How Did Long Branch rifle their barrels?

[Rick]

No, nothing at all like the corporate mergers, acquisitions, etc you're describing. It's a long story; but I'll give it a shot, perhaps as a cautionary tale in the firearms manufacturing business or anything similar. If anything, you could claim it's descriptive of family owned businesses building success and then being responsible for crashing and burning... but I'm not sure that's accurate either.

Perhaps it's more a reminder that people can be really smart businessmen when they build a company from scratch (or recognize a gold mine business opportunity), and ultimately let that original competency and success cloud their judgement as they then ignore warning signs that a blind man could see.

The originator was a trucker/part time gunsmith that realized there were too many notable gunsmiths in town and nearby to leave much room for a new guy. Some really big names in the world of fine rifles had their shingle hung out in this area.

So he turned to manufacturing barrel blanks instead; he made really good barrel blanks, so much so that in short order he owned a successful company that was expanding and adding employees and machines. That booming business and it's profits in turn lead to him redesigning/modifying the ubiquitous Model 70 to be sold as the MRC's rifle; that's when the Haas CNC machines and that side of the operation came into being.

Ultimately, the business split into the barrel side and the rifle side, with the originator owning the one side and the son and his friend the other. Lots of local family/friend relationships in all of it.

Remington only briefly owned the barrel manufacturing side of it, I think to supply enough barrels to keep up with the demand for the AR15 business that they had purchased. After Sandy Hook, Remington panicked and ran from anything that looked like an association with AR15s. The owner made a fortune (I was told $40 million, but I don't know that) selling the barrel side to Remington, he bought it back for pennies on the dollar... ultimately making another pretty good piece of coin selling the carcass of the company, both sides, to my friend.

The company went through 1000 employees in ten years, through all versions of ownership/management. That says a lot (to me anyways, as an operations manager) of the father/son ownership and management. You don't have to have been a senior NCO in the military or a businessman with employees to know your employees are your greatest asset and the one you have the most control over.

From the beginning, the rifles had a reputation inside the gun culture of having excellent accuracy and excellent fit and finish, similar to their competitors in that niche, Kimber. They also had a reputation from the beginning of being plagued by quality control/customer service issues. If you go on websites like 24 hr campfire and similar and look back through the archives to a decade ago, you'll see a fair number of threads about that, with people saying they would never buy one of those rifles out of mistrust of their quality.

Remington really had nothing to do with that - other than their incompetence at not paying attention at what was going on with their new barrel manufacturing facility. They assumed and acted as though they had purchased a turn key barrel making facility that would provide them with 35,000 barrels per month, that would be shipped to another Remington facility for final finishing as an AR15 barrel.

As far as I can tell, nobody from Remington ever came around to see how things were going, maintenance, etc. as long as 35,000 barrels a week left the barrel shop. They didn't notice, obviously, that the old equipment was being run into the ground. The original family owners and their management team were mostly left in place, perhaps all left in place.

They had a hot market for AR15s to satisfy - until Sandy Hook panicked them. The original owner made a tidy little fortune selling the barrel making side of the company to Remington (I was told $40 million, but I don't know that); pretty good payoff for a part time gunsmith/truck driver from what he started. He got it all back for pennies on the dollar.

Now the ops manager side of me says that if you made that much profit selling the company to Remington just a few short years before, and you sure as hell knew the condition of the machinery when you sold it, you would think that with that much coin jingling in your pockets that you would spend a little bit on dealing with machine maintenance, refurbishing, or outright replacement, etc. when it fell back into your hands for a song. Perhaps there's a good reason for not doing that, but I have a hard time imagining one. There is no business case for not doing it simply because the market and the demand was still hot.

The investment group that ultimately bought the whole thing from the original owner and son weren't manufacturing people or anything like that. As I was told by one of their managers who also managed for the family, the investors were a few middle aged well off dentists and a similarly well off world class skeet shooter at the head of them. They only owned and controlled the company for the last 18 months to 24 months or so. Instead of fixing the problems, they enjoyed owning a cool rifle company similar to Kimber and gave little thought to who and how their cool company was being run.

The management, including the son and his friend who were still involved, focused on bringing out new models of rifles and getting maximum exposure from gun writers and industry magazines. They over-promised and under delivered, while ignoring that the machinery their business depended on was increasingly problematic. At least, that's my opinion as I sorted through the remnants trying to see what was wrong, what could be fixed, and what were landmines in our path forward. I heard a lot about all of that from the former lead hands in both shops over the previous five years, as well as former head machinists/CNC programmers.

The business case for their decisions seemed to me to be incomprehensible. Whether under family management or investor group management

As one example, the receiver castings that they contracted for, to go in the Haas CNC machines to be machined into the MRC receiver. They were receiving a large number that were so warped due to core slump that they almost looked like a banana. You would think they would be either returning them to the vendor with a nasty note requesting replacements and/or finding a new supplier of the castings.

Instead, they bought a 40 ton press, had Dave Kiff of Pacific Tool build them a jig, and told their employees to bend the castings back to being close enough that they would fit into the machining fixtures mounted on the tombstones in the Haas machines. After machining the straightened out receiver castings, they then shipped them to a company somewhere on the other side of the country - because after bending them like that, they needed to be re-heat treated and annealed. Then they could be shipped back to Montana for final fitting and assembly. Where it was often found that with all of this, sometimes the axis of the barrel was on the same axis that the receiver had. And because of being heat treated and annealed several times, sometimes the bluing was not uniform. One invoice alone showed 320 receivers shipped for corrective heat treating.

I never, from day one till I left, could ever understand why you would do that rather than simply returning defective castings. They had some pretty brilliant head machinists/CNC programmers; they didn't last long after fighting with the family running the business over decisions like that.

My friend, unfortunately, started making poor decisions based on no logical business case for making those decisions about half way through the time I worked for him as the ops manager. Similar dreams of glory rather than pragmatic management of what he bought, and starting small and building on small guaranteed profit. Over promising and under delivering, while ignoring those of us in his management team with our warnings of where we were... which eventually became almost pleading with him.

It's a shyte show, again. And like the family ownership, and then the investor group ownership, in reality he is only going to have himself to blame. Also like them, he probably won't accept that. And I am truly sad to see that - but at least I'm not there to be part of it and also responsible for it.

Other companies have benefited by my friend selling all the CNC machines to keep up with the bills generated by his dreams since purchasing it. Those machines and what they could have built are all gone now, maybe helping somebody else build their company dream. Another friend of he and I, who also worked for him in management, is now poised to start his own barrel making business after our friend eventually (at this point almost certainly) goes under in a month or two. I expect that once all that happens, the remaining employees - and they're damned fine employees that work magic getting what they can out of that abused machinery - will go to work for him. They know and have worked beside him. I hope our friend who's decided he can do it all by himself without the doom and gloom friends he asked to work for him managing the business finds a way to pull a rabbit out of his hat. But if he doesn't, that will give our/my other friend an opportunity to start a viable business supplying those customers, and those employees a new opportunity. Business and markets don't tolerate a vacuum existing where there is a demand. Failure means opportunities for others to fill the vacuum successfully.

Thus endeth the lesson... a precautionary tale with many moral of the stories contained inside of it.

[Surpmil]

Thank you for taking the trouble to share that. Salutary lessons indeed. It's amazing how often decisions are made on the basis of emotion rather than intellect, and how few employers seem to understand the real value of good employees and how to demonstrate and generate loyalty.