Eugene Morrison Stoner is the designer of what became the M16 system, but he was far more than that. He was a weapons designer for sure, but his interests included rotary winged aircraft, boats, and many other things. He was a genius on many levels.

Stoner was born on 22 November 1922, in Gasport, Indiana, an irony not lost on many AR-15 family collectors. He was a WWII veteran of the USMC, serving as an aviation ordnance technician in El Toro, the South Pacific, the Philippines, Okinawa, and in North China. He died 24 April 1997 in Palm City Florida. As a veteran, he had a solid understanding of what traits an infantryman wanted from a fighting rifle; it should be simple, reliable, robust, and accurate.

Most people today understand the effect Stoner had on modern weaponry; this article is not really about that. What we’re here to discuss is the birthday event that Stoner’s close friend and business partner C. Reed Knight, Jr, put on to celebrate Stoner’s 100^th birthday.

In all their years of friendship, Mr. Knight had managed to hunt down and collect almost all the Stoner designs. Hundreds of firearms were found, and in the process, one of the most amazing small arms collections in the world grew to fantastic size; first in Vero Beach, then in Titusville, Florida. The collection is referenced as either the Knight Collection, or more properly, the Institute of Military Technology. Reed Knight had a lot of dreams. He pursued, adjusted, and excelled at many, but a fervent one was to create a university, more or less, for mechanical engineers to learn firearms design. The institute provided the road map and the collection… well, it’s a working reference collection, one of the finest in the world. The collection goes far beyond just the designs of Stoner and Knight, it covers the development of small arms in almost every country in the world and provides an amazing glimpse into the weapons of our enemies and allies.

When it became close to Mr. Stoner’s 100^th birthday it appeared the date would coincide with the 60^th anniversary of the M16 and 40^th anniversary of Knight’s Armament Company, Mr. Knight and his staff sprang into action with a very ambitious plan; a party for 1200-1400 people. Many members of Knight’s Armament and the Institute’s employee groups devoted a lot of time to make impressive presentations. Attendees were treated to a band, local barbecue, and facility tours. The list of attendees was impressive, many manufacturers and government people were there, as well as members of the general public who had signed up for the tours. All in all, it was an excellent day. Good barbecue, good company, and one of the world’s most

Over the last 15 or so years, the sniper rifle in both concept and rifle has changed.It was not until the Vietnam War where a semiautomatic sniper rifle based on the M14 rifle was introduced. However, it did not perform as well as the bolt action counterpart and required a full time gunsmith to keep it working. So the semiautomatic rifle was in limited use with the standard still being the bolt action sniper rifle.

However, in the late 1950s a rifle was designed by Eugene M. Stoner at ArmaLite, Inc. called the AR-10. ArmaLite was a division of Fairchild Engine and Aircraft located in Hollywood, California. This revolutionary rifle was truly “Tomorrow’s Rifle Today,” that was more true than anyone knew back then. Although it never had a chance to compete head-on with the M14 for the next U.S. infantry rifle due to Army politics, as well as the deep rooted thought of a rifle having to be made from steel and wood, the AR-10 did get noticed. During its limited testing it was known to be the most accurate auto loading rifle made as said by the testers from Ordnance Corps. Limited numbers of AR-10 rifles were manufactured in the Netherlands by Artillerie-Inrichtingen. They were manufactured for Dutch Army trials as well as sold in limited numbers to some other countries including, Sudan, Cuba, Italy, Guatemala and Portugal. As predicted, the M14 was adopted and the AR-10 was tossed in the Ordnance Corps scrap heap. The requirement came down to scale the AR-10 down to a .22 caliber and the AR-15 was born. The rights were sold for the AR-15 as well as the AR-10 to Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company. Colt went on to produce the AR-15 but ignored the AR-10 design. That was left for other companies to capitalize on. To trace the AR-10 lineage to today’s most advanced sniper rifle we must skip ahead nearly 30 or so years ahead to 1991.

In November of 1991, a Mission Needs Statement was drafted for an Enhanced Sniper Support Team Weapon (SSTW). This was written by Lt. Col. David Lutz while serving as the Program Manager for Infantry Weapons at MARCORSYSCOM at Quantico, VA. This documentation was an effort to restart a cancelled Designated Marksman Weapon program (DMR) based on the M14 which could not be made to do all the things needed in a logistically supportable package acceptable to the Fleet Marine Forces. Its requirement document was weak because it totally lacked objectivity in doing a mission analysis or seeking other viable solutions. At the time, the current SSTW was the M16A2 rifle. This weapon supported the M40A1 sniper rifle in the two man scout sniper team. The M16A2 SSTW was used to engage close-up targets and provide rapid fire suppressive fire if needed. Some noted deficiencies were the M16A2’s poor interface with the soldier when having optics mounted, including night vision. The current issue M855 ball ammunition did not meet the accuracy specifications of a SSTW.

The enhanced SSTW would fill the role of a 0 to 600 meter intermediate range sniper rifle. It would have ammunition interchangeability with the M40A1 7.62x51mm sniper rifle and it would have the ability to mount a sound suppressor. Optics would be mounted in-line with the shooter’s eyes for a comfortable mount. This rifle will also have to overcome current problems with the unit, direct, general, and depot support problems (availability and maintainability) long associated with the hand-built and Marine Corps customized M40A1.

Lt. Col. Lutz recalls that he knew of (5 each) Dutch NATO AR-10s that were in a bunker at Picatinny Arsenal from when he was stationed there during 1980-83. So he had one of his successors, USMC Liaison Officer Maj. Dody Knootz, pick out one that shot the best and “temporary loan” it to them at Quantico. Several modifications were made with the most significant being the carrying handle cut off and a weaver rail attached to the upper receiver. The AR-10 had some of the improved M16A2 components added to it including the pistol grip and handguards. All this was to make it look like and use A2 service rifle parts and training. Additionally, they removed the AR-10’s faux muzzle, which incorporated a grenade launching spigot, exposed its skinny barrel and threaded muzzle. Lutz recalls sending the upper to Phil Seberger to have a suppressor made & fitted to it.

As recalled by Lutz, as a concept demonstrator it was a success. “When my general came out to fire it he brought with him his Australian Army Liaison Officer, a full colonel. My general was reluctant to fire the weapon as I presented it to him, and handed if off to the Australian Colonel. Offhand, the Colonel hit a steel gong at 100 yards with 20 of 20 shots (suppressed). When he handed the rifle back to my general, he said “General, this is the finest rifle I have ever fired.” When the General handed the rifle back to me, he said “Dave, you have a program.” I guess the rest is history…” Though the concept was sound, the Marines or big army were not ready for a semiautomatic sniper rifle, at least not yet. So the AR-10 lay dormant once again until the early 1990s. Even though the original DMR program failed, the STSW maintained life in the requirement and allowed Rifle Team Equipment builders at Quantico to produce more prototype M14 based variants as “interim measures.” This eventually took on a “life of its own,” and an M14 based program eventually found traction as the M39 Enhanced Marksman Rifle (EMR). However, the M39 is one of the weapons being replaced by the Marines recent purchase of M110s. The M110 was inherently able to meet the STSW requirement for mounting of Night Vision without lose of zero, sound suppressor integration, M16 ordnance maintenance and training commonality, supply system commonality and cross-service weapon commonality.

The name Eugene Stoner, although not as well known as Browning, is just as significant in the history of the gun. Stoner’s design is the longest service rifle in U.S. military history. During Stoner’s ArmaLite days his goal was to develop 7.62x51mm weapons. He was very fond of his direct gas system. After the M14 was selected, the future was only in the smaller caliber round so Stoner went on to develop other rifles to fire the 5.56mm cartridge including the AR-18 and the Stoner weapon series. He never quite forgot his AR-10. In the early 1990s, Stoner went to work with C. Reed Knight, Jr., the president of Knight’s Armament Company. The union spawned the rebirth of the AR-10. This would be the SR-25 (Stoner Rifle-25 (15+10)). This rifle would be an AR-10 but would take on the advancements of the M16A2 rifle and maintain 60% parts compatibility.

Released in the early 1990s, the SR-25 Match Rifle was equipped with a 24-inch Remington 5R match grade barrel – the same barrel blanks used on the M24 sniper rifle. The heavy barrel was free floating with a fiberglass handguard. The rifle was equipped with a flat top upper receiver with the Mil-Std 1913 rail and the receivers were made from aluminum extrusions. The rifle was equipped with a 2-stage match grade trigger. The bolt carrier group kept with the original AR-10 in that it was chrome plated and it also sported the captive firing pin retainer pin. These were not mass produced rifles. The uppers and lowers were mated together and had matching serial numbers to identify them. They were specifically designed around the 168gr OTM Match cartridge. Using this factory load, the ogive of the bullet set right on the rifling. This is something match shooters want to accomplish due to not wanting the bullet to “jump” into the rifling thus maintaining control of the projectile right from the moment of chambering. The original rifles used the standard “waffle” pattern 20-round magazine and later a steel magazine that looked more like an M16 20-round magazine in appearance. The SR-25 was sold initially through commercial channels that funded R&D. Every SR-25 was test fired at the factory and provided with a target. Knight guaranteed that this rifle would fire 1 MOA or under with factory ammunition. Gene Stoner would work with Knight up until his death in 1997.

The SR-25 quickly gained its reputation for precision accuracy and reliability and its versatility and benefits were appreciated right away by the special operation forces. SOCOM liked the idea of having a semiautomatic rifle that held 20 rounds of ammunition and rivaled the M24 and M40A1 bolt action rifles. They also liked that you could engage multiple targets in less than half the time they could with a manual bolt action rifle.

After more than 40 years, the AR-10 would have its day. In May of 2000, the U.S. Navy and SOCOM adopted the SR-25 as their new Mk 11 Mod 0. This would be follow by another contract in 2007 for 9.9 million dollars with the need from the Global War On Terrorism. The Mk11 had some departures from the original design. Designed to meet the SOCCOM requirement, the rifle was designed to fire the M118 and M118LR match grade 7.62x51mm NATO ammunition. The Remington barrel was replaced with an Obermeyer barrel and was shortened to 20 inches and equipped with a mount for a quick detachable sound suppressor also developed by Knight’s Armament Company. The 11.35-inch Rail Accessory System free floating handguard provided quad Mil-Std 1913 rails enabling attachment of any given number of accessories including night vision, lasers, tactical lights and bipods. The standard M16A2 stock and pistol grip are used for parts commonality. A flip up front sight was added to the gas block as well as KAC’s fully adjustable back-up iron sight was added. The rifle was equipped with 20-round magazines, a Leupold Vari-X mil dot scope with detachable rings and a Harris bipod. The Mk11 weighs 15.3 pounds unloaded and has an overall length of 45.4 inches. The Mk11 would see action with U.S. Special Operations troops all over the world. The weight of the complete Mk11 Mod 0 with the Leupold 3.5×10 scope & SIMRAD adapter, bipod adapter with LM type S Bipod is 13.7 pounds.

Enter the M110 SASS (Semi Automatic Sniper System)

The success of the Mk11 was undeniable and spread to the other branches of the military – the sniper units in particular. Seeing the benefits in September of 2005, Knight’s won the contract for the M110 SASS rifle. The M110 was to replace the M24 bolt action sniper rifles in the U.S. Army. The M110 trials had many submissions including ArmaLite, Remington and DPMS Panther Arms. It would not be until April of 2008 that the M110 would see its first combat action with U.S. Army snipers from Task Force Fury in Afghanistan. During the early M110 period, the Marines purchased 180 XM110 variants they designated Mk11 Mod 1 and then in 2010 ordered 803 M110 rifles.

The M110 has many similarities to the Mk11 Mod 0, however with many enhancements. . The stock on the M110 is adjustable for length with a dial on the rear allowing for the length to be increased or decreased as desired. The stock has one moveable sling swivel mount on the bottom rear plus two QD mounts on the front of the stock on each side. The receiver is manufactured from an aluminum forging and incorporates fully ambidextrous selector lever, bolt catch and magazine release. A button right above the magazine catch on the right side of the receiver is the ambi-bolt release. This allows the right handed shooter to release the bolt without his hand ever leaving the pistol grip. On the left side of the receiver under the bolt catch is a button to release the magazine for a left handed shooter. The trigger is Knight’s 2-stage match trigger, which is exceptional for a sniper rifle.

The upper receiver utilizes the new URX (Upper Receiver Extending) free floating rail with an integral folding front sight. This saves space and makes for a dependable back-up sight. The bottom of the handguard is removable for cleaning. Quad Mil-Std 1913 rails allow attachment of any accessory imaginable. The top rail is continuous for adding thermal, night vision and scopes. The handguard comes with three KAC rail protectors that allow the rifle to be shot in a normal shooting position. It is also equipped with a Harris Type S bipod. The 20 inch Obermeyer heavy barrel has 5R grooves with a 1 turn in 11 inch twist that optimizes the 168 and 175gr match bullets of the M118 and M118LR ammunition. The M110 barrel has an A2-style compensator attached to the end. The pinned-on gas block has a Mil-Std 1913 rail on top of it. The M110 is a self-regulated direct gas operated rifle. The upper receiver is manufactured from a forging and now has an integrated fired cartridge case deflector. Early rifles, due to the upper being made from an extrusion, had the fired cartridge case deflector attached to the rail as a separate piece.

The bolt carrier group follows in the tradition of the original AR-10 in that it is chrome plated making for ease of cleaning. The bolt carrier has a captive firing pin retainer pin that prevents it from being lost during cleaning. The bolt utilizes a 1-piece gas ring that is much more durable than the standard 3-ring set. The extractor and, in particular the spring, have been enhanced since the inception of the rifle.

The M110 is packed with four 20-round and four 10-round magazines and pouches. The M110 can also use the Magpul LMag as well.

The optic used is the Leupold 3.5×10 Illuminated Reticle SASS scope with .5 MOA elevation clicks and 30mm SASS mount manufactured by Knight’s. The shooter can adjust the brightness of the reticle to suit the lighting conditions he faces. The scope is provided with lens covers.

The SASS also is equipped with a Knight’s Armament Company sound suppressor. The suppressor interfaces with two vertical slots cut on both sides of the gas block. There is an alignment pin on the underside of the gas block that prevents improper installation. The suppressor has a decibel reduction of -28dB.

Additional accessories include an operator’s repair parts kit that includes scope ring cap screws, bolt rings, extractor assembly, spring, pin and buffer, cam pin and firing pin. Am optics cleaning kit is provided and a torque wrench for the scope mounts. A complete cleaning system is provided as well. This includes an Otis DMR/M14 7.62 cleaning kit, Dewey rod and bore guide, multiple brushes, rod ends, pipe cleaners and swabs. Cleaning patches a bore snake and CLP is provided as well. A sling is provided as well. All this is provided in a large Hardigg box that is hermetically sealed with a pressure release valve.

The ammunition used in this test and evaluation firing was the M110 Silver State Armory (SSA) M118LR ammunition. There were 200 rounds fired with the barrel being cleaned every 10 rounds. The range was 100 meters and the rifle shot consistently sub-MOA. The best group was 5 rounds in a 1/2 inch group. The average was 3/4 inches. This is accuracy of a match bolt action rifle. Silver State Armory ammunition is match grade and they manufacture their own brass cartridge cases and blend their own powders to the particular load. Additional rounds of the 168gr OTM ammunition were fired with the same results as the M118LR.

It this shooter’s opinion there is no bolt action rifle out there that can beat the M110 on accuracy, speed and firepower. A sniper with a M110 can easily engage the same number of targets in less than half the time a well trained sniper can with a bolt action rifle. The suppressor makes it that much better: less noise, less invitation to reveal your position and no affect on accuracy. As expected, no malfunctions of any sort were encountered with the M110.

The M110 has a weight of 12.82 pounds equipped with iron sights, bipod adapter and scope. With M118LR ammunition the muzzle velocity is 2,571 feet per second. The overall length of the M110 is 40.5 inches with the stock at its shortest setting. The sound suppressor only adds 1.62 pounds to the rifle. The maximum effective range is 875 yards and is subjective to the skill of the shooter.

It is most unfortunate Gene Stoner did not live to see his AR-10 finally get into the U.S. inventory and equip the most elite snipers this world has ever known. He was way ahead of everyone in the late 1950s; they just did not have the vision to see it. Gene Stoner’s legacy has been the defense of this country and allies for nearly 50 years and being one of the most brilliant weapons designers of all time. Thanks to Reed Knight, Stoners vision was realized, produced and reintroduced to the U.S. military. Combining the genius of Gene Stoner with Knight’s technical and manufacturing abilities of KAC, the AR-10 will be with us for another 50 years.

Header photo, Left to right: UNS-SR is a night vision unit that utilizes 1 AA battery with a life exceeding 24 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 250+ meters in starlight. UNS is a night vision unit that utilizes 2 AA batteries with life expectancy exceeding 48 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 500+ meters in starlight. UNS-LRLP is a night vision unit that utilizes 2 AA batteries with life expectancy exceeding 48 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 800+ meters in starlight. UNS TLR is a Thermal vision unit that utilizes two DL123 batteries with life expectancy exceeding 5.5 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 800 meters, and UNS T is a Thermal vision unit that utilizes two DL123 batteries with life expectancy exceeding 5.5 hours, mounts in front of almost any day optic that the rails will line up, and has recognition of a man-sized target out to 1,000 meters. In front is FIST. This is the “Blended Technology” model that allows the operator to add in-line night vision and thermal capability with one unit that mounts in front of the day scope. FIST uses two DL123 batteries with a full “On” life expectancy of six hours. The thermals can detect a man-sized target at 1,000 meters, and the night vision capability extends beyond 800 meters for a man-sized target in starlight.

C. Reed Knight, Jr. is a name that is very familiar to readers of SAR. Reed has been at the forefront of special weapons technologies for decades, working with the likes of Gene Stoner and many other modern designers on programs from the Knight suppressors to the rail forends used by much of the U.S. Military today, as well as the MK11 Mod O and M110 SASS rifles.

Never one to sit back on his laurels, Reed put his engineering team onto a problem that he saw over his 25-plus years dealing with government needs. Knight’s Armament has been involved in the development of night vision opto-electronics since 1991, when they were the test facility for SOTF. They evolved their participation into JSOC, and other groups within the U.S. government. It didn’t take too long before Reed and his engineering team decided that they had the necessary skills, facility, and equipment to solve the problems they were seeing.

The first problem was the night vision equipment was divided into two main categories: standalone vision aids, and dedicated opto-electronic weapon scopes. The two were not interchangeable, and Knight’s was the first group to create the in-line night vision system. This allowed the operator to install his night vision device in front of the standard day optic for night use, and with Knight’s design, it kept the point of aim within .5 MOA. There is a shift that occurs when putting a night vision opto-electronic device in front of a straight optical one, and Knight’s successfully adapted to this. A second problem was that most manufacturers of opto-electronic gear were specialists in their field, and had little experience with firearms and the shock/ mount problems and recoil effect. Knight’s was uniquely qualified to address these issues due to the decades of firearms experience and engineering in the facility.

The latest optics solution that has entered the combat theatre is the new Thermal Weapon Sights (TWS) and their presence has added a third component to the soldier’s kit. Now the soldier would have a day sight, a night sight, and a thermal sight. With Knight’s first engineering solutions, the operator can use his day sight, and when needed simply attach his night vision device in front of it on the rail and there will be virtually no point of impact shift.

Knight’s second solution was to work towards “blended technologies,” meaning some of the opto-electronics offered from Knight’s are a night vision device combined with a thermal weapon sight, and the operator can select his choice of operation on the one blended unit while it is mounted in front of his day optic. The operator can choose day sight only, night vision, and night vision enhanced with thermal using “white as hot,” or using “black as hot.”

Knight’s has also pioneered the removal of film that was being sandwiched into the lenses, and these innovations are allowing the removal of the “Halo” effect that blurs up the detail. For more information, please contact the manufacturer:

Knights Armament Company
701 Columbia Blvd,
Titusville, FL 32780 USA
Tel: (321) 407-9900
www.knightarmco.com

When one hears the name Knight’s Armament Company (KAC) and/or their president’s name, C. Reed Knight, Jr., one automatically thinks of world class quality and ingenuity. The out of the box thinking has made KAC a defense contractor to be reckoned with; one that is known to supply our most elite special operations forces. The downside is that if you are not military, you waited a long time to get any of KAC’s high end weapons. When the company started out with its development of the renowned SR-25, development was funded through commercial sales. KAC has never mass produced any small arm as attention to detail and strict quality control prohibit this. Every SR-25 that leaves the factory is provided with a test target showing it fired less than 1 MOA prior to it leaving the factory. When news of a new 5.56mm rifle that KAC was introducing was released, it was anticipated that this weapon was going to be in a class all its own. Reed Knight was not just going to come out with a standard black rifle with his name on it – the rifle would be in a class by itself: and we were not disappointed.

As of this writing, the market is awash with black rifles. Nearly every major manufacturer has their own derivative of the black rifle with most M4-type clones with standard features. Relatively few of these weapons are combat grade weapons. Most are made specifically to cater to the commercial market where price is a concern amongst others. However, for those who stand ready to make combat reliable weapons, severe attention to detail, stringent quality control and relentless pursuit of ways to improve the weapon systems are constantly sought. Few manufacturers truly step up to the plate to build combat reliable weapon systems. The cost and facility needed to accomplish such a task are cost prohibitive for many manufacturers.

The SR-15 E3 is very unique in the world of black rifles from muzzle to stock. When designed, the concept was taking the best and making it better. Prior to release, KAC looked at existing weapon systems and looked at the critiques and took them into consideration. They examined the accessories operators were buying to make their weapons more effective and built many of them into their new rifle. With KAC’s involvement with Special Operations soldiers they understood the needs of the operators.

Starting with the barrel, the 16 inch barrel is chrome plated and hammer forged. Many within the SOCOM community feel that hammer forged barrels have longer service life than conventional button cut rifled barrels. They have the Mil-Spec 1/7 inch twist so the barrel will handle any projectile up to 80 grains that could be fed to it. The barrel is free floating in the KAC URX (Upper Receiver Extending) handguard. The URX has quad Mil-Std 1913 rails with a removable lower handguard. The lower handguard is retained by a plunger that is located at the bottom rear of the rail and can be depressed with a bullet tip or suitable tool. The lower handguard is secured (tightened) by two screws, one on each side of the rail. The two screws must be removed before depressing the plunger to remove to lower handguard. There are five integrated sling swivel mounds located on the URX. Two on the front side rails, two on the back side rails and one on the front of the bottom handguard. There are also numerous points that a KAC Sling Swivel Stud Assembly can be installed. Additionally integrated into the URX is a folding front sight. This Integrated Micro-Adjustable Folding Front Sight can be adjusted by hand by a dial. Neither bullet tip nor front sight adjustment tool is needed. The front sight is actuated by pushing inward on a button on the left side of the sight. The front sight post is very unique as well being extremely narrow and round. This is extremely beneficial and will increase accuracy by having a more precise aiming point. The sight is protected by “rabbit ears” to prevent damage. When folded, it has stop notches so optics or accessories can be attached over it.

The SR-15 E3 is provided with a 600 meter adjustable folding rear sight. This is one of the few Back-Up Iron Sights (BUIS) that are adjustable for windage as well as elevation. Of course, any BUIS can be used. Also provided with the rifle for examination was the new line of Micro Sight assemblies. The first is the 600 meter fully adjustable micro sight assembly (KAC part number 25650). This is a smaller and more compact version of the standard one (KAC part number 98474). The other is the 300 meter micro sight assembly (KAC part number 25475). This is a smaller and more compact version of the standard adjustable for windage only (KAC part number 97082). The micro sight assemblies were introduced at the 2009 SHOT Show.

The gas system has been altered from the conventional M4 carbine by utilizing a mid-length gas system. The gas port is placed in between the carbine and rifle gas tube lengths. This gives more dwell time (bolt remains closed longer allowing residual pressure to drop, which allows the cartridge case to contract more before extraction) thus increasing extraction reliability and durability. The URX used on the SR-15 E3 is specifically designed to accommodate the mid-length gas system.

The bolt carrier is a standard M16/M4 carrier with a well staked carrier key. Knights usually fully chrome plates the entire bolt and bolt carrier as their trademark. The SR-15 bolt carrier only had standard chrome plating on the inside of the bolt carrier and carrier key. The outside of the bolt carrier for the SR-15 is the standard Mil-Spec manganese phosphate finish.

The bolt on the other hand is all new. Knight’s were of the mindset to build an improved carbine and to do so would require actual improvements to correct deficiencies. This means the priority is on reliability and durability, not interchangeability. The multi-lug improved E3 bolt is just that. USSOCOM had complained of bolt breakage as the bolts would wear out and more than often they would break at the cam pin slot. Knight’s realized that the only way to increase that strength was to have more material in that area; so that is exactly what they did, by decreasing the diameter of the cam pin allowing more material on the bolt. There is a reduction in the diameter of the firing pin that was the result of creating a solid material recess for the dual extractor springs that astride the firing pin hole. What this adds up to is significant increase in service life of the bolt. Another issue addressed by SOCOM was failures to extract. This was mainly due to worn out extractor springs or lack of use of the newer generation gold springs. The solution was to add a rubber O-ring around the extractor spring assembly. Knight’s took an entire new approach. Rather than band-aid the problem, they created a completely new ejector. The extractor has a “lobster tail” configuration and utilizes two extractor springs instead of one – similar to Karl Lewis’ enhanced bolt. These differ by another major design change by Knights. They moved the location of the extractor pivot pin from the rear quarter to the center. Combine the two extractor springs with the leverage of having the pivot point in the middle you have a major increase in extractor force. A dirt groove was added right behind the extractor claw as well to give dirt a place to go rater than on the extractor claw. Additionally, the locking lug geometry has been changed. The corner edges from the lugs have been rounded off to increase the cross sectional area of the lugs, which increases the strength of the lugs. The bolt lugs are a common failure area of the conventional square lug bolt lugs.

The lower receiver has all been reworked as well. There are and have never been any “stock” weapons to come out of Reed’s factory. Starting at the rear, the LMT SOPMOD stock is used along with a 6-position receiver extension. The stock has a triangular cheek weld along with two removable battery compartments that are water resistant. Also, there are two Integrated Sling Swivel Mounts for the right and left side and a removable rubber buttpad. The lower receiver also has two Integrated Sling Swivel Mounds on the receiver right behind the rear takedown pin. This is a KAC innovation and has not been done in a lower receiver before. These points are preferred by those who like the one-point slings. Moving forward is the KAC ambidextrous selector lever that is not just for south paws as depending on your tactical position you may be holding the rifle in your left hand. Another major innovation by Knight’s is the ambidextrous bolt and magazine catch. The bolt catch is integrated into the lower receiver and is located just above and behind the magazine release button on the right side of the receiver. This enables a right handed shooter to be able to actuate and close the bolt with his trigger finger. Both the magazine and bolt release can be actuated by the trigger finger. The ambidextrous magazine release button is integrated into the lower receiver and is located on the left side right in front of the trigger guard. The ambidextrous magazine release button is easily actuated by the left handed shooters trigger finger. The trigger guard has been redesigned to accommodate a gloved trigger finger and is of Knight’s own design. Like the standard trigger guard, it can be hinged down by depressing the detent. The trigger itself is not stock either and is KAC’s proprietary two-stage trigger. The trigger breaks at 4-1/2 pounds and may be adjusted for as little or more creep and desired.

The sample rifle came with three KAC rail protectors, a vertical pistol grip and one Mil-Spec Okay Industry magazine was provided. That magazine was not stock either and was equipped with a new KAC magazine follower. The follower is identified by its white color and KAC written on the end. This is an anti-tilt follower, which is another reliability enhancement.

The fit and finish of the rifle was superb as what one comes to expect from Reed Knight. It weighed in at a light 6.75 pounds unloaded and measured at 33 inches in length with the stock closed and 36.25 inches with the stock fully extended. The lightweight was extremely surprising considering the enhancements from the basic design. The whole package came in a large black polymer case.

In testing the rifle a few things were added. There was only one thing left this author could think of to enhance the reliability of this rifle even more than KAC already has: that was to feed it with Magpul PMags. Based on this author’s experience, it is the finest magazine made for the black rifle. The PMags with the MagLevel (window) were used. The chosen optic was the Aimpoint CompM4 and 3X magnifier.

The ammunition used in test firing the SR-15 E3 was provided by Silver State Armory (SSA). SSA recently moved into a larger state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Packwood, Washington. SSA is known for producing high quality match grade tactical and target ammunition and is also one of the few American companies that produce various armor piercing ammunition for law enforcement/military use. The particular ammunition used for this test was 300 rounds of their 5.56mm M193 Ball. This ammunition is actually 5.56mm and loaded in cartridge cases manufactured by Silver State Armory. Accuracy testing was done with Silver State Armory 5.56mm 77gr Sierra OTM (SSAA10075-77Sierra).

When one takes a Knight’s Armament Company weapon to the range, the bar is raised. High expectations are present and when firing the SR-15, there was no disappointment. The rifle was tested on a brisk winter upstate New York afternoon with a chilling 12º F. There were no malfunctions of any kind during testing. In all, more than 500 rounds were fired. The SR-15 shot continuous 1 MOA groups at 100 yards with both Silver State Armory 77 grain OTM and 55 grain FMJ ammunition. The Aimpoint CompM4 with the 3x magnifier worked out extremely well for this distance. Dialing the intensity of the dot down so it did not overpower the size of the bull’s-eye made all the difference. The rifle may serve well as a fighting carbine or a short range containment rifle. It has the reliability and the accuracy to accomplish both tasks.

Knight’s has put out a world class black rifle, one which sets a new standard as to where the black rifle can go and how much more can be done with this timeless design. After more than 40 years this family of weapons continues to evolve. With the talk of a new service weapon it really leads one to ask, “Why?” Properly made black rifles are light, accurate, reliable, user friendly, modular, adaptable and most of all, proven. Knight’s not to long ago was awarded the contract for the U.S. Army M110 sniper rifle system. This moved sniper rifles to another level in the U.S. armed forces. Traditional thinking of having to have a bolt action rifle for it to be accurate had been challenged. The M110 gives every bit of accuracy of the bolt action rifle with the semi-auto firepower allowing up to 50% decrease in engagement time over the current bolt action rifle. KAC is on the cutting edge of black rifle technology and will for sure be a company to follow to see the future of the black rifle.

Last Month in Part I of The Interview, we ended with the following quote from Reed: “We have been able to take the ideas and the needs of a customer, and build solutions to those needs. My talent has probably been to think outside of the box. Gene Stoner told me something interesting one day; he said, “I believe when you become an engineer, and they teach you the disciplines, you learn that one and one make two, and that you have to do it this way because this is what the book says to do, I think it prevents you from becoming a true designer. If I sometimes knew what the engineering math was on some of my designs before going all the way through with them, I probably would’ve quit earlier.”

SAR: Interesting quote from Mr. Stoner… 

Knight: There are a lot of things that I’ve done not knowing it “couldn’t be done.” When we built the silent revolvers, everybody said, “That just can’t be done.” We thought, “Well, maybe it can.” There was a lot of trial and error and a lot of work. It was in 1989-90, and we needed a very, very small gun that was able to be taken apart and put in a briefcase, have a 200 meter range, have good optics, night-vision, and silenced capability. We built a .30-caliber silent rifle on the Ruger Redhawk frame, with a removable shoulder stock and an integrally suppressed barrel using custom case-telescoped ammunition. We used a very heavy .30 caliber bullet that was case-telescoped inside a .44 Magnum cartridge case. This was almost “Hollywood quiet,” and accurate out to 200 meters. It fit into a very small briefcase, with night vision capabilities. Those were the types of things that I got up early in the morning to go do, because I was excited about doing it, and I had a full team of people that really were passionate about making those things work. There was a requirement for that rifle/ammunition combination, and the revolver had another advantage in that after you fired it, you did not leave the brass cases behind like a semiautomatic, and it was better than a bolt gun because the cartridge is laying on the ground. It was a great project, a fun and very challenging project. Art Hoelke, my production manager today, worked on that project. A lot of things that we developed were just started by thinking, “Boy, that’d be neat to build” and we ended up in production. We’ve also built dozens of things that haven’t gone anywhere. That’s just the way it works.

SAR: You had the Mark 23 program.

Knight: We had teamed with Colt on the Offensive Handgun program back in the ’80s, and we built the suppressor. I had already sold Colt the design of the All-American 2000, which they were building, and they took that design and built a .45-caliber pistol based on it. The barrel rotated, moving straight back, which lends itself quite well to mounting a suppressor. H&K built a suppressor on their pistol candidate. The Colt gun and the H&K gun went out to test, and the H&K gun won. It had a plastic lower receiver and it had some other advantages in that the Colt gun was heavy, and it had some other disadvantages. But our suppressor was better; it was the first time that the Navy had ever seen a total of 40 dB drop in a handgun.

We were actually getting an honest-to-goodness, 162 dB starting pressure at one meter from the muzzle, and 122 dB with the suppressor attached to the gun. They either advised or requested HK to come pick us up as part of their team. HK was pretty negative about doing anything outside, because they had their own design team and they did their own manufacturing. They did pick us up as a subcontractor, and we built the suppressor, and if there ever was a suppressor that has become known as an “Energizer Bunny,” it would be that suppressor. I have a suppressor that has 250,000 rounds of .45 ammunition on it, and it’s still going. It’s noisier because it’s filled with lead and particles, but it’s still going. The user wore out three pistols with that one suppressor.

SAR: You mentioned the All-American 2000 pistol.

Knight: Gene Stoner and I woke up one Monday morning, figuratively speaking, and found ourselves with no military contracts. We would sit down at lunch and say, “What in the world are we going to do from here?” I’d been over visiting Henk Visser in Holland, and Henk said that he had a pistol that he had bought the manufacturing rights to that was a very small, compact, 9mm. Gene and I had talked about it, and Gene said he had a better idea. We sat down and started talking about it, and so we came up with ideas and started building a few little parts, lots of changes. We finally ended up building this pistol, the All-American 2000 as it ended up being called. The initial concept was a very small, compact, double action only rotary barreled pistol.

Trey: As far as from a design point, my dad brought the trigger mechanism to the table…

Knight: … and Gene brought the rotary barrel. The concept was based around an idea that when you picked up the pistol, it was always safe, there was no stored energy in the firing pin and no stored energy in the cocked hammer. You could lay the gun down, it was ready to go, and it also did not have any stored energy. You picked it up and had a very light double-action trigger pull that you pulled the trigger all the way through, and it pulled the striker back and caused the striker to hit. That concept was similar to what Glock later picked up on. We started building some guns. Gary French, who was the President of Colt, (owned by Colt Industries at that time), knew they were looking to sell Colt because they’d just lost the M-16A2 contract to FN, and their factory was downsizing. Colt Industries decided to divest themselves of Colt Firearms. Gary French looked at his list of all the things that they had that were on their future designs and future capabilities and the one thing they did not have was a good 9mm pistol. Gary talked to me and said, “How about your gun? Could we talk about manufacturing it for you?” We struck a deal, they were going to manufacture it and pay us royalties, as well as an up-front fee. This was the first gun that they’d ever bought that they did not manufacture any of the parts, it was all subcontracted to outside vendors. We were supposed to receive a down payment, which we got, another in three months, which we got, and then they said, “I don’t know that we want to continue putting this money into the costs of this thing. Is there anything else that you would consider that we could do?” I said, “Well, do you have any old guns laying around up there?” Colt said, “We have tons of guns in our pattern room and on the shop floor.” We grabbed old shopping carts that had those little rattly wheels on the front, and rolled through the wooden floors where the original plant was. We went into all these old dungeon-looking dark rooms, with racks and racks of old guns, and we just scooped guns up and put them in these shopping carts. Two or three of us did this, and there were hundreds of these old guns, some prototypes, some other manufacturers’ guns, different types of guns that you could ever imagine. We swept them up into the carts and that’s what Colt traded me for one of the payments. In retrospect, nobody knew that machine guns were going to skyrocket in value, and some of these guns are very, very significant.

SAR: This leads us into one of your passions, which is the reference library of firearms that you have.

Knight: Exactly. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have these reference collections available for study. I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been at the right place at the right time on many of these deals. I got a big part of the Armalite collection when it went up for sale in the late ’80s. I also bought a very big part of the Colt collection when it went for sale. I got all of Sam Cummings’ machine guns that he had left the last time that he visited the United States, and I bought the whole Fairchild collection. That was kind of interesting – Gene Stoner was negotiating with Fairchild, because Colt had not paid them their last royalty payments. In one of my trips to Colt, I talked to Bob Morrison, and I said, “I don’t know how successful we’re going to be doing a deal with this pistol that you want to buy because Colt has not paid Gene Stoner his royalties for the M16 for the last two years.” Bob Morrison said, “You’re kidding me.” The payments were being paid from Colt to Fairchild, and Fairchild divided those things up and gave Stoner money and Stoner’s ex-wife money, and some to the Cooper-McDonald family. Everybody got a piece of this chunk of money. Gene had mentioned to me that he had recently talked to the lawyer from Fairchild, and that there was one gun that he had built in his garage that he wanted back and that was in the Fairchild collection.

I contacted the lawyer, and said, “Mr. Stoner has a gun that he had built in his garage that’s in the Fairchild collection, and I’d like to see if I can get it back,” and he said, “No, there’s no way that we’re going to dispose of these guns, because we have to have proof of concept because we’re in a position for a possible battle with Colt over the rights of who owns the technology. The patent’s long run out by now, but we had sold the know-how to them, and we have to prove that we own that know-how.” I said, “Actually, what you need is an expert witness to do that, and I’m your guy. I know this backwards and forwards. If you sell this collection to me, I will promise to keep it until these dates run out,” which was in seven years. He asked, “What would you give us?” I said, “Well, let me just think about it.” I thought about it, and I said, “Let me give you a check for X amount of dollars,” and he said, “Okay,” so I wrote a check out for X amount of dollars and said, “Consider this a deposit.” He said, “Okay.” Two weeks later I went up to their office at the Dulles Airport. I met the president and I sat down, and said, “I’d like to talk to you about this,” and he opened up this closet, about four foot by four foot, and there were many of the prototype AR-10s and M16s that Fairchild had thought that had been lost for all these years, stacked in the corner like cordwood. My jaw dropped. Here were all these prototypes, I think my heart actually stopped, because I’d never even heard of some of these guns. I made an offer and he said, “Okay, well, put it in writing and come back.” I went back two weeks later with Form 3s with all the serial numbers. I said, “This is my offer,” and he said, “This gun number one, we’ve been told that it is worth X number of dollars just by itself.” I said, “You think it’s worth that, it’s not worth that to me, so just take that out of the collection, and I’ll give you this for everything minus gun number one.” He said, “Gun number one’s not worth this much money?” I said, “Not to me, it’s not.” He said that they would go out and get more offers, and I said, “That’s fine, why don’t you give me my check back?” He said, “That’s another problem. “We’ve spent your check and we don’t have your check to give back to you.” I told him I had an appointment at ATF to have these Forms signed, and didn’t want to miss it, and that I thought we had a deal, and they spent my money as if we did. He signed the Forms, I went down to ATF that afternoon. The next morning I went and picked up the Forms, brought them back to him, put those guns in my van and headed back to Florida.

SAR: So you did really, really well on that trip, Reed? [laughter]

Knight: Not all those trips are good trips, but that one was one that I’d have to say that was a very memorable one. Armalite AR-15 number one that had been given to General Wyman, a bunch of the Dutch AR-10s of all different configurations, it was just amazing. I now had a very interesting collection of AR-10s and AR-15s from Colt and Fairchild. That’s where my focus was, to save that history. Most of the prototypes of the Cadillac Gage firearms came from Gene Stoner. He also had the rifles he built in his garage, M5 and M6, and I found the M7 (AR-3, 7.62x51mm caliber rifle) in California. The gun which Gene was looking for, which was referenced in the patents for the M16, was actually Gene Stoner’s M8, which later became the AR-10. It was the only one that was in .30-06 rather than .308. It had a steel receiver.

Trey: I remember Mr. Stoner’s comments about walking into a room where a large portion of his life’s work, all his “children” that were scattered all over the world were now together in one spot. He jokingly said in his dry sense of humor, “I would have just sold them all to your dad if he wanted them.”

Knight: He was excited about me going back and finding all these designs that were parts of his whole life, and bringing them all together in one place. It was like I was chasing firearms all over the world by serial number. I got all of Chuck Dorchester’s collection; he was the president after Fairchild sold Armalite to Dorchester and his group. I have had the chance to have a bit of fun with this as well. I remember talking to Ed Ezell, and he talked about these missing Armalite guns. Everybody had known that when Fairchild sold Armalite off, they sold them to a group – basically, it was George Sullivan, Dorchester, Miller and all the crowd that were there. As I mentioned, one of the things that Fairchild demanded was that they keep was all the AR-10s, all the AR-15s, all the rifles that had proved the gas impingement system, because that was what the patent was about. That large group of rifles left California and went to Hagerstown, Maryland, which was where the Fairchild main office was. To everybody’s knowledge, those rifles were lost in transit, and no one had ever seen those again. Back to Ed Ezell – after I obtained the Fairchild collection, I wrote Ed an anonymous letter, and the letter started off like this: “Mr. Ezell, I understand that you are at the Smithsonian Institution, and I have in my grandpappy’s barn a whole bunch of old guns that when my daddy comes here from California to take them to Hagerstown, Maryland, but when he got home, Mama was in bed with Uncle Johnny, and Daddy shot him, and Daddy went to prison, and these guns have been in the barn ever since. Daddy died in prison. I will trade you these guns if you promise to give me a new motor for my fishing boat.” [laughter] I took a crate, and I got some chickens and eggs and hay, and put the prized, one of a kind prototype AR-10s and the prototype AR-15 in the crate with eggs and a chicken standing over the top of ‘em, nesting on this crate of rifles. I had all these boxes stacked on this old, rusted out flatbed truck. I sent that to Ed, and his secretary got the letter and thought it was a hoax, she didn’t know that the pictures were real, and she tossed the letter. He never saw it. It was absolutely perfect, the best setup ever, and he never got it. Later, I told Ed that I found those rifles, he was absolutely excited. At least he did get to see these rifles before his untimely death.

SAR: As part of your passion for collecting and as a Stoner historian, you at one time organized a reunion for Armalite. When was that?

Knight: 1992. All the cast of characters were there. They all came to talk about the old days, and that’s where I met Mac McDonald for the first time. He was Bobby McDonald’s son, of the Cooper-McDonald Family. At dinner he proudly told me that he had M16 number one. I pursued him for years, and just within the last eight months, he finally decided it really belongs down in this collection. I now have AR-10 number one, M16 number one, and prototype AR-15 number one.

SAR: They’re all where they should be, in one place.

Knight: We’re sort of putting everything back in the box. At the Armalite Reunion, everybody got a chance to see all their old friends. Everybody kind of had a pretty good time. I had a tough time getting some people’s addresses, and getting some people there. Gene and Barbara Stoner were there of course, Chuck Dorchester was there, Tom Teleson was there, and Jim Sullivan (L. James Sullivan). Arthur Miller I couldn’t find.

SAR: Art’s still living in the same house that he bought back in the Armalite days; we have a big Interview with Art coming up in SAR.

Knight: I look forward to seeing that. Let me see… Tom Nelson, Henk Visser, Bob Sullivan and Saxby were there. Bob was the janitor and he was George Sullivan’s son. Saxby was bringing me some new ammunition. Let’s see… Al Paulson, Doug Olson, Eric Kincel, Dave Lutz, Stoner’s youngest daughter Dee Dee Stoner, Susie Klienpeld and Art Klienpeld. It was a big party, and everybody came and talked and had a few drinks and dinner at the Holiday Inn on the ocean. We came out to the plant and went through the collection, talked about the guns. Lots of interesting things about what people said and what they did, setting some records straight, telling anecdotes. It was great! I learned a lot about the history, put the pieces together.

SAR: Right around that time there were a number of reunions or meetings organized. Were you involved in the Kalashnikov-Stoner meeting?

Knight: Yeah, I was. Ed Ezell put together a meeting for Gene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov, and it was the first time that Kalashnikov had been out of Russia since the wall came down. It was a very interesting meeting between the two of them; it was very cordial. That’s the first time that I met Kalashnikov. I was there about a week, they had two campers out in West Virginia, they were at a range, and the two of them would meet each day and go and talk and have a good time. General Kalashnikov had an interpreter. It was a very interesting and enlightening meeting, where the “Father of the M16” the main rifle of our armed forces, met the “Father of the AK47” the main rifle of many of our opponents.

SAR: The flagship project that your companies were working on were the rail systems.

Knight: I guess we’ve probably built close to 750,000 rails for M4s, M16s, and the like. It’s been a good product for us. We made suppressors, some low production dedicated systems, parts, mounts, and had designed firearms, but not built them completely. The military told us that there was a need for a very accurate .308 rifle. Gene came up with the idea, and said, “Why don’t we use some of the parts off the M16; let’s try to make as many common parts as we can, pistol grip, butt stock, screws, plungers, springs, gas key, see how many parts we can use.” We started designing for parts that would be in common between the two guns – the M16 system and our new 7.62x51mm rifle. The other idea was to manufacture the gun so that the training would be the same on the 7.62 rifle. That was the start of the SR-25 rifle. “Stoner Rifle-25,” we took AR-”10” and AR-”15” and added them together to get 25 as the designation. We took the best of the AR-10 and the best of the AR-15, and all of our experience, and the rifle started shooting very, very accurate right out of the box. We built a few more, then we geared up to build it, and we started selling them commercially.

SAR: What was the most challenging part of that project?

Knight: Building a good magazine ranks right up there. Plenty of challenges anyway, and then the military match ammunition, not even the M118LR yet, was thirty-two thousandths longer than SAAMI spec. We built the SR-25 to use original AR-10 aluminum “Waffle” magazines, which I had 10,000 of. Thankfully, I didn’t have to build a magazine at first. When we started to build the magazine, then it became very challenging, how to make the magazine work. The magazine is a part of a firearm that looks to be quite simple, and people think it’s pretty easy and straight-forward, but it’s a feeding mechanism that is dynamically moving and there are so many nuances that affect the reliability of a magazine. Because it appears to be so simple and straight-forward, I think that it’s often overlooked as being as important part of a weapon system as it really is. Very few people spend a lot of time on designing and developing a magazine, and that comes back as trouble later. The event of feeding the cartridge out of the magazine into the chamber happens very quickly. Feeding the round and presenting it to the chamber, and extracting and ejecting the old cartridge case happens in such a short period of time, and it’s all happening at that intersection of the firearm. This is generally right at the throat of the chamber, it’s almost Grand Central Station for interior activity, it’s at high speed, and anything that doesn’t keep up the pace or gets in the way and the system doesn’t work. The magazine has to be top quality and properly engineered or your reliability goes away.

SAR: You have two different ways of firing the system, suppressed and un-suppressed.

Knight: Yes, and that complicates things further – and then there are different types of ammunition, different grain weights of bullets. This system is what has morphed into today’s SASS M110 rifle for the military. We built some guns for the US Army to test way back in the early ’90s, and they came back with a list of around 11 features that they wanted improved on. I was told that if we could not improve on those things, we weren’t going to have a program. We worked on those things for about a year, and we finally got those improvements done. Then we started actually manufacturing, and that became a good enough rifle that the Navy SEALs wanted to buy it, and it was designated the Mk11 Mod 0. We probably made between five and 10,000. Some of them were sold in the civilian market. The early ones we sold commercially were overruns that we built for the Navy SEALs. We have not built a lot of SR-25s. The very early SR-25s, most of those were all 24-inch barrel, match guns, with round fiberglass hand guards. The Mk 11 Mod 0, we haven’t built a whole lot extra because our production has been pretty much taken by the military. As I mentioned, we won the contract for the new M110 SASS- “Semi-Automatic Sniper System.” The chassis is based on the Mk 11 Mod 0, but there are about nine different improvements that we’ve made over the Mk 11 that has made it into a better rifle. We’re building thousands of those now for the military. Over a 15-year period, our first purpose-built Knight gun, the SR-25, has now evolved into the new M110 SASS rifle. Our first program is still alive and well, and serving the US military. The Navy has changed the Mk 11 Mod 0 to the Mk 11 Mod 1 and Mod 2.

SAR: Your companies have built many of the firearm items in use today: suppressors, RIS and RAS rail interfaces, sniper systems, your own line of AR-15/ M16 rifles called the SR-15 and SR-16. At one point you took on the idea of a semiautomatic .50 caliber…

Knight: I guess I should address that. I would call myself strict on or kind of stubborn about what we make. If I can’t put out something that I’m really, really pleased with, I’m just not going to sell it. Stoner designed a .50 caliber gun, and we built some, and they worked very, very well, but when we started doing endurance testing, we had some problems with some bolt cracking, and of course that became a liability issue. We redesigned that, and just about the time we got that redesigned, we ended up having to step up to meet the demand for the September 11th issues. One thing led to another, and I have parts and pieces for the first 100 guns that are about, I don’t know, 50% maybe done that are out there, that I just haven’t put the engineering effort into it to really make me happy. It’s dormant now, and we’re a lot smarter than we used to be. We can build stuff a lot better than we did ten years ago. Our company is a much bigger company and has many more capabilities than we did back then. I’m sure if we build the rifle again, we could overcome some of the design issues that we had on the early prototype guns.

SAR: Parallel to that project, you were working on an AR-15-style weapon that had the input of Mr. Stoner, yourself and your design working team. The SR-15 rifle.

Knight: The SR-15 is semiautomatic and the SR-16 is select fire. It’s a 5.56x45mm rifle that uses a gas impingement system, M16 family, and we improved many things that we think that makes it a superior, reliable weapon. We built quite a bit of parts and pieces to those guns. We build all the production ourselves. As long as you control your parts, you can control your quality. The only person you can blame if you don’t get the things done is yourself. We’re very focused on building pretty much all of our parts ourselves. We do buy some parts on the outside, and our SR-15 we’re probably going to buy some parts on the outside, only because there’s other people out there who can build them cheaper than we can, and if they meet our quality standards, then we’ll probably buy parts and pieces from them.

SAR: Reed, you have almost 40 years experience with the gas impingement system of the AR-15, and 30 years experience dealing with the original designer, other designers of the system, and have intimately been involved in testing and being around all the original designs, the prototypes that worked and didn’t work. In today’s world, we have the M4, the M16A2, the M16 variants, there’s about nine or ten million out there. You are in active production of a gas impingement-style system. Frequently the answer to all the issues in the AR family is the idea of a drop-on piston system. You also have made piston-operated guns yourself that are in somewhat of the Stoner family.

Knight: Dan, I’m like everybody else, I’m striving to find a better mousetrap. I want the best of the best, to be able to improve things. I should probably qualify my statements here this way: In our testing over the last two years, we have fired about 1.3 million rounds of 5.56mm. In that process, we have come up with some things that we think improve the M4 rifle in its baseline design. We’ve also built some piston-driven uppers that drop on the basic lower. If there is anything that I am really convinced of, it’s that you should not go and think that the piston-driven upper system, based on the AR-15 chassis, is some type of a major improvement, because in fact, we have found it not to be. If the M4 is properly maintained, and if the gun is kept clean, it will run and do the job that is needed to be done. On the other hand, if you don’t use the tool as what it was designed to be, it was designed for, then it probably is going to cause you some issues. The major thing that we’ve seen with pistons is the bolt cracking of the locking lugs at maybe a higher rate than what we think it should be. The gas piston system does not help that issue, and it exacerbates the bolt cracking. If you take the things that were allowed to be done to improve the gun, such as some of the things that they’ve done for the HK 416, if they were allowed to do that or do some product improvements on the M4, the M4 itself I believe could have a higher reliability in its own design. Unfortunately, there are some things that you help when you go to the piston-driven upper, but there’s also some things that you don’t help. One of the major things is that in a gas impingement system, when the gas pressurizes the chamber in the bolt carrier, it actually pushes the bolt forward, and that pushing of the bolt forward, as it unlocks, takes a good amount of load off the back of the locking lugs as it’s unlocking.

That system allows you to have a less stress on the locking lugs while it’s unlocking.

The gas impingement system is pushing back on the bolt carrier, evenly from the inside, and pushing forward on the bolt relieving the rearward pressure on the lugs. With a piston, as you’re pushing back on the bolt carrier, you not only have tilting pressure which is uneven, it’s pulling the bolt backwards, which adds more load to the locking lugs of the bolt as the bolt carrier’s going to the rear, and the faster you drive it to the rear, the worse off it is. If you use an M4 in its conventional barrel length, which is 14-1/2 inches, I don’t think a piston gives you any advantage over a gas impingement gun. I think that an M4 in a 14-1/2 inch barrel is just as reliable as a piston gun with the 14-1/2 inch barrel. The gas piston has added different problems.

SAR: One of those issues is the tilting pressure that’s added using a piston on a standard M16 type system.

Knight: Right, you’re actually pushing down on the top of the bolt carrier. Instead of pushing evenly from the center of the bolt carrier, you’re actually pushing the bolt carrier down. Probably the most significant thing is what I am calling, for lack of a better word, bolt bounce. As the bolt unlocks, the bolt actually turns and bounces back, and as the bolt bounces back, it digs into the upper receiver very significantly right out of the unlocking bridge of the upper receiver. The bolt cam pin is actually digging into the upper receiver. I’ve noticed that on piston-driven guns, it is not present at all in gas impingement guns because there’s still residual pressure that holds that bolt from bouncing back. If you look at the bolt carrier velocities of a firearm with a piston-driven bolt carrier, and you look at the bolt carrier velocity of a gas impingement system, the initial bolt carrier velocity of a gas impingement gun is much smoother and less radical than the bolt carrier velocity is on a piston-driven gun. So as it bounces, and this flat right here digs into, significantly into the upper receiver right there, because it bounces… It unlocks and then bounces back and digs into the upper receiver. Bolt carrier speed and how smooth that start up is, effects how reliable the system is. Essentially, on a piston driven system, it causes the bolt carrier to speed up and slow down, and that jerky motion is just not conducive for reliability and smoothness of the system. The bolt carrier velocity on these piston-driven guns is much higher than it should be to get the same amount of work out of it. All that being said, the gas impingement gun is actually a smoother operating system. Where you do run into an advantage on the piston-driven gun is when you take and shorten that barrel length ahead of the gas port significantly. The amount of time that gas in an impingement system has to travel down that gas tube into the carrier is the time that the bullet’s traveling down the barrel, past that port, until it uncorks from the muzzle.

SAR: Time under pressure.

Knight: Exactly. It’s a time under pressure issue, and if you are able to have the luxury of having a barrel with 7 inches of barrel in front of the gas port, it gets the job done before the bullet leaves the end of the barrel. When you go to a 10-inch barrel or an 11-1/2 inch barrel, that time significantly drops, along with your reliability. The only way to do that is to open up the gas port, and you get a big gulp of air immediately. The rifle becomes sporadic at that point. The advantage on a piston system might come in with a shorter barrel. In my opinion, it’s the only advantage that it has. If you look at the bolt carrier velocity, and you shoot ten rounds with a gas impingement system, and you look at the velocity and you look at the standard deviation of that velocity, the standard deviation, meaning the velocities, and you overlay those velocity curves over the top of each other, the gas impingement system is much, much more concise and reliable than the velocity is for a piston-driven AR type rifle. The piston-driven gun is all over the place as far as its bolt carrier velocity, and its bolt carrier velocity at the back of the gun. The AR system likes a gas impingement system much better, because it’s a much better utilization of the gas.

SAR: That was Gene Stoner’s original design in the 1950s.

Knight: Right. It’s been said by a number of the people that were involved that everything worked really well until they changed the powder, which threw the system out of balance. Instead of changing it by going back to the right powder that it was designed for, they started changing the system, and it’s been bouncing around ever since, fixing the symptoms. The idea of putting a piston system on here throws its own problems into the mess. The piston-driven AR type rifle has created its own set of issues that are going to show up in the field in the future.

SAR: There are problems with the M4 though…

Knight: The gas impingement system is just so much more efficient. That said, if you don’t have a set of good gas rings on the gun, if you have a carrier key that’s worn out or if you have a gas tube that’s worn out, there’s going to be problems. I find it interesting that we have rifles out there in the military system that, some of them have 10,000, 20,000 rounds through them, and we’re comparing them with rifle systems that are brand new. Everybody likes a new broom because it always sweeps clean, and everybody wants something new. These changes need a track record, these systems need to fire as many rounds before we can compare. If there’s anything that I think that we are doing wrong in our small arms for the US military, it’s that we figuratively woke up one Monday morning, and said the M60 was a bad weapon. When and where did we fall out of love for the M60? It was after it got worn out and after the parts were worn out, and then we went out to low-bid, small business set asides as vendors that built parts for the M60, flooded the system with parts that may or may not have worked compatibly with the original parts and pieces. What we did was adopt a gun that was two years older, six pounds heavier, and much longer, and that had some other issues of its own. We adopted that gun “because it was more reliable.” If you would let me add 25% of the weight and 25% of the cost, and all the other things to any weapon system we have, sure, we could build a better weapon. When we started realizing that the M60 wasn’t going to last forever, we should’ve started a program to design a new belt-fed .308 machine gun. This brings me back to our firearms laws and the travesties of 1968 and 1986.

When Gene Stoner and I started working on this 7.62mm belt fed issue in 1989, the very first thing we tried to do was import a PKM. ATF said the law would not allow Gene Stoner to import a PKM – that’s just crazy – when he and I wanted to work on this. It was because it was a Russian design, and it was forbidden to import Russian small arms into this country. I mean, here’s the father of our main rifle caliber weapon, and he wants to work on a new belt fed, and he can’t have access to similar designs because of politics. We just decided not to even bother going down that road, it’s just not worth it. Our country should have started designing a new replacement for the M-60 when we saw that the parts were going to be worn out, and the parts weren’t going to be compatible. I’m hearing similar things right now that soldiers are saying about the M249, that they’re unhappy with its reliability, they’re unhappy with the parts, and maybe we’re going to wake up one Tuesday morning, and say, “Let’s throw the M249 away.” Instead of letting it get to that point, let’s see if we can fix the problems, let’s P-I-P it. A good Product Improvement Program.

The first thing to do is see if that machine gun can be improved, and if we have reached the lifecycle of those guns and they’re worn out, then let’s throw ‘em away and buy new ones. But how could a gun that we have had for 20 years, how can we wake up one Tuesday morning and that gun not be any good? What happened to it? If we have an issue, let’s start developing, let’s start thinking about a new level of M249, let’s start now, and let’s improve it. But there is not anyone that has written and told FN that they have a problem. As far as the Army’s concerned, there’s not a problem.

SAR: You’re talking about a breakdown in communication from the end user to the manufacturer.

Knight: The end user to manufacturer communication is only with a PDQR, and that’s a Product Deficiency Quality Report. When you turn one of those in, it goes in front of everybody, it’s throwing a big red flag up. I think there needs to be something else out there that’s a user failure of equipment report, and that means that, “I have a product that’s out in the field that’s not doing what I need it to do. So, somebody come out here and investigate.” I want the end user to tell me. I want to know if the design is faulty. Are parts built right, but the product isn’t working? Is the end user trying to use his M4 as a belt-fed machine gun role? Either the product is being used for something other than what it was intended to be used for, and it doesn’t meet the requirement, or, if it is not reliably doing the job we have another issue. I have to know as a manufacturer, and the sooner I know, the better. Maybe the end users have longer distances now than what we built the product for initially. Maybe he needs a heavier bullet, which is going to affect the system because you can’t just change ammunition and expect everything to be perfect. There should be a report that a soldier puts together that the Army goes and looks at and determines, is it a faulty design, is he using it wrong, or is it in fact a quality problem from the factory? And we’re not doing that.

SAR: In the First World War there were manufacturers who had representatives go out to the frontlines and talk to the people. In World War Two, both manufacturers and Army ordnance groups went out to the frontline, right out to the front, and talked with the guys. They had to take a ship across the ocean. It seems that there was a disconnect then in the information, and the manufacturers were frustrated then with the communication that came through ordnance groups.

Knight: Exactly. I have had some feedback from the front lines, but as a manufacturer, we need better feedback. I would like to have better info. First of all, I have to say there’s nothing in this factory that I am building that is good enough. Everything here can and should be improved. I can’t improve things and initiate obsolescence to previous designs and previous products, because once you get to a certain point, that design is frozen. If you don’t have vertical integration, so that the products that you have in the future are backwards compatible to products that you built in the past, then sometimes you’re shooting yourself in the foot in the supply chain. You can’t obsolete your other products, unless it’s a major improvement.

Let me run further down the road here, because if I have my soapbox to stand up on, it’s this: I think that we as a country would be making a major mistake to adopt another rifle, other than a rifle that we have in the system if that gun already meets our needs, without it being a significant improvement. What I’m trying to say is I do not believe that the United States should adopt another 5.56mm brass case M16-type weapon. In other words, a weapon that weighs six pounds, utilizes a brass cased ammunition, uses the same magazine. I think we should stick with what we have, but I think that we need to come to the table with new technology.

SAR: Do you think there should be some incremental improvements adopted in the M16 and M4 systems?

Knight: Sure. I think if we can come to the table with an incremental improvement that does not obsolete our inventory of parts, our inventory of training, then let’s do it. If as a manufacturer and designer, I can’t give you 30% across the board improvement, a 30% reduction in weight, 30% reduction in cost, 30% increase in reliability, etc., then we shouldn’t change systems. I think what we should look for in a new system is a 30% improvement before we move ahead and change it all. That’s what we should strive for.

SAR: Do you think that was done in previous generations of weapon changes in the US military?

Knight: I do. I think an M4 is as reliable as the M16 is today. I think when it first came out, there was a learning curve that came behind that, and I think that it had multiple issues with it, part of it was government-caused, and part of it was the manufacturing, learning how to manufacture the gun and all the other things that have to be learned, such things as chrome chambers, such as barrel twists, let alone how to manufacture the rifle. More importantly, I think the M16 over the M14 was a 30% reduction in weight, I think it was a 30% reduction in size, certainly I think today it’s been a 30% reduction in cost. There was a significant increase in hit probability in fully automatic, over the M14. The majority of the soldiers who used the M14 used it in semiautomatic role, and it was a good rifle in that, but in fully automatic it took a very skilled operator.

SAR: We’ve had many conversations about the leaps forward that need to be made, and noted that for the last 150-odd years, we take a brass case, fill it with powder, put a projectile in front of it, and we drive it down a rifled bore. We do it faster, more accurately, automatically, semiautomatically, for sure, but you’ve often brought up that we need to have a major sea change in the ammunition.

Knight: I’ve said this many times, that if John Browning, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford all came back to life today, the only one that would not be impressed would be John Browning, because we’re still using a brass cartridge case and a bullet and a primer, the same as what he had 110, 115 years ago. I don’t think we’re ready for caseless ammunition, what I think we need is case telescoped ammunition. Gene Stoner built some of the first ones on the ACR project back in ’86, ’87, Steyr had a case telescope round at around that time. Today, AAI and Ares have designs that make an M249-type weapon that’s very significant in reduction in weight among other things. Aside from all that, if we do not start today to develop the next small arms, we’re going to wake up one Monday morning and say, “Now we have to have what’s on the shelf.” And that won’t be a leap forward. Unfortunately, until you build 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 of something, you can’t get your manufacturing system nailed, and the bugs out of the product. I don’t want the first one off the line of a new model car that they build. I don’t want the first of anything that’s a new model that they build. That includes products that I build, or Colt, or FN, or H&K. We all have the same manufacturing issues of getting the product tweaked and leaving the new weapon system to what’s “on the shelf” isn’t good enough. The manufacturers need not only R&D but they need production to tweak things. Some of us are better at that than others and the customers can decide. One truly interesting thing I can tell you is that we’ve designed a gun recently building it in a computer before we ever built a prototype. Out of all the guns that I’ve ever built and all the guns that I’ve ever played with and all the guns that I’ve ever handled, we got there quicker with that first gun modeled and done on the computer, than we could have ever gotten building physical prototypes. We found design flaws with finite element analysis that we improved upon that prevented us from having problems, and having to modify later on in the system. And, we’re just one of a number of manufacturers exploring those capabilities.

SAR: You’ve designed several systems recently, including the ammunition.

Knight: I was referring to the PDW. Again, we’re using a brass case on our new ammunition, because that’s what the customer is most comfortable with. I still think the future is going to be built around a lighter system. The next leap forward is going to come from somewhere. If you ask me today, I would have to say case telescoped. The cartridge can be smaller, lighter and more efficient, and you can make the case out of today’s polymers rather than brass at a cheaper cost. Then in the future, that should transition over to either caseless or semi-caseless ammunition.

SAR: What caliber of projectile?

Knight: Well, let’s start at the target, the terminal end, and let’s decide what work we need to do. Do we need 600 foot pounds of energy at 500 meters? Do we need 200 foot pounds of energy at 500 meters? Do we need 600 foot pounds of energy at 200 meters? Or do we need 800 foot pound of energy at muzzle? Tell me first what work you want done by the projectile. If you want to produce a certain size wound cavity, and generally I really think that issue we’ve pretty much defined, the 5.56 is about as small as we want to go. I think we want to have no less than around 1,000 foot pounds of energy at muzzle. I don’t think we need 2,600 foot pounds of energy, like we have on a .308. Tell me the distance. Give me 1,000 foot pounds of energy, and let me go from there, and back up, and then I’ll tell you what bullet weight I want, I’ll tell you what velocity it needs to leave the muzzle, and I’ll tell you how big the system needs to be to give you that.

SAR: The testing that you’ve been doing over the last few decades has led you to be able to model ammunition also?

Knight: Absolutely. With a lot of confidence on results. Again, you have to start at the target, you have to start where the event is going to happen, and you need to look at what you want that bullet to do. How much work does it take to get the job done? How much energy are you carrying in that bullet to get that job done? Then we will move back to the distance that you want to be, I’ll call it a stand-off. But is the standoff 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, 400 meters, 500 meters or 600 meters? The original M16 was actually bought to be a 300-meter rifle. They said, “300 meters is not enough, let’s make it 400 meters,” and went to the next meeting, and at the last meeting they said, “You know what? If we can do 400, let’s do 500, let’s make it 500 meters.” They wanted the gun to be lethal, and lethal at that time was determined to be penetrating a military helmet at 500 meters. Mr. Stoner was shooting the rifle in a .222 Remington lead core bullet, and it was hitting the helmet at 500 meters and was not penetrating it. Gene Stoner went back in his garage, cut the end of the bullet, put a steel tip on the front of the bullet and stuck it down in the bullet, and went back and shot the same .222 Remington at 500 meters, and it penetrated the helmet, and it squirted the lead of the bullet in there like a worm inside the helmet. And he said, “I met the requirement.” And the guy looked at him and said, “No, you didn’t, that’s cheating, you can’t do it that way. It’s gotta be a lead bullet, it’s gotta penetrate the helmet.” So Stoner went back and said, “Let’s take this long case neck and let’s blow this cartridge case because I need another couple hundred feet per second.” They made what they called a .222 Remington Special, and that was the blown out cartridge case, and that later became the .223. He needed just that many more grains of powder to give him that extra 200 feet per second at 500 meters to penetrate the helmet, because they wouldn’t let him use a steel penetrator.

SAR: Knight’s today is the size of other major defense small arms contractors, and there’s only a few of them. You’ve become a force in the field. When you took over this facility, you were overflowing your old facility, and you had a vision for where you wanted to go?

Knight: USOCOM told us in 2001, after September 11th, that we were going to have to double our capacity if we wanted to be in the game and take care of business. I went to the county commission in Indian River County and actually to the building department, and I bought a new building, and I set it on the ground, and I said, “I have to build a new building, because I need it now.” I had about a 60,000 square foot building, and I bought another one sitting there, ready to put up. And after months of trying to do traffic studies and fire suppression studies, and all the things that the county wanted me to do, I found a building up in Savannah, Georgia that I could go to with my 100 employees, and they would give me the keys to the front door. I came back to Florida, planning to move to Georgia. The local people in Bavard found out that I was going to do that, and they knew about this facility that had been left surplus, and they called the governor, then Jeb Bush, and said, “Can you talk to Boeing and can you get Boeing to talk to Knights and see if we can do something?” Boeing called us, and in two weeks we had a deal put together that they would sell me the facility that would immediately stop my problems of having delays and everything else. We bought this and started moving our Vero Beach factory up here immediately after buying it. By the time we went out and bought machinery, and our plan was to go and buy duplicate machinery that we had in Vero Beach, and to put the new machinery in place and operating, and then unplug the machinery in Vero Beach and bring it up here, and then we would be at two times capacity. Before we were able to unplug Vero, we got the word that two times our capacity was not going to be sufficient, that was going to have to be three times. Before we ever unplugged Vero, our first phase was in and we bought another full complement. We had two times capacity before we ever unplugged Vero, and then we brought it up here. Actually, with the efficiency that we have gotten with the new machinery and everything else, we’re at better than five times capacity than where we were. One thing that I was fortunate enough to have is that old man McDonald was really thorough in his design of this factory, and he has 100% redundancy of everything that is electrical and mechanical, this facility had the best of the best of capabilities when we walked in the front door. He built the Tomahawk missile here, with 3,500 employees. He had quite an infrastructure. We’re running about 325 employees right now and well over 100 CNC machines. We have robotic systems that are working quite efficiently. We do have a sound suppressor cell, we manufacture pretty much everything in-house.

SAR: The lessons learned from your study of prior programs that shows in your collection, the Stoner systems, the ARs, all of those things, have you maintained that diligence with your own designs? Prototyping and keeping collections for study?

Knight: I guess you would call it archiving. We probably have not done a stellar job of that. When, as you evolve something, do you stop and say, “This is a different model?” Because it is evolving, and you’re making multiple changes. Do you stop after five changes? Do you stop after six, do you stop after eight? Or do you just stop when you get it finished? Unfortunately, around here, we never get it finished. We’re always evolving. Everything is constantly in change. That has its advantages and disadvantages. The good news is our product has a reputation that it usually works really well, and that’s because we really pay attention to the product, and we really pay attention to how we build the product. And that’s not easy to do all the time. The answer is yes, we do keep a reference library of our own designs as well, but it’s perhaps not as thorough as future students might like to see.

SAR: Regarding the idea of a reference library, you’ve done major expansion back to the Civil War in US weapons. You’ve also started collecting military vehicles and tanks and some of the larger cannons and field pieces. Where do you feel you’re going to go with your collecting?

Knight: I have become somewhat frustrated at the unreasonable prices that I’ve seen currently on machine guns, and when I say unreasonable, obviously it’s what people think that they’re worth, or they wouldn’t be paying it. In order to grow a collection it takes a fairly serious checking account. I looked at going back to the Civil War or that timeframe and bringing that forward up to 1900, and I found those 50 years to be very significant in changes in small arms. We actually did more changes and more development in those 50 years than we have in the last 100. It’s very significant what they did and what they learned, so for the last two years I started collecting that period. I’ve bought Gatling guns and muzzle loaders and breech loaders and different weapon systems that either evolved or dead ended. As I was going down that trail, I started thinking, “What have we done in the past on artillery, and what have we done in the past in HE?” I’m going to call it HE, let’s call it cannonball HE, which it’s not, but let’s say that it is. It’s one more place that the evolution of weapons has caught my interest and I am trying to apply it. I’m now focusing on US weapons and weapon systems of our enemies and allies that are significant. Pretty much anything from 1850 to present, I’m looking at, if the US used it or had any fingerprint on it, then I’m looking to have a sample thereof.

SAR: One of the most important aspects of small arms is passing on knowledge, mentoring, apprenticing and training. There’s been some discussion about an institute or a school. Have you got any plans in the future for this?

Knight: I have to think that I would not have been anywhere near as successful at what I’m doing if I had not had the luxury of having someone mentor me like Gene Stoner, Uzi Gal and Henk Visser did, and some of the people that have been able to direct me and focus me on where I am today. Obviously, my father had a lot to do with it, in inspiring me to go chase what I felt like that I wanted to do, and not just do what other people said. I would rather train somebody that has a passion to do what’s needed than to try to take someone that has the knowledge and try to instill in him the passion. The passion is the driving force. I want employees that go home and read gun magazines, and go home and work on the computer, and go home and eat, drink and sleep what they do. I want them to be excited about what they do. I want them to be as excited as I am about what I’m doing. I joke around that I’m only working half-days now, from 8:00 to 8:00, and it’s how it seems, because every hour that I’m at work, I’m really having a good time, I’m really enjoying what I’m doing. Of course there are days that are discouraging, but then there are days that you get letters from soldiers out in the field that thank you for what you do. I got a letter from a young soldier, said that he was driving in a Humvee coming back from Baghdad, and they stopped and picked up a couple Navy SEALs. And the Navy SEALs got into the thing, and then they got into a firefight, and the Navy SEAL handed him his gun from the back seat while he got set up on the radio to call for support. He said he looked, and coming through the window of his Humvee, the light was shining on the hand guard of the side of the SEAL’s rifle, and he saw “Vero Beach, Florida,” and he said, “I just want to write you and tell you thank you for what you’re doing, and I just want to let you know, would you please take care of my family in Vero while I’m taking care of you in Iraq?” He found security by seeing Vero Beach, Florida on the side of his gun, and he didn’t even know us from Adam’s housecat, and he got that connection. Some of things that you can make a difference with what’s out there. I think, where do we want to go in the future? You know, I’m getting up there, these gray hairs are real, I don’t dye my hair, so I’m getting to a point that I gotta be getting serious about what is it that I want to be when I grow up. I do want to train more young people.

SAR: Do you have an apprenticeship program at Knights?

Knight: We have, we do, we have it for manufacturing, but if there’s anything that I think we’re unique about, it’s we are probably, out of all the small arms manufacturers, we build more of all of our parts than all of the other companies. We build pretty much everything here. And we grow our talent amongst ourselves. We train our people, and we train them in what to do.

SAR: Do you have an active recruitment program?

Knight: We have an extremely active recruitment program, of bringing good people in and bringing them to the table. Bonnie Werner in our HR Department runs that. She’s the Vice President here at Knights, and she is looking for new, inspired, young, talented help. We want people who want to make a difference and want to do something with their lives. They want to get out and they want to learn, they want to know more about how things work, and how they can do things better. Our claim to fame is manufacturing. We changed the paradigm in manufacturing. We have more table space in manufacturing than all the other small arms manufacturers in the United States added together.

SAR: You’re out there cutting chips in a country that is massively exporting work.

Knight: That’s a rare thing in America today. But we control quality in what we’re doing that way. The idea of an institute or a school on small arms is a very active idea, and I want to do it. It’s a lot harder to do than I thought it was going to be. It really is tough! What’s first, the chicken or the egg? Do you have the talent or do you have the people, do you have the people or do you have the talent? Educating people and training them to do what we need them to do is very difficult.

SAR: What would your concept be of a school?

Knight: I remember the conversation Gene Stoner had with me. We went to China, and he was at this equivalent to an auditorium, we’re in this college, their war college, it was 10,000 students, and they would ask Mr. Stoner, raise their hand and say, you know, “What is it you do in 1962?” And he’d answer, and a student would stand up and say, “Excuse me, sir, don’t you mean you did this and did that?” And Mr. Stoner would say, “Well, you know, matter of fact you’re right, that is how…” They actually knew more about his life than he did at that point – they taught a course on him. There was a cocktail party that night, and everybody was there, and he was drinking the local drink, and the guy rubbed up close to him, he said, “Mr. Stoner, tell me the secret,” and he said, “Sure. What is it you’d like to know?” “I want to know where the secret school is in America.” He said, “The secret school?” He said, “Yes, the secret gun school you have in America, because obviously you have to have one.” Stoner says, “There isn’t one.” “No, Mr. Stoner, there must be one. Please, here, have another drink.” And Mr. Stoner came back and he said, “I was at a school where there were 10,000 people that were designing and building China’s future weapons. We don’t even have one that even knows how to spell that.” Until we stop educating lawyers and start educating engineers, if we’re not careful, we’re going to wake up one morning and we’re going to have all the lawyers shutting down our few engineers. The lawyers are going to tell the engineers that we can’t build a nuclear car, we can’t build a whatever, because “it’s against the law.” Until we reach that point where we understand the importance of energy, importance of defending our own country, the importance of being what we are, until we train our people, until we educate our people again, until we are producing again, we’re in trouble. When I put an ad out in the paper and say “help wanted,” I get plenty of people that come to the door that do not have any experience at doing anything at all. I get ten times more than I need for that, and I get one-tenth of what I need of the educated people to run machinery, or to weld or skilled individuals. We’re not training our people to do skills and skill sets. It’s to the benefit of the manufacturers to start doing that training themselves, if they want to have a workforce that moves into the future.

SAR: Would you be teaching small arms design or would you be teaching manufacturing process?

Knight: All of the above. Engineering, CAD, model-making, prototyping, testing. You know how many people don’t know how to properly test a product? They don’t know how to get to the results that they’re looking for. Mickey Finn and Don Walsh and I had to agree on suppressor testing in the early ’80s, just to establish a baseline. A large part of our work is designing proper, valid testing protocols.

SAR: If you were talking to a young person today and they were thinking that maybe someday they’d like to run their own business, do you have any advice you’d give them?

Knight: Yes. You’re going to have to work real hard to be successful, no matter what it is. You’re going to have to be passionate about what you do. It’s very hard to be successful unless you really work hard at doing what you want to do, and you need to have an idea of what that is. That doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind, it doesn’t mean that you can’t stop and say, “I don’t want to be a welder tomorrow, I want to be a lathe operator tomorrow,” there’s nothing wrong with that, but be the best you can be. I don’t care if you’re sweeping the floor. Be the best you can be, and be the best floor sweeper that there is in that company. Be the best of everything that is there, and learn all you can about what you’re doing. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care, if you’re learning how to paint, or how to run lathe, learn everything you can about it, and be good at it, and be the best that there is, and most likely you’ll move up the chain. I’ve had a lot of things that have been major changes in my life, breakthroughs, things that, without those things having happened, I would not be where I am today. My father and my mother being supportive of my chasing of the rainbows, my meeting Gene Stoner, meeting Uzi Gal, finding different opportunities that have knocked on the door. Now, I do believe that you can be lucky and catch a big fish, but remember you have to put the bait on the hook, and you have to put the hook and the bait in the water, and then you have to be patient to catch the fish. Most of the time you have to make your own luck, and it isn’t always going to work out the way you want.

Finding Stoner’s M7, the AR-3
Armalite Rifle (1999-2000)

AR-3 is a semiautomatic rifle that disappeared forty years ago, but somebody had turned it into a gun shop, and this guy had bought it from the gun shop about 20 years ago. He calls and talks to one of my salesmen, and of course my salesman said, “You don’t know it, but my boss has every Armalite rifle that’s ever made. You couldn’t have anything he doesn’t have.” This guy says, “Okay, thank you” and hangs up. He calls back about a month later and he gets a hold of my secretary, and he says, “I’m telling you that I have a rifle that your boss needs to see.” She said, “Why don’t you email me a picture, and I will show it to him?” I was walking by her desk one afternoon, and I see this picture of the AR-3 that I had never seen, and I had pretty much seen every picture that had ever been made on the AR-3. I was shocked. I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. “Where did you get this picture?” I asked. She said, “This guy’s been bugging me to send this picture from California.” I said, “Get me on a plane, I am going to California, I have to see this gun.” I flew out to Sonoma, California, and met with this guy, and the gun was, in fact, the AR-3, Stoner’s original he made in his garage, his M7. We cut a deal, and I got on an old prop driven plane through LAX. I put the gun in a little brown plastic case and checked it. I was just so excited that I had found this gun; it was the last of the four guns that Gene built in his garage. I now had all of them. The pilot announced; “We just put the gear down to land at LAX, and the landing gear light shows that the landing gear did not come down. We’re going out over the ocean and dumping our fuel, and then we’re flying back by the tower, there’s still enough light for them to see us. If our landing gear’s down, we’ll try to land, and if the landing gear is up, they’re going to foam the runway and we’ll belly land. Y’all be prepared for that.” I got on my cell phone, called my wife and said, “I just wanted to let you know, if you don’t hear from me again, that I just, well, you know, just tell everybody I said hello.” The stewardess walked by, and I said, “I need to get down in the bottom of this plane,” and she says, “What’s so important?” I said, “Well, I got something down there I need to get,” and she said, “What could possibly be that important right now?” [laughter] I said, “I really can’t say, it’s really immaterial what I need to get. I just need to get down because if you land on the belly of this thing, it’s gonna ruin what I have down there underneath the bottom of this plane.” And she said, “Well, the bottom line is you can’t get from here to there without being on the outside of the plane, and that’s not going to happen.” We were flying low past the tower and from one end of that airport to the other, there was nothing but red and blue lights flashing and everything. I wondered what in the world all these fire trucks were at the airport for. I really had no idea they were there for us. The gear was down, so we came back around, landed, and I ran over and got that rifle. I walked over to Delta, and handed them that gun case, and said, “I want you put this on that plane, I want you to make sure it’s protected.” When I got home, I took that gun out of the box, I put it on the wall, and I still won’t let anybody pick it up, because it’s just very important that it stay on the wall with the other three and nothing happens to it! It’s a treasure hunt, I found a relic, an artifact, that was just so important to the history of these systems. The chase is exciting, and Gene Stoner was just as excited about the other guns that I found at Fairchild. Of course, he was not alive to know that I did find his last gun that was missing, but I like to think that I completed part of the quest.

C. Reed Knight, Jr. was born on 22 August, 1945, in Woodbridge, New Jersey. His family moved to Florida before he was a month old allowing him to claim he didn’t have time to be corrupted into a Northerner. His father, C. Reed Knight, Sr. was in the US Army Air Corps at the time flying B-25 bombers stateside as he had finished his pilot training in 1945 just as WWII ended. Reed is married to his high school sweetheart Jan, whom he married in 1967, and they have four children; oldest son Trey, middle son Jacob, youngest son Will, and daughter Sarah, ranging in age from 21 to 38. Reed attended a number of colleges including Florida Southern, Bavard Engineering College in Melbourne, Florida, and Indian River Junior College in Fort Pierce, Florida. Reed served six years in the National Guard starting in 1965. Reed’s companies are some of the amazing success stories of the small arms world, having grown to the point of employing over 300 people today in the manufacture of weapon systems and accessories that Reed has invented and put into production. The list includes the SR-25 rifle he designed with his late partner Eugene Stoner, as well as the Rail Interface System on most current small arms, and many suppressor designs and other firearms. The Knight Collection is one of the most important small arms collections in the world, and Reed’s devotion to the study of small arms has helped the community in too many ways to count. Reed is a tough businessman with a clear view of what he wants to accomplish, and very little patience with anything that interferes with making a proper, top of the line product.

SAR: Where do you think your interest in mechanical things came from?

Knight: I guess from the very beginning my earliest memories were of taking things apart. I like to see how things work. Maybe the side of my brain that’s mechanical overrides the side of my brain that does the reading and the spelling and the other side. I’ve always been able to see things in multiple dimensions and understand them in a very complicated way mechanically. My dad is like that, also. It’s a form of dyslexia, and he basically could not read or write. I have a very tough time reading and writing, too. When I was young, my dad told me, “Son, you can make a living at 40 hours a week, and you can do a little bit better at 50 hours a week, and you probably can do okay at 60 hours a week, but you’re so damn stupid, you’re gonna have to work about 80 hours a week. I suggest you go find yourself a job that you like doing because you’re gonna be spending a lot of time at it.” {Laughter} He was pretty close to on-target with me. I told my dad at the time that I liked guns, and he said, “Well, I guess you better find a way to make a living playing with guns.” I’m one of the very fortunate few people that have managed to make a living out of my hobby.

SAR: Weren’t you racing cars before the firearms?

Knight: Actually, the interests were concurrent. I built cars in high school. When everybody else would go out dating and going to parties, my future wife and I would go over to my garage at my grandfather’s house where I had Model A’s and different types of cars that I was working on. We used to make dune buggies and head down to the beach and go hunt turtles on the east coast of Florida. Model As were cheap, very lightweight, and we’d put big tires on them, strip them down to where they’d weigh almost nothing, and then drive right on the beach. We would run up and down the beach and that was our weekend fun: running from inlet to inlet on the east coast of Florida. We weren’t interested in making the cars original; we were making them into what we wanted out of them. I had a brand new ’63 Chevrolet Super Sport, less than three months old, and my mom and dad went out of town for the weekend. When they came back, I’d pulled the engine and transmission out of that to put it in my ’55 Chevy, and I had lightened it up and put a blower on it, put the big slicks on the back, and I never will forget the look on my mom’s face when she saw that I had taken this brand new car and tore it all up into my hot rod. I had to put the motor back in my street car, under duress. My dad and I put a motor together in my second floor bedroom for the hot rod. We were carrying it down the steps, and he was in front and I was in the back, and he tripped, and the motor cart-wheeled down the staircase and landed upside-down in the middle of my mother’s living room and the oil ran out and ruined her carpet. She was pretty upset when she saw it and asked, “Why in the world did you put this motor together in your bedroom?” I said, “Well, that was just the cleanest place that I could think of to put this motor together.” She got a brand new carpet out of that deal. She caught me at college where I had converted my kitchen sink into a parts washer and the rest of the kitchen into an assembly area. It’s “guy logic,” all those things were a natural for working on engines.

SAR: Did you have access to a machine shop?

Knight: My family has been in the citrus business forever, so we had our place where we worked on all of our tractors and I had a welding shop and a machine shop; everything that you would need to work on tractors. It was basically a mechanical heaven. I would work at my dad’s shop during the summers taking tractors apart, fixing them, putting them back together and working on the heavy machinery. I loved it. My dad kept having clutches slip on some of his tractors that were using a “tree hoe.” I knew about a special clutch used on dragsters, so I sent one of the clutches in and had them build the dragster clutch plate package to fit on my dad’s Massey Ferguson tractor. It was so successful that Massey Ferguson came over and used the idea, and every tractor since then has that same clutch pack that I had altered. I guess that was my first invention that got adopted. I was about 16 years old when the Massey Ferguson deal happened. I got a Farmall Cub tractor for my 9th birthday, which was electric start but I had to hand crank it like a Model A, and I learned to work on that real fast. I mowed yards with it. My dad had a team of mechanics that used to teach me about engines and I would repair the tractors and the semi trucks that we hauled the fruit with. It was a lot of fun. I rebuilt a lot of transmissions and engines. Between 1965 and 1968, we road-raced Camaros at the “Baby” Grand Am – the pre-runner to the Bush races. Camaros, Firebirds, Mustangs and the little Ford Cougars, they would all race the day before the Grand Am, before Richard Petty, A.J. Foyt, and all those guys. I think it was year ’67 we ended up in the NASCAR points. We were seventh in the nation with just a three-man team. We had a driver called Billy Yuma, and I was the mechanic and about everything else. I never will forget sitting on the pit box and we had built this device that shook the rubber off the radiator because the radiator kept getting clogged up on the car, and Richard Petty walked by and saw it. He said, “Well, son, I really like that idea. I’m gonna do that.” He was the king back then, and that was thrilling. I did enough driving to scare myself half to death. What I really liked was drag racing, and I set four national records way back in the old days. I had an A Comp dragster with a 396 Chevy in it, and I had a B dragster back when you could do it economically. My Mom didn’t catch me this time, but the motor came out of my ’65 Corvette. [laughter] I guess I didn’t learn my lesson in ’63. Of course, my mom tells the story now as if it was funny but she didn’t act that way back then.

SAR: Reed, you talk about driving around off-road, plinking and shooting. What was your first firearm that you remember?

Knight: I started with bow and arrow in the 1950s. I was very competitive, and that went from archery to firearms to cars. I used to shoot .22s all the time. Being in the citrus grove business, we’d hunt rabbits, squirrels and varmints. I had a Winchester gallery pump gun. It was just part of every day life, plinking and hunting. My dad had an interest in arms and armor, and he took me to Europe where we bought a lot of antique guns and armor. The Customs guys thought we were in the antique business because of the flint locks and cap and ball guns. My dad enjoyed the history of firearms: he was a collector extraordinaire. He collected tools, coins; he collected all kinds of things. I grew up in an environment where people had respect for the past, and the details and the discipline of collecting. My dad would bring home bags of quarters, and I’d sit down watching TV with a bag of quarters and going through separating them. First, pulling all the silver quarters out, and second filling in all the quarters in the books. Of course all the books having all the different rare quarters and filling them all through was exciting. In the ’40s and ’50s, that was real common. On firearms, I did some hunting, but not a lot other than around the groves. In my first year of college I was on the ROTC rifle team where we used .22 caliber Remington 52s. I was on the rifle team freshman year, and then I started shooting what’s called PPC, and that’s police combat shooting with revolvers. I was a reserve police officer with the City of Vero Beach in 1969-70 or so.

SAR: Had you seen machine guns at that point?

Knight: I had seen some, played with them, and when ’68 came along with the Gun Control Act and the Amnesty, you know, everybody was so skeptical about the registration process, that I didn’t get involved. There were plenty of guys with machine guns, and they’d go out and shoot them at ranges, and before 1968 if you made the gun where it would not shoot automatic, then it was considered not to need registration. When the law changed in ’68, it became “Once a machine gun, always a machine gun.” That changed the whole thing for everyone I knew. I didn’t have anything to register, so in 1968 I didn’t make any. Sort of the opposite. Everyone was pretty cynical that the government was going to come take the guns away once they got them all registered. Most of the people that I ran with back then, because I was shooting pistols and stuff, were either police officers or friends of police officers. When the law changed, they took their guns and either gave them up or gave them to somebody else, or actually turned them in to the department, and let the department do the paperwork. People generally thought there would be a confiscation. They sure didn’t know they were going to be worth $10,000 or $20,000 apiece. Remember we’re talking about machine guns that people had bought very cheaply. They were buying Thompsons from InterArms for $125. The machine guns weren’t worth much even after the Amnesty for a very long time.

SAR: Were you doing any gunsmithing?

Knight: Yes. I was shooting about 50,000 rounds a year of .38 special ammunition and I had to reload that because it was so expensive. I was reloading at night, and shooting during the weekends. I had my own range and my own targets as well as turning targets. I had one of the best ranges set up. During the winter, all the shooting teams from the United States Secret Service would come down and practice at my home in Florida. It was cold up north and if they could get another couple months of practicing, they could get a head start on the year. Some of the early matches were held in Florida. The very first regional match was held in Pompano, Florida. I would travel with them to and from matches, pretty much all over the country, shooting. I enjoyed that, and I worked on the guns. I built combat guns and built the sights on them, and built the big, heavy bull barrels, and worked on the actions, put ball bearings in. I had a milling machine and a lathe, and a couple of real sharp files. I learned how to thread barrels, how to set head space and polish parts. One of the things I did was I built an adjustable trigger stop that in the combat you would use a two-stage trigger pull, rather than cocking the hammer. The amount of movement on the trigger would rotate the cylinder and cock the hammer and get everything locked up, and then you’d break the hammer, and it was very accurate. Back in those days I was building guns and shooting with wadcutter ammo, and we were shooting one-inch groups at 50 yards. I liked Smith & Wesson’s.

SAR: Were you collecting Smiths?

Knight: When ’68 came along with the Gun Control Act, I started very intently collecting Smith & Wesson’s. I didn’t have an FFL yet. I was collecting to try and get one of each and condition wasn’t too important at that time. They didn’t have to be new in the box. The hard guns to get were the snub noses. You wouldn’t think it today, but back then the little J frames were very hard to get because they were concealable and everyone thought the government was after them. Smith and Wesson wasn’t building enough of them for the customer base. The basic law change in 1968 was in fact going after concealable handguns and stopping interstate commerce in so-called “Saturday Night Specials.” Getting all the different models with all the alloy frames, the different concealed hammers and features sure was interesting to me. We were all into revolvers. Remember, not only myself, but there were no police officers that even thought about carrying automatics. They were not considered to be a weapon of choice for a police officer.

SAR: When was the first time you saw a sound suppressor, a silencer for a firearm?

Knight: I’m sure I saw some in the 60’s, but they didn’t really interest me then. I got into machine guns first. I had a very early semiautomatic AR-15; a three-digit serial number Colt Model SP-1. I was at a gun show and a friend of mine came over and gave me a barrel bag. I unzipped it and there was this barrel in it, it was obviously a heavy barrel, it was a quick change barrel, and I had no idea what that barrel fit. It had a barrel extension that looked like the AR-15. I started doing research. I found out that this guy Gene Stoner had invented a gun that was called a Stoner 63. I then found out that he was the same guy that invented the AR-15 which became our US M16. I read some of the books about the subject and I started thinking about if I could ever find one of these Stoner 63s. Roger Cox from Law Enforcement Ordnance Corporation advertised a Stoner 63 and in 1974, for $1,700, I bought my first Stoner 63. It was in the rifle configuration. Now I had the machine gun barrel and a rifle, and I was off on a quest.

SAR: A Stoner 63 couldn’t be your first machine gun… that’s just not right. {Laughter}

Knight: You’re correct. The very first machine gun I bought was a Military Armament Corporation MAC 10, and I bought it before I got a machine gun license. It came with a suppressor, and I paid $200 for the gun and suppressor, $200 for the stamp tax for the gun, and $200 for the stamp tax on the suppressor. I paid $600 for the package. There was a guy from Tampa who was a machine gun dealer. He didn’t have a shop, he was a collector who had quite a few machine guns and ran a Class 3 business on the side. I didn’t shoot it – we were at a gun show where he had it. He gave me the Form 4 paperwork, and I went and got the paperwork signed off immediately. Nothing really caught me about it except that it was affordable and it just looked like something fun to shoot. After that, I got an FFL and paid the Class 3 Stamp. The first gun that I bought under that license was an MG-42 from InterArms, and I really got ripped off on that because this guy had bought it from InterArms and he had resold it to me for a whopping $300! It was mismatched too.

SAR: Disgusting. You must have felt terrible. [laughter]

Knight: Yeah, but not anymore. Wish I could find MG-42s for that price now. It was one of the InterArms mismatched guns with wire wrapped around the buttstock to hold the buttstock together. It had been arsenal refinished. I had trouble finding ammo, but it ran fine, and it was fun. That was how I got started in Class 3, and that was probably in ’73. The Vietnam War was still going on, but it was winding down. I was chasing Stoner parts. I knew what I was looking for, and I just found people here and there with parts. I had found some belt feed parts, and I built other belt feed parts to complement the ones I had. The Houston Gun Show was where you’d really find all the parts. Back then that was the Knob Creek of the machine gun community. We’d find parts and pieces, and then we would finish them up or try to make them work. We didn’t have any drawings to work from. I guess I started going to gun shows in the ’60s. That Houston show was the classic of all classics, our favorite at the time. We also went to Ohio for Ohio Gun Collectors Shows. I went to Atlanta sometimes, and the big show in Florida was the Lakeland Gun Show. I had some traveling buddies, Pedro Bello, John Ciener, the local cronies that were gun nuts. We all kind of hung around together and traveled to shows.

SAR: This would be right around the time of the MAC auction in 1975. Did you know Mitch Werbell?

Knight: Pedro Bello knew Mitch, and I never will forget riding up with Pedro up to Georgia in his pickup truck. Some things in life stick in your mind vividly, and I remember this very well. I had three machine guns to my name, and I sat there next to Pedro, I had a Class 3 machine gun dealer’s license, and there I was sitting at the MAC auction. I had also just gotten paid for a big citrus contract, and I had $50,000 with me – cashier’s checks in $5,000 increments. They were selling the MAC 10s. They started off, and they sold a few, but when it really got in the heat of things, when they were really trying to move them, they would put a pallet of 100 on the floor, and say, “We are not going to take one dime less than $600.” I don’t mean $600 apiece; I mean $600 for the 100 MACs. I said, “Pedro, how can I go wrong at six bucks apiece?” He said, “Those guns will be bookends, don’t buy them, you can’t get magazines, they’re no good, you don’t want them.” In two days at the auction, I ended up buying 750 machine guns and silencers, and I spent $11,000.

SAR: Did you keep any for bookends? {Laughter}

Knight: I still have some, so I guess if I wanted to… Anyway I bought everything I could. I bought every prototype silencer they had, I bought Reisings, a bolt Remington 700, and I never will forget, we went from there over to Mitch Werbell’s house, and Pedro introduced me to him. Of course Mitch was walking around and just having a ball because the auction had all gone off so well and he was at odds with Military Armament Corp. Mitch had his M134 Minigun for sale at his house for $600, just the receiver, and I passed on that because I figured I could never get the parts. Fred Rexer was there, and Fred came over to me and he looked me in the eye and said, “Who in the hell are you, and why in the world would you buy those machine guns?” And I said, “I just did it because I could.” He was mad because he had put in a full bid for everything and individually everybody’s bid ended up being more than his total bid. Of course he would not bid against himself to get individual pieces; it would be bidding against himself. He actually gambled on winning the whole thing, and he got nothing. Fred was just absolutely livid. Looking at how machine gun values went, I still like to tell everybody that I see that knows Pedro that Pedro cost me my first $1 million, because I could’ve bought $50,000 worth where I only ended up buying $11,000 worth. Jonathan Ciener was there at the auction. Ron Martin bought all the MAC11 .380s which went for $50 each and InterArms bought almost all of the 9mm MACs. Most of those 9mm MACs went overseas. If memory serves me right, there were about 10,000 MACs total, .380s, 9mms and .45s. The majority of everything was .45s, and there were probably less than 100 .380s MAC 11s.

SAR: Were some of those MAC 10s export models without a threaded barrel?

Knight: Actually, I don’t think so. I think people converted them afterwards. In order to export the MACs, the government made them take the threads off the barrel. I think it was a company called Swift Shops that did that later as they were going to export MACs and no threads for silencers were allowed. Our government didn’t want silencers exported or guns with the ability to accept a silencer. They took the threads off the end of the barrel and cold-blued them on the front.

SAR: How long did it take to get the paperwork done from the auction?

Knight: The paperwork was only about seven days. The interesting part is the ATF just came along and confiscated what they wanted for downtown, and I had gotten some of the really nice, consecutive serial numbered, high polished blue MAC 10s and MAC 11s. ATF confiscated some of my guns and simply did not approve the paper. Back then I didn’t know enough to complain. They just cherry picked the things that they wanted out of the auction. There was a ton of interesting parts and raw material they sold at auction as well. There were bolts, and stocks and all the internals. The ATF would not let them sell any of the parts for the silencers and they made them destroy those. The material they built the wipes out of, there were big sheets of that, and they made them destroy that. That indicates even in 1975 they had an idea that silencer parts were to be considered contraband, or at least had that attitude.

SAR: It wasn’t until 1981 that the suppressor parts were blocked from sale. I know Mitch used to sell silencer parts to whoever was doing whatever. It was a straight over the counter sale and any number of Class 2s in the early to mid 1970s bought their parts at Military Armament Corporation.

Knight: There wasn’t a law to prevent it, but ATF would not let the bankruptcy auction sell any silencer parts. In the MAC auction, the ATF had wanted all these machine guns and everything destroyed, and the bankruptcy judge said, “No, these are legal to own and they’re guns that are manufactured, and they can sell these.” The Bankruptcy judge had full control and if it was legal to sell, he was going to sell it. On another note, one of the RPB (Robie, Pitts & Brugeman, the next manufacturers of the MAC series) guys had been the shop foreman for Military Armament Corporation. I’m sure he was there and bought all the MAC tooling, and bought the machine guns in the flat, and RPB finished those. He knew how to continue the manufacturing process. I bought the very first guns from RPB; I have guns one through five in every caliber for the RPB production. I was good friends with them when they first started off building guns. They’re first production was taking the MAC flats and re-stamping them “RPB” on the other side of the receiver. These are called the “RPB Overstamp MACs.” I have very good examples of the entire MAC series machine guns, and some of the stock of MAC-10s left as well.

SAR: In this same timeframe, you had been making some Stoner parts and gathering up whatever you could find, but you hadn’t found any large caches yet.

Knight: The caches came later. Around 1974-5, I was doing my police combat shooting, and I was involved with the Secret Service teams. One of the guys from Secret Service had gone to SEAL Team Two, and they showed him these Stoner belt-fed machine guns that were inoperable, and he said, “Well, I know a guy down in Florida that works on those and has some parts and pieces, and you need to call him.” SEAL Team Two called me and wanted me to go up to see what they had. They had a conglomeration of 63s and 63As that were all hodge-podged, and they had mixed parts from 63s into the 63As and 63As into the 63s. Most of the guns just did not work. I took all their guns apart and repaired and rebuilt all their guns, as much as could be done. They had used those extensively in Vietnam, and they’d brought back all the stuff, but the guns weren’t supportable because the factory wasn’t building any of the new parts. I had the parts in stock, and I put all their guns back together. That’s way before I even knew that if you do the work, you were supposed to charge the government. I figured that out later. {Laughter} That’s also when I really saw my first pistol suppressor. The SEALs had what was called a “Hushpuppy,” a Smith & Wesson Model 39 that was converted by Smith & Wesson and had a little aluminum silencer on it with a rubber package that let the bullet go through it and trapped the gases inside the silencer. When they added a slide lock on it, and when the operator unlocked the slide and tried to jack the round out and put a new round in, the extractor would climb out over the cartridge case, and the cartridge case would stick in the chamber. They thought that that was some kind of a “vapor lock” (That was the term the SEALs used), and I later determined that the ammo they were using was manufactured by Supervel, and was way up on the high end of SAMMI specs for what was functional. They were using a heavier bullet, making that 9mm go sub-sonic, and of course at that time, in the early ’70s, no one had really perfected sub-sonic 9mm ammunition. It’s not as simple as just putting in a heavier bullet. I did a whole lot of experimenting and found out that as the slide went back, the barrel on the 39 unlocked by moving down, and as the barrel moved down, the extractor came over the cartridge rim and the extractor would leave the cartridge stuck in the chamber. I went and got a whole bunch of Beretta 92 series that used an extractor that was a larger size and a straight motion, they pulled the cartridge straight back as it unlocked. I threaded in the barrels and put their silencers on Beretta 92s and solved that problem. I also loaded 50,000 rounds of 9mm with a 170-grain bullet that they could also use in this suppressed pistol package. I built the Beretta 92s in 1978-79, and the special subsonic ammunition was in 1981-82. I only built about a dozen and all went to the government except my “keepers.” My first contract with the government was around 1974 when the government had wanted to fix the Stoner 63s, putting a block in the front of the trigger, and I took and built a little dust-cover for the Stoner 63 for all the guns. Crane bought a bunch of parts so they could rebuild their guns. I also built wooden handguards for the Stoner 63, so they could convert rifles to machine guns. To this day you still see some of my wooden hand guards that people think are original and I’m the only guy who knows that they’re not. I did a real good job of copying Cadillac Gage’s work.

(Reed’s son Trey has been quietly prodding his father on some issues in the Interview, and at this point Trey suddenly remembers this event and gets indignant.)

Trey: Hey! That’s right! You know, he gave me ten cents apiece to sand them. I didn’t know I was getting ripped off. I was just a kid!

Knight: Yeah. [laughter] I gave you ten cents apiece and you were darned happy.

SAR: How can you tell the difference between those forends? We’re going to start a new edition of Stoner collector frenzy here.

Knight: These were the Stoner 63 LMG handguards, and we built them out of the same wood that the originals were made from. We used the same steel bushings, everything was the same. The difference is that the original Cadillac Gage wooden forends had a sling swivel at one end, and ours did not, because the Navy SEALs didn’t want a sling that hooked to the hand guard. After that, I was rebuilding their Stoners, trying to keep them running, and I’d run out of parts. I went everywhere looking. One day, I said to myself, “There’s got to be a bigger stash of parts somewhere.” These didn’t just to dry up. I had heard that this guy by the name of Eugene Stoner had a house in Florida. I looked in the phonebook, and I found him in a little town just south of mine, just north of West Palm and south of Fort Pierce. I called him and I said, “Is this the Gene Stoner that worked for Cadillac Gage?” And he said, “No, this is the Gene Stoner that worked as a consultant for Cadillac Gauge,” and I said, “Well, I’m repairing some of the Navy SEALs’ guns, and I’m looking for parts and pieces, and is there any way that I can get any parts?” He said, “I have all that stuff, but I’m down here in Florida. If you want to come up to my place up in Port Clinton, Ohio, I’ll entertain showing you the parts and pieces and what have you.” It was late 1978, maybe into 1979. Trey says I “tricked” the family that we were going on a family vacation and that is what I told them. We all piled in the Dodge van and drove up to Port Clinton, Ohio, and we met Mr. Stoner. He took me into this warehouse that had big holes in the roof, and there were seven or eight semi-loads of parts, and all the tooling for the Stoner 63. I got a handful of parts I wanted and invited him to visit me in Florida. He came up a couple times and had lunch with me, and we talked, and I’d go down to his place, and we would have a lot of fun, just going out to lunch and talking. He was not really doing anything as he was between programs. At that time he had just gone to Iran and sat down with the Shah, who said, “We want an anti-aircraft gun to shoot down those Iraqi aircraft.” Stoner said, “I can build you a gun, and I can build it for anti-aircraft work,” and the Shah asked how long it would take. Stoner said “I’ll send you a proposal,” and they had a very nice, cordial meeting. As Stoner’s getting ready to leave, one of the assistants to the Shah came up and handed Stoner a check for $1 million. In those days that was pretty tall money, and the Shah had Stoner’s attention. The Shah said, “I want you to get started on this program, and I want you to send me monthly reports, and I want you to tell me how far you are and keep me posted. As you tell me what you spend, I’ll refurbish that money, but here’s your first draw, and just keep going on this thing, and let’s get this program underway.” Stoner was actually being directed by the State Department to do this project. One of the things that I later found out is they didn’t really want to sell the Iranians our best US anti-aircraft technology, but they wanted to sell the Shah good technology. Stoner basically had the very, very first of the laser-tracking systems that he built on his “Eagle” system, and was quite successful at building this twin 35-millimeter, high-velocity anti-aircraft system. We spoke quite a bit in that period. We’d talk about other things that he was working on, what he was doing in Ohio at Ares. His main projects were cannons and the 75mm and 90mm smooth bore, long rod penetrating, case telescoped ammunitions.

SAR: Were you still racing?

Knight: No. At that time, I was really focusing on my main work; I was in what’s called the hedging and topping business, in the citrus business. I also had a garbage company at that time, yes, before you jump on that Dan, I was actually a garbage man. {Laughter} I just hadn’t made up my mind what I really wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn’t racing, but I was always an avid shooter. For ten years I won the Florida State Championship for the number one on the Governor’s 20, which was the top 20 revolver/pistol shooters in the State of Florida, consecutive, up until 1981. I wasn’t doing archery anymore, but guns were always around. I had a big pile of machine guns. I was an FFL dealer, doing business, but I was also working towards the collection that was my passion. Regarding the firearms business, other than dealing, I had been working on silencers for the Berettas and Hushpuppies. Right about 1980, I basically started working very close with the government to develop better silencers for them. I also went all over the country looking for parts and pieces for the government. They wanted certain types of guns and certain types of ammunition, and I was kind of a go-to guy to get things for them.

SAR: This is the same timeframe you started working with Dick Marcinko? (Richard Marcinko, the “Rogue Warrior” of SEAL Team Six and Red Cell fame.)

Knight: That’s affirmative. I didn’t know all the details at the time, but I was read into a then-to-be secret program that this individual was going to go out and build a bunch of equipment and put together a team for counterterrorism. This later became Dev Group. I went all over the country finding parts and pieces, and getting guns and things that they could use to do their job. I sold to the Navy, and I sold Marcinko the first Beretta 92s that the government ever bought. Later I traded the 92s back and gave them 92Ss. These were all Italian pistols. Some of these I altered for slidelocks and suppressors. The early years of this were all pretty wild. Carrying guns and ammo to Little Creek in the back of that same old Dodge van I had, pulling a U-haul trailer behind it filled to the top with guns, and getting there and dropping them off in this warehouse in Little Creek, Virginia, walking over to this other warehouse and a guy handed me a check, then I’d leave and go back home to Florida. I was a contractor, and doing business with them.

SAR: Did it make you money in those first deals?

Knight: Gas was a lot cheaper then, and I did make money, but this was all exciting. I traveled a lot for shooting, but very little overseas. I worked a lot through InterArms and some of the other companies that had product that I could buy and import. I was not like Sam Cummings and the people who were really international-type people. I was such a low denominator and so low on the food chain in these deals. I know I made some money and had a good time. I learned a lot. I was “drinking water through a firehose” back then. It was certainly exciting because I was working for all the high-end people. I remember one day I was up at Beltsville, the Secret Service facility, and these guys came over and said, “Listen, we need you to go talk to somebody,” and I said, “Okay.” So we went into this room and we sat down and this guy was there chomping on a cigar, and he’s sitting there looking at me, and he said, “Listen,” he said, “I understand you’re doing some work for my buddy, Marcinko,” and I said, “Well, yeah, I have.” He said, “Well, I really want you to come to work for me.” And I said, “Okay, I guess I could. Who are you?” He said, “I’m Charlie Beckwith, and I have a need for what you do,” and I said, “Well, I’m your guy.” Charlie had heard about all the work that I’d done for Marcinko, and of course, Beckwith and Marcinko were rivals, they both wanted to be on top of the hill. I’m sure that everybody that Marcinko had, Charlie tried to steal, and everybody Charlie had, Dick tried to steal. I started working for Charlie Beckwith in the early ’80s, at SOTF, the Special Operations Training Facility.

The two Navy SEALs that I repaired the Stoner 63s for, one was Fly Fallon, the other was Ken McDonald. They were the armorers at SEAL Team Two. They had served in Vietnam with Marcinko. When Marcinko stood up at Dev Group, he basically picked five guys, including himself made six. Ken McDonald basically knew me from work me in the arms room, and that’s how my connection had got there. Fly had started working for Special Operations Group Two, which was basically the early WarCom. At that time there was SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Four. Fly did all the weapons testing. Fly was actually the Navy SEAL that did all the testing on the M-60E3, which was a lightweight M-60. He also did all the early testing of the very early Minimi, and the HK262. That’s where I got into all the early weapons in the ’70s, when all those systems were being tested. Fly served up until almost until his death. He had gotten “Agent Orange’d,” and about seven years ago he died from cancer.

SAR: Reed, here we are in the early 1980s, and you’re running a bunch of different, diverse businesses that don’t have much connection to each other…

Trey: Selling guns to the Navy SEALs was probably a lot more fun than hauling trash and trimming trees.

Knight: I was still in the citrus hedging and topping business, and yes, selling guns to the SEALS was pretty exciting. In 1981 I started a supply company for the police departments in the State of Florida, and the name of that company is Lawmen’s Shooter Supply. We were a distributor for Smith & Wesson, Remington, and Winchester. I sold handguns, body armor, light bars, car equipment, holsters and whatever they needed. I started off kind of small with three or four employees. I had a retail store at 3801 Okeechobee Road in Fort Pierce, Florida. Trey started working there when he was 11 or 12 or so. It was kind of a family business.

Trey: That was my first exposure to the firearms business, getting behind the counter and selling guns.

Knight: I actually worked there too, that was my day job. I was driving around to different police departments doing trade-ins and straight sales. We would trade guns, we would bid on guns, we would do light bar demonstrations, we would go all over the state and sell guns. I got some good trade-ins, did a lot of good business with a lot of good departments. Basically, grew that from a startup company, it’s still in business, and now my oldest son, Trey, still runs and manages that company, with 25 employees. We basically just stay in the state of Florida. We had other people that we competed against that, they stayed in their territory and we stayed in ours, it just made sense. This is also about when I went to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot for the first time.

SAR: Did you go there when it was tents outside, or when it was the pole barn?

Knight: The first year or so the show was in tents. I guess that would be in 1986 or so. Right after the 1986 law change banning manufacture of machine guns for private ownership. After they put the pole barns up, I would get some tables with friends and go there to shop for firearms and parts we needed, and sell some Stoner 63s. It was always a good time. I still like to go there when I can, to shop, see what’s there, see old friends.

SAR: Regarding finding Stoner 63s and parts, you went back to Port Clinton with Gene Stoner and made a deal….

Trey: I remember when. It was13 tons of parts and tooling, seven tractor trailer loads that all had to be loaded, sorted, stored.

Knight: Yeah, they included the tooling and everything else in the deal we did. That was much earlier than 1986. I guess it sets the stage for where we were. I was collecting that stuff just to keep it, to supply parts for the Navy SEALs, to have inventory. I thought that I might build a gun one day and actually made 100 pre-1986 transferable Stoner 63As. I saw the end of the machine gun world coming and like everyone else I built whatever I could. 100 Stoner 63As, some Steyr AUGs, some HK trigger packs, a few M134 Miniguns, and even some Remington 1100 machine guns in 12 gauge. There was a window of opportunity of about 45 days from when we knew the law was coming at us, to when it took effect. It was quite a frenzy in the industry, and some people that were based in the civilian market turned out a tremendous amounts of items. On the Stoners, I was interested in preserving and keeping up with the tooling. There were only maybe two dozen Stoners that the SEALs would try and keep going by this point. It wasn’t like it was a big, monumental effort on my part or their part. In 1982, there was an RFP out on the street for suppressors for the M16s that the Navy was going to build, seems like it was 3,000 suppressors for the M16A1s. The silencer had to meet certain thresholds – of so many rounds a minute for such a period of time, had to be submergible, had to meet all the military Navy specs. In 1982, we won that contract, and delivered those suppressors to Crane Naval Weapon Support. It was our first major suppressor contract. We had sold a couple dozen here or there in the past. As has been noted before, there’s a difference in a “sale” and a “Contract.” This was a full size “Contract.” This was the Navy Model, from Knight’s Armament Company. I built a few extra; I probably sold 100 other than that on the civilian market, and they were all stainless steel. The flash hider was removed and the Navy Model was screwed on, and had a tapered split collet that clamped onto the barrel that kept the silencer straight, and it also kept it from unscrewing off into the barrel. It extended back over the barrel. It was an inch and three-quarters in diameter, and about seven or eight inches long. Our delivery time frame was six months, and we met the deadline.

SAR: What were you doing for sound testing in that time period? There really wasn’t a solid protocol.

Knight: I had bought a B&K 2209 sound meter from Don Walsh (Larand). Mickey Finn (Qual-A-Tec) was testing suppressors, and Don and I were testing them. We got together and said, “Okay, this is how we’re going to standardize things. We’re going to test this at one meter from the muzzle, at 90 degrees to the muzzle, and we’re going to use a 4136 microphone, and the B&K 2209 meter, Peak-Hold, but A-weighting.” Basically, Crane followed us and their standards, and we set up what became the Mil-Standard for A-testing used today. Our combined experience with sound level testing led us to choose the 2209 meter with that particular microphone because of the very fast rise time, and for the high sound pressure levels with firearms.

SAR: When did you meet Don Walsh?

Knight: I met Don in the mid-’70s, probably around maybe ’76, ’77. All that period of time I was doing work with the suppressors and the Navy SEALs. Everyone knew all the cast of characters in the business at that time. It was a small, closed community with a closed customer base. Kind of a parallel sales situation. Some of the people concentrated on selling to the civilian market or a little bit to law enforcement, but the community that was actually selling to the government was very small. It still is, no matter what the marketing hype might be. When I said “Cast of Characters,” I meant that it was an interesting group. Mickey Finn was the first one to coin the term “investors” in this industry, in that he went out and got a bunch of people to put money into his business, and they did a lot of R&D and took a new style of write-off. I was funding all of my work out of my back pocket. They really got a leg up on us and they really built some great products. That was in the ’79-’80 timeframe, when we were very heavily involved in the suppressor development work for the government, doing different things: .22s and 9mms, and MP-5s and integral suppressors. Most of that was nickel and dime stuff and nobody had any real large major contracts at that time. That first Navy contract was pretty much the largest contract that had come along out of the military for a number of years since the Vietnam era. Testing at that time was still based on the Frankfurt Arsenal-style testing. Our new protocol moved things up to a higher level. It was still an analog system, it hadn’t moved to the digital system, but it was so much further ahead then because it was a defined parameter. How you measure the sound of a gunshot, because it is so transient, is very important on what type of rise time you use, and also what kind of microphone you use, and what kind of distance you use away from the sound source, as well as angles. All of those things, when you define them, and we all started using the same “ruler” to measure something it became so subjective so we could accurately understand the effects of our suppression techniques. Especially on products like the Hushpuppy-type suppressor, because the sound is over such short period of time, but the peak of that sound is higher. A Hushpuppy-type suppressor with a rubber-type baffle or wipe system actually shows on the meter at a much higher level of sound than other suppressors, but because the sound source is for such a short period of time, you actually hear the bullet hitting the wipes as the source of the sound, not the muzzle blast. On many wiped designs, it’s the bullet strike that’s getting the noise level that you actually hear. That being said, the Hushpuppy was quiet to the ear, but it showed a 127 dB on the sound meter. If you would compare it to a non-wipe system, it would be probably about 122 dBs, and you’d look at that and you’d see that five or six-dB difference, and that was 100% noise difference, but the Hushpuppy sounded quieter to the ear. We really perfected the rubber wipe suppressor in what we called the “Snap-On.” We actually built a little aluminum can with the rubber baffle stack for pistols. Because the suppressor was so light and it built pressure in this chamber, it negated the need for a Nielsen-type device, and the gun/suppressor system became very reliable. The Beretta happens to be the gun of choice in this type system, because the barrel does not tilt, the action just goes straight back.

SAR: You do have a tremendous passion for the history and technology of military small arms. Would it be fair to characterize your experiences though as living a little bit in the civilian world of ownership, but living mostly in the military and law enforcement community in your designs and manufacturing?

Knight: I guess we’re always trying to identify what we want to be when we grow up. I have crossed over in the communities, looking for balance and diversity to get companies through the hard times. We all want to be something, or aspire to be something. My inspiration has always been for making better equipment for our servicemen, and building good equipment, and improving the tools that they have to do their job. It’s not all good times though. I remember in 1990, waking up one Monday morning and having a big mortgage on a brand new factory that I’d built, and not having one government contract in-house at all. They were completed. That was quite frightening because I looked at the mortgage and I had made a major commitment to it when I had had some very large government contracts, and it looked like they were going to last forever. I had committed when we had three major contracts hit all at one time. I was building silencers for the Beretta M9 for the Air Force, about 5,000 of them. I was building helicopter gun mounts for the H-53 helicopter, and both of those contracts were running concurrent with each other. I also had another very large classified contract of delivering product that was right after that. With three of those contracts, it looked like we had “arrived.” We were now, in my opinion at the time, a major military contractor, because we were certainly able to do the work. I had another business that I mentioned earlier that was a company called Lawmen’s and Shooters’ Supply Inc. That company was very, very stable. We were doing good sales, we were making a decent profit, but the Lawmen’s and Shooters’ Supply Inc. ended up, from time to time, covering the payroll for the research and development that we were doing over there in the other side of the house. When we got these good contracts for these large deliveries, I did not have any way to manufacture what was needed. I started going to the tool shows and looking at manufacturing methods to be able to manufacture this equipment that I had sold to the government. I ended up buying new CNC machines and developing processes. From 1986 to 1988, we became a pretty serious manufacturer. I owned two or three CNC lathes and two or three CNC milling machines, and we were learning on how to “manufacture” as opposed to “filling small contracts.” Big difference. Then, like I said, there is the day when everything is done and you’re looking at that big mortgage, no open contracts, and you wonder, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

SAR: Knight’s was making suppressors, some larger mount pieces, and some other accessories. There had to be a point where you had an inspiration for a rail system.

Knight: One of my very good Navy SEAL friends had gotten tangled up into his parachute going into Panama and drowned wrapped up into his parachute cord. I thought, “I need to help make their load lighter.” I noticed that in the pictures and on TV that they had taken their flashlight and taped it to their hand-guards with duct tape. I thought, “That’s not going to stay lined up and it’s going to hit on doors, and it makes the rifle bulky.” I thought, “What if we had a way to put that flashlight on and off the gun easily and compactly?” I played around a little bit with what we called the “Lego,” nicknamed after the toy company product that allowed you to clip things together. I had no idea that this thing was ever going to be used for holding anything other than a flashlight. I built flashlights that went underneath the rifle, and vertical pistol grips. I built flashlights that went on the side of the rifle. I built all kinds of flashlight mounts, and converted a lot of already existing MAG lights to brackets and mounts that attached to guns. Our first goal was to take an already existing firearm and modify it to make this “rail system” that parts could plug onto. We took the thing to Colt, and other manufacturers, and I said, “Hey, I got this idea. I’d like to show you this, and I’d like for you to build it,” and I remember meeting there at Colt, and Rob Roy said, “Is there a requirement for this?” I said, “What do you mean by requirement?” He said, “Does the government have a need for this?” I said, “Yeah, they have a need for it.” He said, “Well, is there a written requirement?” I said, “They don’t even know they don’t have this yet, but there is a need for it.” So he said, “Well, you go get a requirement for this and we’ll build it for you.” I said, “If I go get a requirement for this, I’m not gonna need you. I need you now, I need you to go help me sell this.” They all said, “Well, we just don’t think that there’s a need for it, and we don’t think there’s a requirement for it.” I had been doing a lot of work with Colt because I built the muzzle brake on the Advanced Combat Rifle, the ACR program. So I knew everybody at Colt, and they knew me, and they’d been down to my factory and I had a relationship with them that was a very good and strong.

SAR: They just didn’t get the vision.

Knight: In retrospect, it took forever to get the government interested in it. They really didn’t know that they really needed it. Remember, I was selling it as a mount to hold a flashlight. I remember talking to Gene Stoner about it one time. I said, “Why in the world didn’t you give me a place on this M16 that was square to the bore, so that I can mount something on that would always be parallel to the bore?” He said, “Well, what is it that you wanted me to mount? What is it that you have in mind that you’re going to mount to this?” I said, “Well, like maybe a laser,” and he looked at me and he said, “Yeah, in 1958 I was thinking about a laser.” {Laughter} I said, “I guess you’re right, you didn’t have any need for that at that time.” I remember in the early ’90s sitting in a meeting with a colonel who was briefing people and he said, “I believe if they put one of these rails on a butt stock, somebody would buy it.” I was in the back of this room filled with the industry people, and I raised my hand and I said, “Sir, did I understand that to be a requirement?” {Laughter} It was a joke at the time, but today it might not be a joke. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about it.

The hardest thing to do was not modifying the existing rifle, but to have those rails to stay in alignment for the total life of the shooting of the rifle for its total life. The rail system had to withstand the wear factor, it had to withstand the recoil factor, the heat factor, and all the other adverse conditions as well as be soldier-proof. We had to build it so it didn’t make the gun any heavier, it didn’t change the point of impact, that it didn’t take any tools to put on, and that it could be put on at the user level rather than having to come back to the armory to install. I remember sitting in the first meeting, we were negotiating, and I said, “You guys aren’t even asking for the most important part of this rail system, which is the vertical pistol grip.” They said, “We don’t need that. We don’t have a requirement for it.” I suggested they do some testing. They had just finished up with a simulator that they had just built for the ACR program, and they had just spent umpteen millions of dollars of testing that equipment against the baseline of duplex rounds and different things. The simulator rifle actually recoiled, and you had to acquire the next target. About two months later they came back to the colonel and he said, “You know something? We have found that that $39 vertical pistol grip that we put on your gun increased the hit probability for every soldier type, experienced soldiers, non-experienced soldiers, all types of shooters, significantly more than the whole $32 million that we spent on the ACR program.” The $39 piece that they added to the M4 and the M16 increased the hit probability more than all the training and testing they did with spending and development on the Advanced Combat Rifle.

SAR: So just getting your rail system on there and putting your front grip on it—

Knight: – Gave a better than 20% improvement to hit probability, which was the goal of the ACR program. What they really said that was significant is that the people that had the most improvements were novice shooters who had a much better hit probability increase than experienced shooters. Experienced shooters knew how to hold the gun, knew how to shoot and what have you. I remember being at Fort Benning one year, and I was there with a group of people, and this sergeant came up to me, he said, “You’re Reed Knight, aren’t you?” I said, “Yeah, I am.” He said, “I just want to shake your hand,” he said, “I train thousands of people here in basic training in the shooting skills, and every time I get a shooter that does not qualify, I can give them one of your vertical pistol grips, and they always qualify afterwards. That one piece of gear has made more difference in people qualifying in military shooting than any other piece of gear that I’ve ever seen come through here.”

SAR: That’s pretty satisfying.

Knight: It was great. It was also satisfying that this was something that the government didn’t even want and I had called it right and gotten it approved. Actually, in my infinite stupidity, when we were negotiating on the rail system, I said, “You don’t want the vertical pistol grip? I’ll throw it in for free.” Obviously it was included in the price with all the other stuff, but at the same time, when I added it to the kit, I didn’t increase the price for the vertical pistol grip. That was the RIS (Rail Interface System), our first product in 1992. It was a USSOCOM purchase. The RAS (Rail Adapter System) was an almost concurrent requirement. The Army tested the RIS first, then tested the RAS, and wanted some changes made. At 5-6,000 rounds with their testing style using a bore rod, the point of impact had shifted out of the specification on the RIS. We developed the RAS, and spent another $250-300,000 developing that product. Six months of development, really a very strong program, and we submitted it. They tested it and said, “It didn’t do any better than the RIS.” That was a shock. I asked how they tested it. It turns out they were testing with a bore rod down the bore like they had on the RIS, and the bore rod had gotten worn out, that it became out of synch, and they didn’t have a baseline. We showed them how we tested it, and they adopted our test procedure and re-tested it, and they said, “You know something? Your first one would’ve passed also.” We had ended up spending a lot of our own money to give them a different product, and that’s why we always look carefully not only at our own products, but what the customer’s test protocols will be.

SAR: You were putting a great team together in the ’80s, and today you’ve got a good team to design and build the products that you decide to take on.

Knight: One of the things that I’ve been very fortunate on is that even though I’m not an educated engineer, I’m not an educated business manager, and I’m really not an educated pretty much anything, I have been able to associate myself with some very, very talented people. I have been able to find people that have the same passion that I do, or they have come to me. We have been able to take the ideas and the needs of a customer, and take those needs and to build solutions to those needs. My talent has probably been to think outside of the box. Gene Stoner told me something interesting one day; he said, “I believe when you become an engineer, and they teach you the disciplines, you learn that one and one make two, and that you have to do it this way because this is what the book says to do. I think it prevents you from becoming a true designer. If I sometimes knew what the engineering math was on some of my designs before going all the way through with them, I probably would’ve quit earlier.”

The Knight Interview continues in the next issue of Small Arms Review, where Reed discusses the MK23 suppressor program, SR-25, The SASS, and more.

(Reed’s sons Trey and Will sat in on the interview to prod their father’s memory a bit)

C. Reed Knight, Jr. was born on 22 August, 1945, in Woodbridge, New Jersey. His family moved to Florida before he was a month old allowing him to claim he didn’t have time to be corrupted into a Northerner. His father, C. Reed Knight, Sr. was in the US Army Air Corps at the time flying B-25 bombers stateside as he had finished his pilot training in 1945 just as WWII ended. Reed is married to his high school sweetheart Jan, whom he married in 1967, and they have four children; oldest son Trey, middle son Jacob, youngest son Will, and daughter Sarah, ranging in age from 21 to 38. Reed attended a number of colleges including Florida Southern, Bavard Engineering College in Melbourne, Florida, and Indian River Junior College in Fort Pierce, Florida. Reed served six years in the National Guard starting in 1965. Reed’s companies are some of the amazing success stories of the small arms world, having grown to the point of employing over 300 people today in the manufacture of weapon systems and accessories that Reed has invented and put into production. The list includes the SR-25 rifle he designed with his late partner Eugene Stoner, as well as the Rail Interface System on most current small arms, and many suppressor designs and other firearms. The Knight Collection is one of the most important small arms collections in the world, and Reed’s devotion to the study of small arms has helped the community in too many ways to count. Reed is a tough businessman with a clear view of what he wants to accomplish, and very little patience with anything that interferes with making a proper, top of the line product.

SAR: Where do you think your interest in mechanical things came from?

Knight: I guess from the very beginning my earliest memories were of taking things apart. I like to see how things work. Maybe the side of my brain that’s mechanical overrides the side of my brain that does the reading and the spelling and the other side. I’ve always been able to see things in multiple dimensions and understand them in a very complicated way mechanically. My dad is like that, also. It’s a form of dyslexia, and he basically could not read or write. I have a very tough time reading and writing, too. When I was young, my dad told me, “Son, you can make a living at 40 hours a week, and you can do a little bit better at 50 hours a week, and you probably can do okay at 60 hours a week, but you’re so damn stupid, you’re gonna have to work about 80 hours a week. I suggest you go find yourself a job that you like doing because you’re gonna be spending a lot of time at it.” {Laughter} He was pretty close to on-target with me. I told my dad at the time that I liked guns, and he said, “Well, I guess you better find a way to make a living playing with guns.” I’m one of the very fortunate few people that have managed to make a living out of my hobby.

SAR: Weren’t you racing cars before the firearms?

Knight: Actually, the interests were concurrent. I built cars in high school. When everybody else would go out dating and going to parties, my future wife and I would go over to my garage at my grandfather’s house where I had Model As and different types of cars that I was working on. We used to make dune buggies and head down to the beach and go hunt turtles on the east coast of Florida. Model As were cheap, very lightweight, and we’d put big tires on them, strip them down to where they’d weigh almost nothing, and then drive right on the beach. We would run up and down the beach and that was our weekend fun: running from inlet to inlet on the east coast of Florida. We weren’t interested in making the cars original; we were making them into what we wanted out of them. I had a brand new ’63 Chevrolet Super Sport, less than three months old, and my mom and dad went out of town for the weekend. When they came back, I’d pulled the engine and transmission out of that to put it in my ’55 Chevy, and I had lightened it up and put a blower on it, put the big slicks on the back, and I never will forget the look on my mom’s face when she saw that I had taken this brand new car and tore it all up into my hot rod. I had to put the motor back in my street car, under duress. My dad and I put a motor together in my second floor bedroom for the hot rod. We were carrying it down the steps, and he was in front and I was in the back, and he tripped, and the motor cart-wheeled down the staircase and landed upside-down in the middle of my mother’s living room and the oil ran out and ruined her carpet. She was pretty upset when she saw it and asked, “Why in the world did you put this motor together in your bedroom?” I said, “Well, that was just the cleanest place that I could think of to put this motor together.” She got a brand new carpet out of that deal. She caught me at college where I had converted my kitchen sink into a parts washer and the rest of the kitchen into an assembly area. It’s “guy logic,” all those things were a natural for working on engines.

SAR: Did you have access to a machine shop?

Knight: My family has been in the citrus business forever, so we had our place where we worked on all of our tractors and I had a welding shop and a machine shop; everything that you would need to work on tractors. It was basically a mechanical heaven. I would work at my dad’s shop during the summers taking tractors apart, fixing them, putting them back together and working on the heavy machinery. I loved it. My dad kept having clutches slip on some of his tractors that were using a “tree hoe.” I knew about a special clutch used on dragsters, so I sent one of the clutches in and had them build the dragster clutch plate package to fit on my dad’s Massey Ferguson tractor. It was so successful that Massey Ferguson came over and used the idea, and every tractor since then has that same clutch pack that I had altered. I guess that was my first invention that got adopted. I was about 16 years old when the Massey Ferguson deal happened. I got a Farmall Cub tractor for my 9th birthday, which was electric start but I had to hand crank it like a Model A, and I learned to work on that real fast. I mowed yards with it. My dad had a team of mechanics that used to teach me about engines and I would repair the tractors and the semi trucks that we hauled the fruit with. It was a lot of fun. I rebuilt a lot of transmissions and engines. Between 1965 and 1968, we road-raced Camaros at the “Baby” Grand Am – the pre-runner to the Bush races. Camaros, Firebirds, Mustangs and the little Ford Cougars, they would all race the day before the Grand Am, before Richard Petty, A.J. Foyt, and all those guys. I think it was year ’67 we ended up in the NASCAR points. We were seventh in the nation with just a three-man team. We had a driver called Billy Yuma, and I was the mechanic and about everything else. I never will forget sitting on the pit box and we had built this device that shook the rubber off the radiator because the radiator kept getting clogged up on the car, and Richard Petty walked by and saw it. He said, “Well, son, I really like that idea. I’m gonna do that.” He was the king back then, and that was thrilling. I did enough driving to scare myself half to death. What I really liked was drag racing, and I set four national records way back in the old days. I had an A Comp dragster with a 396 Chevy in it, and I had a B dragster back when you could do it economically. My Mom didn’t catch me this time, but the motor came out of my ’65 Corvette. [laughter] I guess I didn’t learn my lesson in ’63. Of course, my mom tells the story now as if it was funny but she didn’t act that way back then.

SAR: Reed, you talk about driving around off-road, plinking and shooting. What was your first firearm that you remember?

Knight: I started with bow and arrow in the 1950s. I was very competitive, and that went from archery to firearms to cars. I used to shoot .22s all the time. Being in the citrus grove business, we’d hunt rabbits, squirrels and varmints. I had a Winchester gallery pump gun. It was just part of every day life, plinking and hunting. My dad had an interest in arms and armor, and he took me to Europe where we bought a lot of antique guns and armor. The Customs guys thought we were in the antique business because of the flint locks and cap and ball guns. My dad enjoyed the history of firearms: he was a collector extraordinaire. He collected tools, coins; he collected all kinds of things. I grew up in an environment where people had respect for the past, and the details and the discipline of collecting. My dad would bring home bags of quarters, and I’d sit down watching TV with a bag of quarters and going through separating them. First, pulling all the silver quarters out, and second filling in all the quarters in the books. Of course all the books having all the different rare quarters and filling them all through was exciting. In the ’40s and ’50s, that was real common. On firearms, I did some hunting, but not a lot other than around the groves. In my first year of college I was on the ROTC rifle team where we used .22 caliber Remington 52s. I was on the rifle team freshman year, and then I started shooting what’s called PPC, and that’s police combat shooting with revolvers. I was a reserve police officer with the City of Vero Beach in 1969-70 or so.

SAR: Had you seen machine guns at that point?

Knight: I had seen some, played with them, and when ’68 came along with the Gun Control Act and the Amnesty, you know, everybody was so skeptical about the registration process, that I didn’t get involved. There were plenty of guys with machine guns, and they’d go out and shoot them at ranges, and before 1968 if you made the gun where it would not shoot automatic, then it was considered not to need registration. When the law changed in ’68, it became “Once a machine gun, always a machine gun.” That changed the whole thing for everyone I knew. I didn’t have anything to register, so in 1968 I didn’t make any. Sort of the opposite. Everyone was pretty cynical that the government was going to come take the guns away once they got them all registered. Most of the people that I ran with back then, because I was shooting pistols and stuff, were either police officers or friends of police officers. When the law changed, they took their guns and either gave them up or gave them to somebody else, or actually turned them in to the department, and let the department do the paperwork. People generally thought there would be a confiscation. They sure didn’t know they were going to be worth $10,000 or $20,000 apiece. Remember we’re talking about machine guns that people had bought very cheaply. They were buying Thompsons from InterArms for $125. The machine guns weren’t worth much even after the Amnesty for a very long time.

SAR: Were you doing any gunsmithing?

Knight: Yes. I was shooting about 50,000 rounds a year of .38 special ammunition and I had to reload that because it was so expensive. I was reloading at night, and shooting during the weekends. I had my own range and my own targets as well as turning targets. I had one of the best ranges set up. During the winter, all the shooting teams from the United States Secret Service would come down and practice at my home in Florida. It was cold up north and if they could get another couple months of practicing, they could get a head start on the year. Some of the early matches were held in Florida. The very first regional match was held in Pompano, Florida. I would travel with them to and from matches, pretty much all over the country, shooting. I enjoyed that, and I worked on the guns. I built combat guns and built the sights on them, and built the big, heavy bull barrels, and worked on the actions, put ball bearings in. I had a milling machine and a lathe, and a couple of real sharp files. I learned how to thread barrels, how to set head space and polish parts. One of the things I did was I built an adjustable trigger stop that in the combat you would use a two-stage trigger pull, rather than cocking the hammer. The amount of movement on the trigger would rotate the cylinder and cock the hammer and get everything locked up, and then you’d break the hammer, and it was very accurate. Back in those days I was building guns and shooting with wadcutter ammo, and we were shooting one-inch groups at 50 yards. I liked Smith & Wesson’s.

SAR: Were you collecting Smiths?

Knight: When ’68 came along with the Gun Control Act, I started very intently collecting Smith and Wesson’s. I didn’t have an FFL yet. I was collecting to try and get one of each and condition wasn’t too important at that time. They didn’t have to be new in the box. The hard guns to get were the snub noses. You wouldn’t think it today, but back then the little J frames were very hard to get because they were concealable and everyone thought the government was after them. Smith and Wesson wasn’t building enough of them for the customer base. The basic law change in 1968 was in fact going after concealable handguns and stopping interstate commerce in so-called “Saturday Night Specials.” Getting all the different models with all the alloy frames, the different concealed hammers and features sure was interesting to me. We were all into revolvers. Remember, not only myself, but there were no police officers that even thought about carrying automatics. They were not considered to be a weapon of choice for a police officer.

SAR: When was the first time you saw a sound suppressor, a silencer for a firearm?

Knight: I’m sure I saw some in the 60’s, but they didn’t really interest me then. I got into machine guns first. I had a very early semiautomatic AR-15; a three-digit serial number Colt Model SP-1. I was at a gun show and a friend of mine came over and gave me a barrel bag. I unzipped it and there was this barrel in it, it was obviously a heavy barrel, it was a quick change barrel, and I had no idea what that barrel fit. It had a barrel extension that looked like the AR-15. I started doing research. I found out that this guy Gene Stoner had invented a gun that was called a Stoner 63. I then found out that he was the same guy that invented the AR-15 which became our US M16. I read some of the books about the subject and I started thinking about if I could ever find one of these Stoner 63s. Roger Cox from Law Enforcement Ordnance Corporation advertised a Stoner 63 and in 1974, for $1,700, I bought my first Stoner 63. It was in the rifle configuration. Now I had the machine gun barrel and a rifle, and I was off on a quest.

SAR: A Stoner 63 couldn’t be your first machine gun… that’s just not right. {Laughter}

Knight: You’re correct. The very first machine gun I bought was a Military Armament Corporation MAC 10, and I bought it before I got a machine gun license. It came with a suppressor, and I paid $200 for the gun and suppressor, $200 for the stamp tax for the gun, and $200 for the stamp tax on the suppressor. I paid $600 for the package. There was a guy from Tampa who was a machine gun dealer. He didn’t have a shop, he was a collector who had quite a few machine guns and ran a Class 3 business on the side. I didn’t shoot it – we were at a gun show where he had it. He gave me the Form 4 paperwork, and I went and got the paperwork signed off immediately. Nothing really caught me about it except that it was affordable and it just looked like something fun to shoot. After that, I got an FFL and paid the Class 3 Stamp. The first gun that I bought under that license was an MG-42 from InterArms, and I really got ripped off on that because this guy had bought it from InterArms and he had resold it to me for a whopping $300! It was mismatched too.

SAR: Disgusting. You must have felt terrible. [laughter]

Knight: Yeah, but not anymore. Wish I could find MG-42s for that price now. It was one of the InterArms mismatched guns with wire wrapped around the buttstock to hold the buttstock together. It had been arsenal refinished. I had trouble finding ammo, but it ran fine, and it was fun. That was how I got started in Class 3, and that was probably in ’73. The Vietnam War was still going on, but it was winding down. I was chasing Stoner parts. I knew what I was looking for, and I just found people here and there with parts. I had found some belt feed parts, and I built other belt feed parts to complement the ones I had. The Houston Gun Show was where you’d really find all the parts. Back then that was the Knob Creek of the machine gun community. We’d find parts and pieces, and then we would finish them up or try to make them work. We didn’t have any drawings to work from. I guess I started going to gun shows in the ’60s. That Houston show was the classic of all classics, our favorite at the time. We also went to Ohio for Ohio Gun Collectors Shows. I went to Atlanta sometimes, and the big show in Florida was the Lakeland Gun Show. I had some traveling buddies, Pedro Bello, John Ciener, the local cronies that were gun nuts. We all kind of hung around together and traveled to shows.

SAR: This would be right around the time of the MAC auction in 1975. Did you know Mitch Werbell?

Knight: Pedro Bello knew Mitch, and I never will forget riding up with Pedro up to Georgia in his pickup truck. Some things in life stick in your mind vividly, and I remember this very well. I had three machine guns to my name, and I sat there next to Pedro, I had a Class 3 machine gun dealer’s license, and there I was sitting at the MAC auction. I had also just gotten paid for a big citrus contract, and I had $50,000 with me – cashier’s checks in $5,000 increments. They were selling the MAC 10s. They started off, and they sold a few, but when it really got in the heat of things, when they were really trying to move them, they would put a pallet of 100 on the floor, and say, “We are not going to take one dime less than $600.” I don’t mean $600 apiece; I mean $600 for the 100 MACs. I said, “Pedro, how can I go wrong at six bucks apiece?” He said, “Those guns will be bookends, don’t buy them, you can’t get magazines, they’re no good, you don’t want them.” In two days at the auction, I ended up buying 750 machine guns and silencers, and I spent $11,000.

SAR: Did you keep any for bookends? {Laughter}

Knight: I still have some, so I guess if I wanted to… Anyway I bought everything I could. I bought every prototype silencer they had, I bought Reisings, a bolt Remington 700, and I never will forget, we went from there over to Mitch Werbell’s house, and Pedro introduced me to him. Of course Mitch was walking around and just having a ball because the auction had all gone off so well and he was at odds with Military Armament Corp. Mitch had his M134 Minigun for sale at his house for $600, just the receiver, and I passed on that because I figured I could never get the parts. Fred Rexer was there, and Fred came over to me and he looked me in the eye and said, “Who in the hell are you, and why in the world would you buy those machine guns?” And I said, “I just did it because I could.” He was mad because he had put in a full bid for everything and individually everybody’s bid ended up being more than his total bid. Of course he would not bid against himself to get individual pieces; it would be bidding against himself. He actually gambled on winning the whole thing, and he got nothing. Fred was just absolutely livid. Looking at how machine gun values went, I still like to tell everybody that I see that knows Pedro that Pedro cost me my first $1 million, because I could’ve bought $50,000 worth where I only ended up buying $11,000 worth. Jonathan Ciener was there at the auction. Ron Martin bought all the MAC11 .380s which went for $50 each and InterArms bought almost all of the 9mm MACs. Most of those 9mm MACs went overseas. If memory serves me right, there were about 10,000 MACs total, .380s, 9mms and .45s. The majority of everything was .45s, and there were probably less than 100 .380s MAC 11s.

SAR: Were some of those MAC 10s export models without a threaded barrel?

Knight: Actually, I don’t think so. I think people converted them afterwards. In order to export the MACs, the government made them take the threads off the barrel. I think it was a company called Swift Shops that did that later as they were going to export MACs and no threads for silencers were allowed. Our government didn’t want silencers exported or guns with the ability to accept a silencer. They took the threads off the end of the barrel and cold-blued them on the front.

SAR: How long did it take to get the paperwork done from the auction?

Knight: The paperwork was only about seven days. The interesting part is the ATF just came along and confiscated what they wanted for downtown, and I had gotten some of the really nice, consecutive serial numbered, high polished blue MAC 10s and MAC 11s. ATF confiscated some of my guns and simply did not approve the paper. Back then I didn’t know enough to complain. They just cherry picked the things that they wanted out of the auction. There was a ton of interesting parts and raw material they sold at auction as well. There were bolts, and stocks and all the internals. The ATF would not let them sell any of the parts for the silencers and they made them destroy those. The material they built the wipes out of, there were big sheets of that, and they made them destroy that. That indicates even in 1975 they had an idea that silencer parts were to be considered contraband, or at least had that attitude.

SAR: It wasn’t until 1981 that the suppressor parts were blocked from sale. I know Mitch used to sell silencer parts to whoever was doing whatever. It was a straight over the counter sale and any number of Class 2s in the early to mid 1970s bought their parts at Military Armament Corporation.

Knight: There wasn’t a law to prevent it, but ATF would not let the bankruptcy auction sell any silencer parts. In the MAC auction, the ATF had wanted all these machine guns and everything destroyed, and the bankruptcy judge said, “No, these are legal to own and they’re guns that are manufactured, and they can sell these.” The Bankruptcy judge had full control and if it was legal to sell, he was going to sell it. On another note, one of the RPB (Robie, Pitts & Brugeman, the next manufacturers of the MAC series) guys had been the shop foreman for Military Armament Corporation. I’m sure he was there and bought all the MAC tooling, and bought the machine guns in the flat, and RPB finished those. He knew how to continue the manufacturing process. I bought the very first guns from RPB; I have guns one through five in every caliber for the RPB production. I was good friends with them when they first started off building guns. They’re first production was taking the MAC flats and re-stamping them “RPB” on the other side of the receiver. These are called the “RPB Overstamp MACs.” I have very good examples of the entire MAC series machine guns, and some of the stock of MAC-10s left as well.

SAR: In this same timeframe, you had been making some Stoner parts and gathering up whatever you could find, but you hadn’t found any large caches yet.

Knight: The caches came later. Around 1974-5, I was doing my police combat shooting, and I was involved with the Secret Service teams. One of the guys from Secret Service had gone to SEAL Team Two, and they showed him these Stoner belt-fed machine guns that were inoperable, and he said, “Well, I know a guy down in Florida that works on those and has some parts and pieces, and you need to call him.” SEAL Team Two called me and wanted me to go up to see what they had. They had a conglomeration of 63s and 63As that were all hodge-podged, and they had mixed parts from 63s into the 63As and 63As into the 63s. Most of the guns just did not work. I took all their guns apart and repaired and rebuilt all their guns, as much as could be done. They had used those extensively in Vietnam, and they’d brought back all the stuff, but the guns weren’t supportable because the factory wasn’t building any of the new parts. I had the parts in stock, and I put all their guns back together. That’s way before I even knew that if you do the work, you were supposed to charge the government. I figured that out later. {Laughter} That’s also when I really saw my first pistol suppressor. The SEALs had what was called a “Hushpuppy,” a Smith and Wesson Model 39 that was converted by Smith and Wesson and had a little aluminum silencer on it with a rubber package that let the bullet go through it and trapped the gases inside the silencer. When they added a slide lock on it, and when the operator unlocked the slide and tried to jack the round out and put a new round in, the extractor would climb out over the cartridge case, and the cartridge case would stick in the chamber. They thought that that was some kind of a “vapor lock” (That was the term the SEALs used), and I later determined that the ammo they were using was manufactured by Supervel, and was way up on the high end of SAMMI specs for what was functional. They were using a heavier bullet, making that 9mm go sub-sonic, and of course at that time, in the early ’70s, no one had really perfected sub-sonic 9mm ammunition. It’s not as simple as just putting in a heavier bullet. I did a whole lot of experimenting and found out that as the slide went back, the barrel on the 39 unlocked by moving down, and as the barrel moved down, the extractor came over the cartridge rim and the extractor would leave the cartridge stuck in the chamber. I went and got a whole bunch of Beretta 92 series that used an extractor that was a larger size and a straight motion, they pulled the cartridge straight back as it unlocked. I threaded in the barrels and put their silencers on Beretta 92s and solved that problem. I also loaded 50,000 rounds of 9mm with a 170-grain bullet that they could also use in this suppressed pistol package. I built the Beretta 92s in 1978-79, and the special subsonic ammunition was in 1981-82. I only built about a dozen and all went to the government except my “keepers.” My first contract with the government was around 1974 when the government had wanted to fix the Stoner 63s, putting a block in the front of the trigger, and I took and built a little dust-cover for the Stoner 63 for all the guns. Crane bought a bunch of parts so they could rebuild their guns. I also built wooden handguards for the Stoner 63, so they could convert rifles to machine guns. To this day you still see some of my wooden hand guards that people think are original and I’m the only guy who knows that they’re not. I did a real good job of copying Cadillac Gage’s work.

(Reed’s son Trey has been quietly prodding his father on some issues in the Interview, and at this point Trey suddenly remembers this event and gets indignant.)

Trey: Hey! That’s right! You know, he gave me ten cents apiece to sand them. I didn’t know I was getting ripped off. I was just a kid!

Knight: Yeah. [laughter] I gave you ten cents apiece and you were darned happy.

SAR: How can you tell the difference between those forends? We’re going to start a new edition of Stoner collector frenzy here.

Knight: These were the Stoner 63 LMG handguards, and we built them out of the same wood that the originals were made from. We used the same steel bushings, everything was the same. The difference is that the original Cadillac Gage wooden forends had a sling swivel at one end, and ours did not, because the Navy SEALs didn’t want a sling that hooked to the hand guard. After that, I was rebuilding their Stoners, trying to keep them running, and I’d run out of parts. I went everywhere looking. One day, I said to myself, “There’s got to be a bigger stash of parts somewhere.” These didn’t just to dry up. I had heard that this guy by the name of Eugene Stoner had a house in Florida. I looked in the phonebook, and I found him in a little town just south of mine, just north of West Palm and south of Fort Pierce. I called him and I said, “Is this the Gene Stoner that worked for Cadillac Gage?” And he said, “No, this is the Gene Stoner that worked as a consultant for Cadillac Gauge,” and I said, “Well, I’m repairing some of the Navy SEALs’ guns, and I’m looking for parts and pieces, and is there any way that I can get any parts?” He said, “I have all that stuff, but I’m down here in Florida. If you want to come up to my place up in Port Clinton, Ohio, I’ll entertain showing you the parts and pieces and what have you.” It was late 1978, maybe into 1979. Trey says I “tricked” the family that we were going on a family vacation and that is what I told them. We all piled in the Dodge van and drove up to Port Clinton, Ohio, and we met Mr. Stoner. He took me into this warehouse that had big holes in the roof, and there were seven or eight semi-loads of parts, and all the tooling for the Stoner 63. I got a handful of parts I wanted and invited him to visit me in Florida. He came up a couple times and had lunch with me, and we talked, and I’d go down to his place, and we would have a lot of fun, just going out to lunch and talking. He was not really doing anything as he was between programs. At that time he had just gone to Iran and sat down with the Shah, who said, “We want an anti-aircraft gun to shoot down those Iraqi aircraft.” Stoner said, “I can build you a gun, and I can build it for anti-aircraft work,” and the Shah asked how long it would take. Stoner said “I’ll send you a proposal,” and they had a very nice, cordial meeting. As Stoner’s getting ready to leave, one of the assistants to the Shah came up and handed Stoner a check for $1 million. In those days that was pretty tall money, and the Shah had Stoner’s attention. The Shah said, “I want you to get started on this program, and I want you to send me monthly reports, and I want you to tell me how far you are and keep me posted. As you tell me what you spend, I’ll refurbish that money, but here’s your first draw, and just keep going on this thing, and let’s get this program underway.” Stoner was actually being directed by the State Department to do this project. One of the things that I later found out is they didn’t really want to sell the Iranians our best US anti-aircraft technology, but they wanted to sell the Shah good technology. Stoner basically had the very, very first of the laser-tracking systems that he built on his “Eagle” system, and was quite successful at building this twin 35-millimeter, high-velocity anti-aircraft system. We spoke quite a bit in that period. We’d talk about other things that he was working on, what he was doing in Ohio at Ares. His main projects were cannons and the 75mm and 90mm smooth bore, long rod penetrating, case telescoped ammunitions.

SAR: Were you still racing?

Knight: No. At that time, I was really focusing on my main work; I was in what’s called the hedging and topping business, in the citrus business. I also had a garbage company at that time, yes, before you jump on that Dan, I was actually a garbage man. {Laughter} I just hadn’t made up my mind what I really wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn’t racing, but I was always an avid shooter. For ten years I won the Florida State Championship for the number one on the Governor’s 20, which was the top 20 revolver/pistol shooters in the State of Florida, consecutive, up until 1981. I wasn’t doing archery anymore, but guns were always around. I had a big pile of machine guns. I was an FFL dealer, doing business, but I was also working towards the collection that was my passion. Regarding the firearms business, other than dealing, I had been working on silencers for the Berettas and Hushpuppies. Right about 1980, I basically started working very close with the government to develop better silencers for them. I also went all over the country looking for parts and pieces for the government. They wanted certain types of guns and certain types of ammunition, and I was kind of a go-to guy to get things for them.

SAR: This is the same timeframe you started working with Dick Marcinko? (Richard Marcinko, the “Rogue Warrior” of SEAL Team Six and Red Cell fame.)

Knight: That’s affirmative. I didn’t know all the details at the time, but I was read into a then-to-be secret program that this individual was going to go out and build a bunch of equipment and put together a team for counterterrorism. This later became Dev Group. I went all over the country finding parts and pieces, and getting guns and things that they could use to do their job. I sold to the Navy, and I sold Marcinko the first Beretta 92s that the government ever bought. Later I traded the 92s back and gave them 92Ss. These were all Italian pistols. Some of these I altered for slidelocks and suppressors. The early years of this were all pretty wild. Carrying guns and ammo to Little Creek in the back of that same old Dodge van I had, pulling a U-haul trailer behind it filled to the top with guns, and getting there and dropping them off in this warehouse in Little Creek, Virginia, walking over to this other warehouse and a guy handed me a check, then I’d leave and go back home to Florida. I was a contractor, and doing business with them.

SAR: Did it make you money in those first deals?

Knight: Gas was a lot cheaper then, and I did make money, but this was all exciting. I traveled a lot for shooting, but very little overseas. I worked a lot through InterArms and some of the other companies that had product that I could buy and import. I was not like Sam Cummings and the people who were really international-type people. I was such a low denominator and so low on the food chain in these deals. I know I made some money and had a good time. I learned a lot. I was “drinking water through a firehose” back then. It was certainly exciting because I was working for all the high-end people. I remember one day I was up at Beltsville, the Secret Service facility, and these guys came over and said, “Listen, we need you to go talk to somebody,” and I said, “Okay.” So we went into this room and we sat down and this guy was there chomping on a cigar, and he’s sitting there looking at me, and he said, “Listen,” he said, “I understand you’re doing some work for my buddy, Marcinko,” and I said, “Well, yeah, I have.” He said, “Well, I really want you to come to work for me.” And I said, “Okay, I guess I could. Who are you?” He said, “I’m Charlie Beckwith, and I have a need for what you do,” and I said, “Well, I’m your guy.” Charlie had heard about all the work that I’d done for Marcinko, and of course, Beckwith and Marcinko were rivals, they both wanted to be on top of the hill. I’m sure that everybody that Marcinko had, Charlie tried to steal, and everybody Charlie had, Dick tried to steal. I started working for Charlie Beckwith in the early ’80s, at SOTF, the Special Operations Training Facility.

The two Navy SEALs that I repaired the Stoner 63s for, one was Fly Fallon, the other was Ken McDonald. They were the armorers at SEAL Team Two. They had served in Vietnam with Marcinko. When Marcinko stood up at Dev Group, he basically picked five guys, including himself made six. Ken McDonald basically knew me from work me in the arms room, and that’s how my connection had got there. Fly had started working for Special Operations Group Two, which was basically the early WarCom. At that time there was SEAL Team Two, SEAL Team Four. Fly did all the weapons testing. Fly was actually the Navy SEAL that did all the testing on the M-60E3, which was a lightweight M-60. He also did all the early testing of the very early Minimi, and the HK262. That’s where I got into all the early weapons in the ’70s, when all those systems were being tested. Fly served up until almost until his death. He had gotten “Agent Orange’d,” and about seven years ago he died from cancer.

SAR: Reed, here we are in the early 1980s, and you’re running a bunch of different, diverse businesses that don’t have much connection to each other…

Trey: Selling guns to the Navy SEALs was probably a lot more fun than hauling trash and trimming trees.

Knight: I was still in the citrus hedging and topping business, and yes, selling guns to the SEALS was pretty exciting. In 1981 I started a supply company for the police departments in the State of Florida, and the name of that company is Lawmen’s Shooter Supply. We were a distributor for Smith and Wesson, Remington, and Winchester. I sold handguns, body armor, light bars, car equipment, holsters and whatever they needed. I started off kind of small with three or four employees. I had a retail store at 3801 Okeechobee Road in Fort Pierce, Florida. Trey started working there when he was 11 or 12 or so. It was kind of a family business.

Trey: That was my first exposure to the firearms business, getting behind the counter and selling guns.

Knight: I actually worked there too, that was my day job. I was driving around to different police departments doing trade-ins and straight sales. We would trade guns, we would bid on guns, we would do light bar demonstrations, we would go all over the state and sell guns. I got some good trade-ins, did a lot of good business with a lot of good departments. Basically, grew that from a startup company, it’s still in business, and now my oldest son, Trey, still runs and manages that company, with 25 employees. We basically just stay in the state of Florida. We had other people that we competed against that, they stayed in their territory and we stayed in ours, it just made sense. This is also about when I went to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot for the first time.

SAR: Did you go there when it was tents outside, or when it was the pole barn?

Knight: The first year or so the show was in tents. I guess that would be in 1986 or so. Right after the 1986 law change banning manufacture of machine guns for private ownership. After they put the pole barns up, I would get some tables with friends and go there to shop for firearms and parts we needed, and sell some Stoner 63s. It was always a good time. I still like to go there when I can, to shop, see what’s there, see old friends.

SAR: Regarding finding Stoner 63s and parts, you went back to Port Clinton with Gene Stoner and made a deal….

Trey: I remember when. It was13 tons of parts and tooling, seven tractor trailer loads that all had to be loaded, sorted, stored.

Knight: Yeah, they included the tooling and everything else in the deal we did. That was much earlier than 1986. I guess it sets the stage for where we were. I was collecting that stuff just to keep it, to supply parts for the Navy SEALs, to have inventory. I thought that I might build a gun one day and actually made 100 pre-1986 transferable Stoner 63As. I saw the end of the machine gun world coming and like everyone else I built whatever I could. 100 Stoner 63As, some Steyr AUGs, some HK trigger packs, a few M134 Miniguns, and even some Remington 1100 machine guns in 12 gauge. There was a window of opportunity of about 45 days from when we knew the law was coming at us, to when it took effect. It was quite a frenzy in the industry, and some people that were based in the civilian market turned out a tremendous amounts of items. On the Stoners, I was interested in preserving and keeping up with the tooling. There were only maybe two dozen Stoners that the SEALs would try and keep going by this point. It wasn’t like it was a big, monumental effort on my part or their part. In 1982, there was an RFP out on the street for suppressors for the M16s that the Navy was going to build, seems like it was 3,000 suppressors for the M16A1s. The silencer had to meet certain thresholds – of so many rounds a minute for such a period of time, had to be submergible, had to meet all the military Navy specs. In 1982, we won that contract, and delivered those suppressors to Crane Naval Weapon Support. It was our first major suppressor contract. We had sold a couple dozen here or there in the past. As has been noted before, there’s a difference in a “sale” and a “Contract.” This was a full size “Contract.” This was the Navy Model, from Knight’s Armament Company. I built a few extra; I probably sold 100 other than that on the civilian market, and they were all stainless steel. The flash hider was removed and the Navy Model was screwed on, and had a tapered split collet that clamped onto the barrel that kept the silencer straight, and it also kept it from unscrewing off into the barrel. It extended back over the barrel. It was an inch and three-quarters in diameter, and about seven or eight inches long. Our delivery time frame was six months, and we met the deadline.

SAR: What were you doing for sound testing in that time period? There really wasn’t a solid protocol.

Knight: I had bought a B&K 2209 sound meter from Don Walsh (Larand). Mickey Finn (Qual-A-Tec) was testing suppressors, and Don and I were testing them. We got together and said, “Okay, this is how we’re going to standardize things. We’re going to test this at one meter from the muzzle, at 90 degrees to the muzzle, and we’re going to use a 4136 microphone, and the B&K 2209 meter, A-hold, peak-hole, but A-weighting.” Basically, Crane followed us and their standards, and we set up what became the Mil-Standard for A-testing used today. Our combined experience with sound level testing led us to choose the 2209 meter with that particular microphone because of the very fast rise time, and for the high sound pressure levels with firearms.

SAR: When did you meet Don Walsh?

Knight: I met Don in the mid-’70s, probably around maybe ’76, ’77. All that period of time I was doing work with the suppressors and the Navy SEALs. Everyone knew all the cast of characters in the business at that time. It was a small, closed community with a closed customer base. Kind of a parallel sales situation. Some of the people concentrated on selling to the civilian market or a little bit to law enforcement, but the community that was actually selling to the government was very small. It still is, no matter what the marketing hype might be. When I said “Cast of Characters,” I meant that it was an interesting group. Mickey Finn was the first one to coin the term “investors” in this industry, in that he went out and got a bunch of people to put money into his business, and they did a lot of R&D and took a new style of write-off. I was funding all of my work out of my back pocket. They really got a leg up on us and they really built some great products. That was in the ’79-’80 timeframe, when we were very heavily involved in the suppressor development work for the government, doing different things: .22s and 9mms, and MP-5s and integral suppressors. Most of that was nickel and dime stuff and nobody had any real large major contracts at that time. That first Navy contract was pretty much the largest contract that had come along out of the military for a number of years since the Vietnam era. Testing at that time was still based on the Frankfurt Arsenal-style testing. Our new protocol moved things up to a higher level. It was still an analog system, it hadn’t moved to the digital system, but it was so much further ahead then because it was a defined parameter. How you measure the sound of a gunshot, because it is so transient, is very important on what type of rise time you use, and also what kind of microphone you use, and what kind of distance you use away from the sound source, as well as angles. All of those things, when you define them, and we all started using the same “ruler” to measure something it became so subjective so we could accurately understand the effects of our suppression techniques. Especially on products like the Hushpuppy-type suppressor, because the sound is over such short period of time, but the peak of that sound is higher. A Hushpuppy-type suppressor with a rubber-type baffle or wipe system actually shows on the meter at a much higher level of sound than other suppressors, but because the sound source is for such a short period of time, you actually hear the bullet hitting the wipes as actually the source of the sound, not the muzzle blast. On many wiped designs, it’s the bullet strike that’s getting the noise level that you actually hear. That being said, the Hushpuppy was quiet to the ear, but it showed a 127 dB on the sound meter. If you would compare it to a non-wipe system, it would be probably about 122 dBs, and you’d look at that and you’d see that five or six-dB difference, and that was 100% noise difference, but the Hushpuppy sounded quieter to the ear. We really perfected the rubber wipe suppressor in what we called the “Snap-On.” We actually built a little aluminum can with the rubber baffle stack for pistols. Because the suppressor was so light and it built pressure in this chamber, it negated the need for a Nielsen-type device, and the gun/suppressor system became very reliable. The Beretta happens to be the gun of choice in this type system, because the barrel does not tilt, the action just goes straight back.

SAR: You do have a tremendous passion for the history and technology of military small arms. Would it be fair to characterize your experiences though as living a little bit in the civilian world of ownership, but living mostly in the military and law enforcement community in your designs and manufacturing?

Knight: I guess we all look identifying what we want to be when we grow up. I have crossed over in the communities, looking for balance and diversity to get companies through the hard times. We all want to be something, or aspire to be something. My inspiration has always been for making better equipment for our servicemen, and building good equipment, and improving the tools that they have to do their job. It’s not all good times though. I remember in 1990, waking up one Monday morning and having a big mortgage on a brand new factory that I’d built, and not having one government contract in-house at all. They were completed. That was quite frightening because I looked at the mortgage and I had made a major commitment to it when I had had some very large government contracts, and it looked like they were going to last forever. I had committed when we had three major contracts hit all at one time. I was building silencers for the Beretta M9 for the Air Force, about 5,000 of them. I was building helicopter gun mounts for the H-53 helicopter, and both of those contracts were running concurrent with each other. I also had another very large classified contract of delivering product that was right after that. With three of those contracts, it looked like we had “arrived.” We were now, in my opinion at the time, a major military contractor, because we were certainly able to do the work. I had another business that I mentioned earlier that was a company called Lawmen’s and Shooters’ Supply Inc. That company was very, very stable. We were doing good sales, we were making a decent profit, but the Lawmen’s and Shooters’ Supply Inc. ended up, from time to time, covering the payroll for the research and development that we were doing over there in the other side of the house. When we got these good contracts for these large deliveries, I did not have any way to manufacture what was needed. I started going to the tool shows and looking at manufacturing methods to be able to manufacture this equipment that I had sold to the government. I ended up buying new CNC machines and developing processes. From 1986 to 1988, we became a pretty serious manufacturer. I owned two or three CNC lathes and two or three CNC milling machines, and we were learning on how to “manufacture” as opposed to “filling small contracts.” Big difference. Then, like I said, there is the day when everything is done and you’re looking at that big mortgage, no open contracts, and you wonder, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

SAR: Knight’s was making suppressors, some larger mount pieces, and some other accessories. There had to be a point where you had an inspiration for a rail system.

Knight: One of my very good Navy SEAL friends had gotten tangled up into his parachute going into Panama and drowned wrapped up into his parachute cord. I thought, “I need to help make their load lighter.” I noticed that in the pictures and on TV that they had taken their flashlight and taped it to their hand-guards with duct tape. I thought, “That’s not going to stay lined up and it’s going to hit on doors, and it makes the rifle bulky.” I thought, “What if we had a way to put that flashlight on and off the gun easily and compactly?” I played around a little bit with what we called the “Lego,” nicknamed after the toy company product that allowed you to clip things together. I had no idea that this thing was ever going to be used for holding anything other than a flashlight. I built flashlights that went underneath the rifle, and vertical pistol grips. I built flashlights that went on the side of the rifle. I built all kinds of flashlight mounts, and converted a lot of already existing MAG lights to brackets and mounts that attached to guns. Our first goal was to take an already existing firearm and modify it to make this “rail system” that parts could plug onto. We took the thing to Colt, and other manufacturers, and I said, “Hey, I got this idea. I’d like to show you this, and I’d like for you to build it,” and I remember meeting there at Colt, and Rob Roy said, “Is there a requirement for this?” I said, “What do you mean by requirement?” He said, “Does the government have a need for this?” I said, “Yeah, they have a need for it.” He said, “Well, is there a written requirement?” I said, “They don’t even know they don’t have this yet, but there is a need for it.” So he said, “Well, you go get a requirement for this and we’ll build it for you.” I said, “If I go get a requirement for this, I’m not gonna need you. I need you now, I need you to go help me sell this.” They all said, “Well, we just don’t think that there’s a need for it, and we don’t think there’s a requirement for it.” I had been doing a lot of work with Colt because I built the muzzle brake on the Advanced Combat Rifle, the ACR program. So I knew everybody at Colt, and they knew me, and they’d been down to my factory and I had a relationship with them that was a very good and strong.

SAR: They just didn’t get the vision.

Knight: In retrospect, it took forever to get the government interested in it. They really didn’t know that they really needed it. Remember, I was selling it as a mount to hold a flashlight. I remember talking to Gene Stoner about it one time. I said, “Why in the world didn’t you give me a place on this M16 that was square to the bore, so that I can mount something on that would always be parallel to the bore?” He said, “Well, what is it that you wanted me to mount? What is it that you have in mind that you’re going to mount to this?” I said, “Well, like maybe a laser,” and he looked at me and he said, “Yeah, in 1958 I was thinking about a laser.” {Laughter} I said, “I guess you’re right, you didn’t have any need for that at that time.” I remember in the early ’90s sitting in a meeting with a colonel who was briefing people and he said, “I believe if they put one of these rails on a butt stock, somebody would buy it.” I was in the back of this room filled with the industry people, and I raised my hand and I said, “Sir, did I understand that to be a requirement?” {Laughter} It was a joke at the time, but today it might not be a joke. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about it.

The hardest thing to do was not modifying the existing rifle, but to have those rails to stay in alignment for the total life of the shooting of the rifle for its total life. The rail system had to withstand the wear factor, it had to withstand the recoil factor, the heat factor, and all the other adverse conditions as well as be soldier-proof. We had to build it so it didn’t make the gun any heavier, it didn’t change the point of impact, that it didn’t take any tools to put on, and that it could be put on at the user level rather than having to come back to the armory to install. I remember sitting in the first meeting, we were negotiating, and I said, “You guys aren’t even asking for the most important part of this rail system, which is the vertical pistol grip.” They said, “We don’t need that. We don’t have a requirement for it.” I suggested they do some testing. They had just finished up with a simulator that they had just built for the ACR program, and they had just spent umpteen millions of dollars of testing that equipment against the baseline of duplex rounds and different things. The simulator rifle actually recoiled, and you had to acquire the next target. About two months later they came back to the colonel and he said, “You know something? We have found that that $39 vertical pistol grip that we put on your gun increased the hit probability for every soldier type, experienced soldiers, non-experienced soldiers, all types of shooters, significantly more than the whole $32 million that we spent on the ACR program.” The $39 piece that they added to the M4 and the M16 increased the hit probability more than all the training and testing they did with spending and development on the Advanced Combat Rifle.

SAR: So just getting your rail system on there and putting your front grip on it–

Knight: – Gave a better than 20% improvement to hit probability, which was the goal of the ACR program. What they really said that was significant is that the people that had the most improvements were novice shooters who had a much better hit probability increase than experienced shooters. Experienced shooters knew how to hold the gun, knew how to shoot and what have you. I remember being at Fort Benning one year, and I was there with a group of people, and this sergeant came up to me, he said, “You’re Reed Knight, aren’t you?” I said, “Yeah, I am.” He said, “I just want to shake your hand,” he said, “I train thousands of people here in basic training in the shooting skills, and every time I get a shooter that does not qualify, I can give them one of your vertical pistol grips, and they always qualify afterwards. That one piece of gear has made more difference in people qualifying in military shooting than any other piece of gear that I’ve ever seen come through here.”

SAR: That’s pretty satisfying.

Knight: It was great. It was also satisfying that this was something that the government didn’t even want and I had called it right and gotten it approved. Actually, in my infinite stupidity, when we were negotiating on the rail system, I said, “You don’t want the vertical pistol grip? I’ll throw it in for free.” Obviously it was included in the price with all the other stuff, but at the same time, when I added it to the kit, I didn’t increase the price for the vertical pistol grip. That was the RIS (Rail Interface System), our first product in 1992. It was a USSOCOM purchase. The RAS (Rail Adapter System) was an almost concurrent requirement. The Army tested the RIS first, then tested the RAS, and wanted some changes made. At 5-6,000 rounds with their testing style using a bore rod, the point of impact had shifted out of the specification on the RIS. We developed the RAS, and spent another $250-300,000 developing that product. Six months of development, really a very strong program, and we submitted it. They tested it and said, “It didn’t do any better than the RIS.” That was a shock. I asked how they tested it. It turns out they were testing with a bore rod down the bore like they had on the RIS, and the bore rod had gotten worn out, that it became out of synch, and they didn’t have a baseline. We showed them how we tested it, and they adopted our test procedure and re-tested it, and they said, “You know something? Your first one would’ve passed also.” We had ended up spending a lot of our own money to give them a different product, and that’s why we always look carefully not only at our own products, but what the customer’s test protocols will be.

SAR: You were putting a great team together in the ’80s, and today you’ve got a good team to design and build the products that you decide to take on.

Knight: One of the things that I’ve been very fortunate on is that even though I’m not an educated engineer, I’m not an educated business manager, and I’m really not an educated pretty much anything, I have been able to associate myself with some very, very talented people. I have been able to find people that have the same passion that I do, or they have come to me. We have been able to take the ideas and the needs of a customer, and take those needs and to build solutions to those needs. My talent has probably been to think outside of the box. Gene Stoner told me something interesting one day; he said, “I believe when you become an engineer, and they teach you the disciplines, you learn that one and one make two, and that you have to do it this way because this is what the book says to do. I think it prevents you from becoming a true designer. If I sometimes knew what the engineering math was on some of my designs before going all the way through with them, I probably would’ve quit earlier.”

The Knight Interview continues in the next issue of Small Arms Review, where Reed discusses the MK23 suppressor program, SR-25, The SASS, and more.