2019! What a roller coaster of a year…
I want to first start off by saying how much we appreciate everyone who chose to do business with us in 2019, it was a hell of a year and it wouldn't be possible without all of you choosing to give us your business. Even more than your business, we appreciate how patient everyone has been with the delays we have encountered in the modern sporter lineup. So I have spent the last week between phone calls and emails making a little list of some of the biggest highlights we have had this past year.
Our Successes:
We have completely overhauled our production methods from previous runs of MH, MV and MS receivers, to move from running 1-2 parts per cycle, to where we are at now doing 8-16 parts per cycle on most machining operations, with the same machines. With these revisions we have managed to produce some 1,100 lower receivers, and over 1,500 upper receivers for our newest platform the Modern Sporter.
Modern Hunter and Modern Varmint back orders have been virtually eliminated! (yes I know there are still a few of you, literally only a few, who are still waiting and your patience is very much appreciated)
We attended TACCOM 2019 in Mississauga! This is the first gun show we have ever attended further east than Saskatchewan. This show was incredibly different from anything we’ve attended out west or done in the past and was truly the next level of an industry show in Canada.
At TACCOM we released 6 new rifle models off of our Modern Sporters:
MS18-A3
MS18-A3 CCFR Limited Edition
MS Titan
MS LCR Mod 0
MS LCR Mod 1
MS MK12 Mod 0
Throughout 2019, Dustin was out representing our company competing at eleven different 3 gun competitions in 3 provinces, sponsoring 5 matches with over $5,000.00 in prizes contributed to the tables.
We were proud to support the CCFR and display at their AGM, and thrilled to announce a Limited Edition Modern Sporter MS18-A3 project with them. $200 from each sale of these rifles goes directly to the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights to help further our interests in Ottawa!
We had a great time attending Canadian Podcasters Annual Charity Shoot being hosted in Drumheller in July of 2019! We brought a large selection of our firearms for the public to shoot and helped raise over $10,000.00 for local charities.
In the back end and behind the scenes we accomplished a lot and to lightly touch on those:
EDM programs redone completely and set up to run continuously 24 hr operation with new fixtures.
Rebuild, improvement, and replacement of fixturing, tooling and shop organization.
A new quality-control room, further improving on our ability to maintain stringent standards.
Network drives updated and offsite redundant backups implemented.
Network drives reorganized to improve workflow.
Significant security system upgrades including additional cameras.
Our Struggles:
We developed and submitted the Modern Sporter – Rimfire, with a 10.5” barrel dedicated in 22lr and 26.5” overall length, and got a non-restricted FRT!.... However, it was promptly reversed by the higher-ups in the firearms lab within 24 hours.
Our biggest struggle this year feels like it has been repairs and maintenance on the CNC machines… Cumulatively we had 41.5 weeks, or 1,660 hours of lost machine time which far exceeds any of our historical experiences.
EDM motherboard CMOS / programming (2 weeks)
EDM high voltage control drive electrical issues (2 weeks)
EDM chiller breakdown (1 week)
EDM upper/lower head maintenance issues (8 weeks)
Servo tuning (Mill 1 and 2) 4th axis issues (0.5 weeks)
(Mill 1) 4th axis replacement (10 weeks)
(Mill 2) 4th axis rebuild (6 weeks)
30,000 RPM air turbine spindle rebuild (8 weeks)
Spindle Replacement on (Mill 4) (2 weeks)
(Mill 1, 2, 3) “X” axis all ball screws replaced (2 days)
(Mill 1 and 3) tool changers repairs/rebuild (2 weeks)
POLITICS!!!!! I can’t emphasize this enough how big of a struggle this has been. I swear we are going to open a 1-900 number and start charging by the minute for these political-therapy sessions if this keeps up. [kidding… mostly]. It seems all the liberals can do is to keep talking about bans and confiscations, without ever actually putting anything in writing or providing any proof. Bill Blair’s “slip” about OIC, followed by his interview 24 hours later stating “this could take quite a while, up to 2 years”. The volume of drop ins, phone calls, and emails asking for us to guess what the Liberals will or won’t do, when we don’t have any more information available to us than the general public, has taken hundreds if not thousands of man hours.
Our Focus moving forward:
We are excited to announce that we have chosen Reliable Guns out of Vancouver to represent our products on the west coast! One of our goals for 2020 is to establish some strong stocking dealers in eastern Canada, as despite your funny politics, we know you’re not all bad out there.
I would like to see production increase to 1,600 lowers and 2,000 uppers this coming year. This is optimistic but achievable. It is reliant upon reducing the amount of mechanical downtime we had in 2019, which was simply unprecedented.
The Modern Sporter – Rimfire, we have plans to counter this “ruling”, and hopefully we can find the free time to implement these plans.
I’m also very excited to conclude the CCFR Limited Edition receivers and present them with a nice cheque showing the support of Canadians to really stand behind the tag line “Firearm Rights are Human Rights”. As it is right now, these are around half sold out of the limited #250 that we are making.
The 4th Axis for Mills 1 and 2 are both up and running again, and we are sending the uppers (that were supposed to have been finished many months ago) for anodizing. We just finished shipping a huge number of receivers out this week but we are critically low on uppers right now due to that downtime. I expect to ship out another big batch in two weeks and then reassess what is remaining to complete the second run at that time.
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