The Bullard Engineering Works held contracts calling for the production of 1,400 155-millimeter gun tubes. On the first day of the armistice it had delivered forty-five finished tubes, and 500 others were progressing through the plant in various stages of completion. Many of these incomplete units had passed through the difficult shrinking process. Guns are built up in layers of steel, each one heated, superimposed upon the adjoining one, and then shrunk on in various cooling processes, thus putting into the steel strata a compression that enables the gun to sustain tremendous interior pressures without distortion. The ordnance officers looked at the status of work at the Bullard plant and ordered the completion of the 500 units in process, terminating the rest of the great contract. This action was taken on the eleventh day of the armistice. The company expected to be able to complete the remaining 500 guns in six months, a course that would enable the manufacture to taper off and the gunmakers to find other employment. Two months later it was found that other industry was readily absorbing the excess labor of the gun plant, and therefore another cut was made in the contemplated production, the number of completions ordered being reduced to 262 in number. These were to be finished by April 15, 1919, after which war work at the plant was to cease entirely. Note, now, the measures adopted in terminating the work. It is evident that the post-armistice operation was going to deliver to the Government 262 finished guns and 238 unfinished ones. The latter would stand for a government expenditure of millions of dollars. As an industrial commodity these unfinished tubes would have value only as scrap steel, to be melted up and made into other things. Yet to the Government they possessed a real military value. In the event of another war occurring before the present-day types of artillery become obsolete, the Army would need not only reserves of guns ready for use, but also another great gunmaking industry, to produce for an indefinitely expanding field force. Therefore proper war reserves should consist not only of guns, but also of reserve facilities for manufacturing guns--machinery and tools, designs, plans, and instructions, and, especially, the rough forgings of gun elements, so that, the moment a new gun factory was organized and equipped, it could start working, without having to wait weeks and months until the raw materials came up from the forging plants. The Bullard Works were instructed to stop work on the incompleted units at such points as would enable future gunmakers, if necessary, to resume the work without difficulty. All incomplete units, however, were to be carried through the shrinking process before being dropped. The various hoops and jackets which are shrunk upon gun tubes are machined to a precision expressed in thousandths of an inch. In heavy metal working, such exactness is ordinarily unknown. It is evident that