Olympic Arms is Shutting Down

Sad to see a manufacturer shutting down, but the only Olympic AR I owned (a stripped lower from them) was out of spec... required a lot of fiddling to build a rifle out of it. I personally have never bought another product from them.
 
Shuetzen Gun Works were probably the first non Colt AR15s to be available, certainly in Canada.

And they were push pin...

The real/main issue with them was the baked on finish was a little thick.
 
Like many others already posted. They never got around to making a top quality product
If you can't get it right in 10 years another 30 is not going to make any difference.
 
After 25 plus years my SGW Stop Sign AR has never missed a beat. Very accurate and a keeper for me. But hey maybe the later models where more problematic?
 
Nope, you just got lucky. As much as it seems they never made a truly stellar product, most of their reputation was earned early on, and my own SGW stop sign AR always had the faint wiff of lemon, at least until I reworked it and replaced enough parts that it now runs "okay". They got away with a lot in the mid 80s when they were only non-Colt option on the market, but once Armalite and Bushmaster came online and showed the world that it shouldn't be necessary to hand-fit parts to make them work together the lustre came off Olympic Arms pretty fast, and it never came back.
 
badboybeeson said:
Like many others already posted. They never got around to making a top quality product
If you can't get it right in 10 years another 30 is not going to make any difference.
Click to expand...

Yup...I've got one of the SGW stop sign rifles; only tried a couple shots and used a laser bore sighter on it....seems to shoot sideways. I'm hoping that when better weather comes I can do something with it; might have to jump on it a couple times to straighten it out....
 
In the 90's they built their reputation of making precision AR and the rather iconic AR pistol with the top side charging handle. They were also one of the few that offered pistol caliber ARs, other than colt.

Their reputation took a nose dive afterwards as quality issue seemed to be norm of the day. They wanted to play the low end AR game for awhile, that pretty much killed them once that stigma stuck on them. The AR market changed in 2000's - thanks to ARF and people wanted "mil spec" rifle
 
I had a 20" H-Bar with the SGW stop sign, etc and it was decent, but sad to say, my Norc M4gery could outshoot it six ways from Sunday - and was more reliable to boot. Don't miss that Oly at all.
 
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