The slides are undergoing the pre-machining heat treatment and will be on the machine shop floor soon; the Fortis slide is machined from solid bar stock, no casting.
Actually, we have eliminated several cast parts from the original Bren design… with today’s Live Tool and high speed machines, advanced 5th Axis techniques, EDM cutting and other modern manufacturing techniques… it is actually just as fast and cost efficient to make a lot of the originally cast parts from solid stock. Add to this the fact that we are able to select from state-of-the-art materials that were unavailable only a few years ago; and once again, we are quite comfortable saying that the Fortis is the finest pistol made.
Oh, one big question we get… Yes, we have magazines; the .45ACP is a 10 round magazine and the 10MM is a 15 round magazine, the price is no more than you would pay for any current production mag, and availability is not a problem. The only down side is that they will not retrofit the original Bren Ten.
Stay tuned folks… things are starting to move quickly.
