[Leica] Filing the parts to fit

["Doug Richardson" <doug@meditor.demon.co.uk>]

DonjR43198@aol.com wrote:
>As for new manufacturing techniques, I am already advised the company
is using files to make things fit rather than manufacturing them to
fit. Someone from Solms must have taken a page out of the pre-WWII
Japanese camera industry's book.

Perhaps they’ve taken something out of their own book - that’s the way
the pre-war screw Leicas were built.

The practice continued to some degree into the post-war era. Back in
March 1998 Erwin described how:

"The most used assembly tool in the days of the famous M3 and
M4 period was a wooded hammer to squeeze the parts into position as
the
production tolerances were a little (lax). The fine build of these
products
has been the result of diligent and laborious use of manual
adjustments
and the selecting of parts with matching tolerances.
As a very competent analyst said in those days after visiting the
factory
and its assembly lines: the finest asset of the Leitz company is its
competent and experienced workforce. That was the magic of the M3/4. I
visit every year a gathering in Germany who call themselves
'Leitzianer'
(Leitz people). And all stories are the same: judicious use of
countless
manhours of manual labour generated the M quality."

I suspect we are reading too much into the passage from Leica about
"alternative materials" - the English is simply unclear. All we can
reliably draw from it is that in some cases existing materials and
processes are causing too much expensive wastage, so alternatives will
be sought.

Regards,

Doug Richardson