Timoney

[na grohmiti]

If I remember correctly, Timoney ended up getting Bombardier (Then building Busses), in shannon to do much of their mass production. Then Bombardier pulled out of Ireland.
Ireland with notable exceptions (Liebherr in Killarney) just don't grasp the importance of high quality engineering, be it vehicles or plant. It is a skilled trade but nobody is being trained here for it any more.

[expat01]

If we wanted an indigenous defence industry it has to export and/or minimum quadruple the size of the DF.

If it armoured vehicles you need to be building minimum 10s of vehicles every year.

If it rounds, it’s probably in minimum the tens of millions.

It has to at least equal the quality and cost of the foreign competition.

For quantity of vehicles, yup. Which is precisely why arms companies often need government investment until they have a reputation and market. If you’re not willing to lose money for five to ten years you haven’t the vision to be in the game in the first place. Anyway, too late, ship sailed.

For quality, I don’t fully agree. The world’s militaries are full of equipment made by the lowest bidder, politically acceptable bidder, domestic bidder etc. with quality an afterthought so long as it doesn’t fall apart immediately. However if by quality you mean “good enough” and you can match that with “cheap enough” you might have a chance in markets that can’t afford shiny and don’t want Soviet.

For ammunition - no civilian market in Ireland is the killer, I did say it made most sense when we had no friends and only got Britain’s leftovers.
But I could set up a factory in my garage producing 40,000 rounds per day for a capital outlay of less than 20,000 euro and employing 5 people. That’s with 5 presses meant for home use. If it’s 9mm I would have to sell them at 30 cents each to make a profit, more for rifle ammo. But that’s what some guys have done here. There are about 15 large and small ammunition producers I know of in SA. Some of them export too. You don’t need tens of millions of rounds to make it worthwhile.
But you do need more than one customer. Hence the civilian market.
I only shoot a paltry 3000 or so rounds per year and most are like me. But any serious team or competition shooter I know shoots 3000 - 5000 rounds per month. I can find 30 of those any given weekend.

[DeV]

When I say quality I mean a quality design and product which is able to meet or exceed our needs in line with alternatives (eg STANAG levels, ISO standards). They would need to be comparable to say MOWAG or FN.

No you need a market full stop. Not sure what issues changing tooling for different calibres would cause or for example making ball, AP, tracer etc.

To give you an idea of the market we are looking at:
- generally the DF contracts last about 3 years at a time
- the DF hasn’t issued a tender for any small arms (they have issued 2 for 5.56mm blank) in the last 10 years

[expat01]

When I say quality I mean a quality design and product which is able to meet or exceed our needs in line with alternatives (eg STANAG levels, ISO standards). They would need to be comparable to say MOWAG or FN.

No you need a market full stop. Not sure what issues changing tooling for different calibres would cause or for example making ball, AP, tracer etc.

To give you an idea of the market we are looking at:
- generally the DF contracts last about 3 years at a time
- the DF hasn’t issued a tender for any small arms (they have issued 2 for 5.56mm blank) in the last 10 years

Gotcha.

Don't know for commercial machines, but on the press I use (manual) the tool head contains all the dies for the calibre I'm loading and I can just swap out the entire tool head to change from, e.g. 9mm to 5.56 in a couple of minutes. The assembly of the round is really independent of the bullet - ball, tracer, AP. You just size and prime the case, load the required measure of whatever propellant your using for the weight and type of bullet you want, stick the bullet on top and crimp. The hard work is figuring out the load in the first place.
It's not that we should make it now, it's just amazing that we never did make something so easy to manufacture when it made sense and we had a market. If we weren't going to do that, what odds for Timoney?

[hptmurphy]

Problem with Timoney being they were really a one trick pony, They built piecemeal singular unique firetenders and one small batch of APCs.

Multiple products with solid numbers in the hundreds per anum need to stay afloat at a certain level, but you can always piddle around in the shallow end of the pool in R&D and a few prototypes and still make a nice few quid without too much risk and investment

[paul g]

The army selected the Landsverk tank in the 1930s explicitly with a view to having it built in Ireland. The government's argument was that no Irish manufacturer was interested in building it. Probably because they were quietly told there might be a requirement for 7 or 8 tops.
Not even making bullets is mad. The potential civilian market alone could have justified a small facility, I know a shooting club of 20 guys that gets through 100k rounds of 9mm a year by themselves.
There is something odd about this state's attitude to things weapony.

There was a plan in the 1930s to build a munitions factory in clare in conjunction with ici. Duggans history of Irish army had details

I believe the plan was to build the landsverk in Dundalk or drogheda in the railway engineering works.

[pym]

IAV 2018: TIMONEY Products and Markets

[GoneToTheCanner]

There were quite a few ammunition factories in Ireland supplying the Empire; Kynoch had a plant in that triangular building beside Heuston Station, making .303 rounds and there were more around Ireland (most of the large cities and towns made ordnance of all kinds for the British, ie, canvas belt order, harnesses for men and animals, leather belts, straps, bridles, rucksacks, bags, uniforms, rifle slings, clothing and making propellant and shell cases, none of which would be beyond the Ireland of 1920, let alone today's Ireland. In fact, it came as a surprise to me that the rebels in the Rising had IEDs, improvised hand grenades designed and built by college students. In addition, there were plans for the mass production of land mines by Thompsons of Carlow and other engineering shops for the Emergency.......the most ironic thing about ammunition production in Ireland was that private reloading was never banned in the North during the Troubles, whereas it is banned or very heavily restricted here. same applied to Class F weapons........there is no good reason why Ireland could not manufacture all sorts of military goods, except people like AFri will be on your case if you do.

[hptmurphy]

There were quite a few ammunition factories in Ireland supplying the Empire; Kynoch had a plant in that triangular building beside Heuston Station, making .303 rounds and there were more around Ireland (most of the large cities and towns made ordnance of all kinds for the British, ie, canvas belt order, harnesses for men and animals, leather belts, straps, bridles, rucksacks, bags, uniforms, rifle slings, clothing and making propellant and shell cases, none of which would be beyond the Ireland of 1920, let alone today's Ireland. In fact, it came as a surprise to me that the rebels in the Rising had IEDs, improvised hand grenades designed and built by college students. In addition, there were plans for the mass production of land mines by Thompsons of Carlow and other engineering shops for the Emergency.......the most ironic thing about ammunition production in Ireland was that private reloading was never banned in the North during the Troubles, whereas it is banned or very heavily restricted here. same applied to Class F weapons........there is no good reason why Ireland could not manufacture all sorts of military goods, except people like AFri will be on your case if you do.

In times of conflict there is a very lucrative market for all sorts of consumables and local artisans and craft workers were often able to alter their production to make equipment for armies, In Waterford for instance the local foundry produced artillery shells for the British Army, stocks of which were probably expended during the civil war given the calibres on offer.

Thompsons of Carlow are that one company that was really divergent ,given they started with carts and ended up with Armoured Cars with Naval Mines also on their inventory.

Given the local military would not suffice to be your bigger customer to consume your product of say ammunition and competition against the likes of Belguim, Israell and Pakistan ammunition production would need to be of a very specialist natures, say high end quality as opposed to the standard ball crap we normally buy.

Try putting some Swedish or Finish Match grade ammo through a steyer and see the difference.. but I digress.

Uniforms , boots and webbing , the trends have changed and Ireland should be able to compete if the product is good enough but is the risk trying to break into a al ready highly subscribed market to high?

Protac had some good product but seemed to lack support, Irish begrudgery perhaps?

[DeV]

https://twitter.com/DF_COS/status/97...514698240?s=20

COS visits Timoney and seems at least one member of RDF was involved

[Rhodes]

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