Zakłady Mechaniczne Tarnów
Zakłady Mechaniczne Tarnów is a Polish defense manufacturing company. Based in the city of Tarnów, the company is producing handguns, assault rifles, sniper rifles and anti-air guns. It is part of the state-controlled Bumar corporation.
Initially founded during World War I as a local train repair workshop, between the wars the company was part of the Polish State Railways. Confiscated, dismantled and sent to Germany during World War II, the company was rebuilt as a train repair workshop, but in 1951 it was turned into a defence contractor producing guns, firearms and machine tools.
Initially the company license-built M1939 37 mm automatic air defense guns and Nudelman N-37 aircraft cannons used in LiM-2 and MiG-17 fighters. Later other types of Soviet-designed military equipment were also introduced: 57 mm AZP S-60 and ZU-23-2 AA guns, 2M-3M naval cannons, armament for the 2S1 Gvozdika SP howitzer, DShK, NSV and KPV heavy machine guns, as well as domestic designs. The latter group included ZU-23-2M Wróbel universal naval gun and its successor, the artillery-rocket set ZU-23-2MR Wróbel II.
After 1989 the company switched entirely to home-designed weapons. Those include Pallad grenade launcher, RGP-40 grenade launcher, UKM-2000 MG, WKW Wilk sniper rifle, Bor rifle and ZSMU-36 missile and anti-missile system. Among projects currently developed in the Tarnów Mechanical Works are the WLKM-12 Szafir 12.7 mm multi-barrel machine gun, ZSMU-70 missile system and GA-40 belt-fed grenade launcher.
