Use folded (stamped) slides for ever to reduce costs

The tooling was probably wearing out. Same reason Browning is stopping Hi Power production. Sig knew that a major expense was coming up and switching to milling machines meant a greater degree of flexibility and using one machine to make different guns over its life.

TL;DR the answer is money. The answer is always money.

Wait, my 1989 West German Sig P226 has a stamped slide?

Maybe he meant they couldn't fold it with their tooling and it was cheaper to just mill shit? I don't know enough about steel tho

i felt some pain when i first learned of this

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Would the tooling really be that expensive? Isn't it basically a shape of steel that you press into the sheet to form it? Also do they really make entirely different guns with the same machine?

Yeah, because it's German. Once things got rolling stateside it switched over

Rolling a slide isn't the issue, but you still have the whole breech block

this hurts me

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you can't fold it into the specs required for a firearm slide using the type of stainless used in gun production you pedantic fucks

>Why would they care what everybody else was doing when their system worked just as well if not better?
Because milled slides withstands pressure better and stainless resists corrosion better. It's objectively better than a folded carbon slide at everything except weight, also means you can use a lighter recoil spring and have an easier time racking the slide. Literally every other handgun in the industry uses milled slides now except hi-point.

>Sauce? Says that on Wikipedia but no citation

It's just a fact.
Compare bolt trust: due to having larger diameters and or higher pressure, 40 and 357 are significantly harder to contain than 9mm:
9mm +P has a bolt thrust of 4,000 some pounds
40's is 4,700 lbs
.357 sig is over 6000 lbs

Add in the fact that the folded slides are lighter than the milled slide, you have to have a correspondingly stronger recoil spring to keep the gun from beating itself apart, even if the breech block / slide interface could take the added force.

It's a coincidence that modern CNC machining really took off about the same time, and made it an absolute no-brainer to abandon the folded steel slide. The nose section, breech block both had to be brazed on, the slide had to be press-folded; a ton of manual work. A sufficiently sized CNC mill? Press the fucking button, wait a while, out pops a slide. Or ten.

Its more of an iterative cost. For $X you can make the new stamping, but any changes will require another $X for a new form. With a mill, it will be significantly more upfront, but any changes to design are negligibly free.

I believe the original tooling was worn and hold, and it was cheaper to buy CNC mills than to purchase new tooling. In addition the folded guns couldn't stand up to high pressure cartridges like the .40 and the .357 SIG, which necessitated the switch to milled slides.

Hence the .40 P229 being the first milled SIG. Gradually the rest of the lineup followed.

Attached: P225-P6.jpg (5312x2988, 2.82M)

It's a fact that they have more bolt thrust, but if you want to claim the stamped slide couldn't handle it you need a source.

>Find me a stamped Sig with a broken slide and you might have a valid point.
Go look into the early guns and the issues they had. The 9x19 wasn't breaking em, but it's a bit of a universal design these days