Originally Posted by
Rick
We walked into MRC just a bit over a week after the group of owners called it quits - it looked like everybody had gone home at the end of the Friday shift and forgot to come back the next Monday... lunches and food still in the fridge, open files laying on desks, notes of callbacks to be made, unopened mail, unfinished work in the CNC machines that were shut down in mid operation as though to be restarted the next shift, verniers and micrometers on work tables beside the CNC machine control panels, etc.
In my few days of rooting around through everything in management offices to try and figure out how the heck I started the process of trying to get it back on its feet at least making barrel blanks, the one thing that really stuck out to me is that QC/QA were absolutely Delta Sierra.
There were letters from one owner of one of their Africa professional rifles in .458 Lott, purchased for his dream bucket list trip to go on Safari in Africa. He had returned his rifle to them SEVEN TIMES and it still wasn't working properly - the last letter was not pleasant and it was him informing them that he was about to fly out on his trip and his professional hunter would be supplying him with the rifle for his Cape Buffalo and lion hunt. For the price of that rifle, after the first return had failed to solve the problem, I would have flown him to Kalispell, paid for his hotel, and invited him to be present while the lead gunsmith in the shop sorted out the problem and then took him to the range to confirm it was fixed.
At the same time, their idea of dealing with mould slump in their receiver castings wasn't to send those receivers back to the company who cast them to be replaced - instead they put workers busy attempting to push the receiver blanks straight enough that they could load them into the Haas CNC machines' tombstones so the milling operations could be carried out. And if THAT managed to turn out a usable receiver, then they had to ship the finished receivers to another company back east to be re-heat treated/annealed... which didn't always result in a usable receiver.
Who thinks like that? The owners at the end were a bunch of wealthy guys mostly from California I think, some successful trap shooters, but one would think they had some basic business sense rather than just happy with the idea of a boutique business where they could go to the SHOT show and have business cards with their name and 'Montana Rifle Company' on them.
Anyways, that's a good part of what killed whatever MRC was back when it was winning Rifle Of The Year awards and stuff like that (if you believe there's no industry politics in stuff like that).
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