Why They Are No Longer Used

Figure 1 — A Blanchard-type duplicating lathe preserved at Harpers Ferry — the machine now exists only as a museum piece. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

This is one of your explicit questions, so it gets a full volume. The short answer is that the Blanchard principle — a mechanical tracer synchronized to a cutter — had a very long and successful afterlife and was not so much abandoned as refined into extinction, first into hydraulic and mechanical duplicating carvers, then into CNC, while the underlying market (high-volume solid-wood stocks) simultaneously collapsed as stocks went synthetic. No single cause; four converging ones. This volume takes them in turn and ends with where the survivors are.

7.1 Cause 1: The Principle Got Better — Duplicating Carvers, Then CNC

The Blanchard idea did not die; it was superseded by machines that did the same job better. Mid-twentieth-century commercial gunmakers and aftermarket stock houses ran hydraulic and mechanical multi-spindle duplicating carvers — conceptually direct descendants of Blanchard’s tracer, refined into multi-station machines. A period practical-machinist description of a later-generation shop duplicator: “a massive machine duplicator where a master (a large version of the stock) was spun, and styluses rode the contours of the master to mechanically duplicate the shape on a smaller stock-sized spinning piece of wood.”¹ That is Blanchard’s swing-frame tracer, grown up — multiple cutting spindles, better rigidity, sometimes a scaling ratio the original lacked, but the same trace-and-copy DNA.

Then came CNC, and the transition has named actors:

Reinhart Fajen, Inc. is credited as first to apply CNC to gunstocks. It was neither cheap nor easy: “The learning curve and costs for CNC were far beyond what was imagined — programming was very difficult and time consuming, requiring four Shoda 4-spindle, 4-axis machines and one single spindle, five-axis machine.” Fajen’s Lincoln, Missouri manufacturing was suspended by fall 1998, after which its stock production was contracted to other CNC shops.²
Boyds Hardwood Gunstocks (founded 1981; now the largest aftermarket maker) bought Fajen’s inletting equipment and runs CNC inletting to house-standard actions at scale, with a 100-plus-employee operation.³
McMillan Fiberglass Stocks runs CNC precision inletting — computer-guided cutting of custom inlet programs “for thousands of action, bottom metal, and barrel profile combinations” — with a technician overseeing the cut, blending CNC with hand-laid composite construction.⁴

The broad modern summary is that “most duplicators today are using 5-axis CNC mills.”⁵ (That last is a soft, search-synthesized claim; treat it as directional, not gospel.) The through-line: CNC gives you a digital master instead of a physical one, better as-cut tolerance and finish, and near-instant design changes — every axis on which Blanchard’s machine was weak.

Figure 2 — A second view of the preserved Harpers Ferry duplicating lathe — the mechanical tracer refined but not yet retired. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

7.2 Cause 2: The Material Moved — Wood to Synthetic

A duplicating lathe for wood is only useful if stocks are made of wood, and increasingly they are not. The material shift is a parallel and reinforcing cause:

Remington Nylon 66 (late 1950s) — an early commercially successful synthetic-stocked rifle (DuPont Zytel-101 nylon), aimed squarely at cost reduction.⁶
Fiberglass stocks — borrowing boat-building lamination (epoxy and glass cloth over a mold) — gained ground in the 1950s-60s; Chet Brown is credited with introducing fiberglass stocks to competition shooting in the 1960s.⁶
Weatherby Fibermark (early 1980s) — cited as the first synthetic-stocked factory rifle, after which “all of the major manufacturers” followed.⁶
Today, injection-molded polymer stocks dominate factory-rifle production on cost, and synthetic stocks have “all but replaced wood stocks” in the mass market.⁶

Injection molding a polymer stock does not involve a duplicating lathe at any point — it involves a mold and a press. So as volume shifted to polymer, the addressable market for any wood-duplicating machine, Blanchard-style or hydraulic-tracer-style alike, shrank toward the premium and traditional niches.

7.3 Cause 3: The Economics Never Favored It Against CNC

Set the two side by side on the terms a shop actually cares about, and the Blanchard architecture loses on nearly every axis:

Table 1 — Set the two side by side on the terms a shop actually cares about, and the Blanchard architecture loses on nearly every axis

Factor	Blanchard / physical-master duplicator	CNC
Master	One physical model per pattern; slow, skilled to make	A CAD file; copy/edit freely
Design change	Re-cut a whole new master	Edit the file
As-cut surface	Rippled, faceted; heavy hand finishing	Near-finish; light sanding
Tolerance	Follower/linkage slop; wear-dependent	Repeatable to machine tolerance
Operator	Skilled setup and monitoring	Skilled setup, then it runs
Product variety	One shape until you re-tool	Any shape in the library
Safety	Open, unguarded high-speed cutter	Enclosed, guarded, interlocked

Two of those rows deserve emphasis. Setup and inflexibility: the physical master is the killer. Every new stock design meant fabricating a whole new master — the expensive, skilled, one-time step that made the machine economical only against a fixed, high-volume design (armory musket production). Change the design and you rebuild the tooling; with CNC you change a file. Safety: the cutter wheel carried “a score of sharp cutters” spinning at line-shaft speed, open and unguarded, directly where an operator loaded, unloaded, and watched the cut. By any modern machine-guarding standard that is a serious point-of-operation hazard — entanglement, laceration, amputation, flying chips. (No period accident records surfaced in the research — that is a gap, not a claim of safety.) A machine you cannot guard is a machine you cannot run in a modern shop regardless of its other merits.

7.4 Cause 4: The Volume Base Collapsed

Underneath all of it: the era of large-volume wooden gunstock production ended. Government armory contracts for millions of walnut-stocked muskets are a nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century phenomenon; the modern equivalent is polymer, injection-molded, at a scale and cost point no duplicating lathe can touch. When the giant captive customer for identical wooden stocks disappeared, so did the economic case for a machine optimized to make exactly that. What remains — premium walnut sporters, custom and traditional-pattern rifles, historical reproductions, the aftermarket — is served perfectly well by CNC (for volume) and hand work (for the top tier), with no niche left for the physical-master duplicator.

Figure 3 — The sole surviving original, now a static museum piece at Springfield Armory NHS. Source: nps.gov.

7.5 Where the Survivors Are

There is no evidence of any Blanchard-type lathe in working commercial use today. The role is fully superseded. The survivors are static museum pieces:

Springfield Armory National Historic Site holds “the only surviving example of an original Blanchard Lathe,” dated 1822, catalog no. SPAR 5550, roughly 2.5 m tall, wood-and-metal — on permanent display (this series’ Vol 1/6/9 hero image).⁷⁸
American Precision Museum, Windsor VT (in the 1846 Robbins & Lawrence Armory) displays a Blanchard gunstock lathe as part of its American-System collection. No accession number or clean photo URL was resolved in the research — worth a direct inquiry if you ever visit.⁹
Harpers Ferry (National Park) displays a later-generation, 1850s water-powered Blanchard-type duplicating lathe in the reconstructed gunsmith shop — the machine in this volume’s figure. A same-lineage representative, not the original Springfield machine.¹⁰
The Henry Ford holds a cast-iron wood-copying lathe dated to the 1860s — Blanchard-type/descended technology, i.e., a later production example of the type, not necessarily an original Blanchard-built unit.¹¹

The machine, in short, worked so well that its own principle out-evolved it, while the market it served walked away from wood entirely. That is the honest answer to “why don’t we use these anymore.”

7.6 Bibliography

Practical Machinist forum discussion of mid-20th-century gunstock duplicators (search-synthesized description). ↩
MidwayUSA, “The Fajen Years,” and related sources on Fajen’s CNC adoption and 1998 closure. https://www.midwayusa.com/larrys-short-stories/the-fajen-years/189 ↩
Boyds Hardwood Gunstocks, company history. https://www.boydsgunstocks.com/content/resource-center/about-boyds ↩
McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, CNC inletting process (search-synthesized from marketing/history content). ↩
General search synthesis on 5-axis CNC mills in modern stock duplication — soft-sourced. ↩
Search synthesis of RifleMagazine.com, American Hunter, and USA Wire on the Remington Nylon 66 / fiberglass / Weatherby Fibermark synthetic-stock timeline. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
NPS, Springfield Armory NHS, “Thomas Blanchard and His Lathe.” https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/thomas-blanchard-and-his-lathe.htm ↩
Google Arts & Culture, “Blanchard Lathe” (dated 1822, catalog SPAR 5550, height 2.5 m). https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/blanchard-lathe/GQEi8p22l3Rj-A ↩
American Precision Museum, Windsor VT — collection reference. https://americanprecision.org/ ↩
Wikimedia Commons, File:Harpers_Ferry_gun_smith_shop_-Blanchard_lathe-_01.jpg (Jarek Tuszynski, CC BY 4.0). ↩
The Henry Ford, “Thomas Blanchard’s Wood Copying Lathe” (1860s cast-iron example). https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/blog/thomas-blanchard-s-wood-copying-lathe/ ↩