Mr. Legg,
You are flat out wrong. I have toured the Bruchet and Granger shops in St. Etienne France. The are NO machines in the Granger shop, just three guys with well organized benches of hand tools, mostly files. The Bruchets have a few machines that see regular use, a lathe with a fixture that drills a through bolt hole in the stock, a saw that is used to set LOP for guns with checkered butts, and an internal barrel profiler that is perhaps 75-80 years old. The rest of the work is by hand, with the hand scraping easily seen on the ways and breech. The parts do not interchange from gun to gun. Quite a few of the hand tools these guys use, they built themselves-I have a photo of the float that Paul Bruchet built from a section of truck spring, that is used to rough shape the monobloc to the contour of the barrels. It makes rapid work of this chore, but, it is still rapid hand work.
There are a few companies that hand build guns left in the world. Not many, but that is not the same as none.
Best,
Ted
