Hinderikus (Henk) Lucas Visser was born in the City of Groningen, the capital of Groningen Province in the northeast of the Netherlands, on 5 August 1923. Henk was very involved in the CETME rifle project, the original HK G3, Stoner’s projects (most notably the Stoner 63A1), Oerlikon, Mauser, and many other historical events that impact on the small arms community today. Smallarmsreview.com is pleased to bring this lengthy and comprehensive interview to our readers from our 2006 issue and will be presented in two parts. – Dan Shea, SAR Editor-in-Chief

SAR: Thanks for joining us, Henk. I guess the readers would like to know what got you started with firearms – what was your first gun?

Visser: My first gun was an old pinfire revolver, which you could buy for about two bucks in those days. I was maybe fifteen years old. Pinfire ammunition was very rare so I just collected these and enjoyed looking at them and I would hide them from my mother who did not approve. My father had died when I was ten years old. Later in life my mother would complain about my gun collecting habits, but I would say, “Mother, it’s your own fault. You never bought me an air rifle.”

SAR: And your interest in military firearms?

Visser: I had wanted to be in the military, so as soon as I could ride my bicycle, I was always around the barracks in Groningen and the nearby airfield. After the German occupation of Holland, May 10, 1940, there wasn’t much hope for me to join the Dutch army. I was still in high school, and was definitely not a Nazi sympathizer. With friends, we harassed the occupying military units, and I was arrested by the Germans but managed to talk my way out of it several times. I was eighteen years old when the SD (German Sicherheitsdienst) finally arrested me.

SAR: What were the charges? And, I suppose, were you actually guilty?

Visser: Guilty as charged. Sabotage, gun possession, those were the main charges. It was May 5th, 1942 when the German SD arrested me. It was in the classroom, in front of all the other kids. (Laughs) It was quite something! On one occasion I had broken into the German barracks and put a match to a wooden building that the Germans were setting up for storing radio transmitters. It was at the airfield next to our town that the Germans had expanded and made into a bigger airfield. They held me, because the last thing I did was to break into the Navy officers’ mess, and I stole a K98, a machine pistol, a pistol, ammo and some of their papers. We had a small group of people that had gotten together to do this, and there was one man who was a traitor, he tried to blackmail me. Anyway, the Dutch police got involved, and I got arrested. Then in July I had a Navy court-martial in the town of Utrecht.

SAR: So, your first machine gun involved getting a Navy court-martial from the Germans while you were in high school?

Visser: (Laughs) Yes, and they condemned me to death and also three years for another break-in in a Dutch Nazi gunsmith shop in town.

SAR: An additional three years?

Visser: With the Germans, you were condemned separately for each crime and punished that way as well. I had a friend in jail, a cadet from the Dutch military academy, who was condemned separately to death three times, plus ten years, and four months. His father was very rich, and he started paying people off, so the Germans took off two of the death sentences and shot him for the third. My uncle, who was a director of the Dutch Philips electronic company, knew one of the German supervisors of the factory and tried to get me off. He told the supervisor, “You have to go and see if you can get the boy pardoned since his mother is a widow and only has one other younger son.” The supervisor went to see Seis Inquart, the German ruler of Holland, who said that this was a job only for the military. He suggested that my uncle should talk to General Christiansen, who was the military commander in Holland…but he also said no, and he said that Dutch high school boys who think that they can make a joke out of the German Army will be shot. So my mother was quite desperate, and she went with our lawyer to see the German Navy commander herself. Just to let you know how these Germans were; he lived in a big villa…my mother and our lawyer passed the guards at the gate, rang the bell, and a Navy sailor opened the door. He took the letter that my mother had brought asking for a pardon, and left my mother and the lawyer standing outside in the rain for half an hour. Then the door opened again and the same sailor gave the letter back to my mother, torn in half.

My mother was very desperate at this point. Her father had a butcher shop in town, and next to that was a vegetable shop…our two families were good friends. One of the children of the vegetable shop owner, Kees Veening, had gone to live in Berlin to be a speech therapist, teaching them how to breathe, etc. Kees Veening had a neighbor, and they became good friends. The neighbor was a historian, a reservist in the German army and was called up for duty in 1938. He had become a general and was responsible for the daily historical facts in Hitler’s headquarters, the “Wolfschanze.” This man had an idea: if he could get a hold of my file from the Dutch prison and keep it, the Germans in Holland would not be able to shoot me. So I sat for three months in the section of the prison where they kept the prisoners who were condemned to die, and oftentimes at 5 in the morning you would hear the Germans with the steel-toed boots coming up to take one or two of us out to be shot. So the question was always, “Who’s next?” I was there for three months.

SAR: On a German death row cellblock for three months, waiting to be shot every day?

Visser: Yes. You had to take all of your clothes off at night, so that if you escaped during the night you’d be naked. One night, there was a tremendous row and shouting and a group of drunken German guards came knocking on my door. I was sleeping on a straw bale, so I got up and ran to the window, stood at attention, reported myself and my punishment. The Germans shouted “Visser, who was condemned to death…You swine, our Führer has pardoned you!” After repeating this several times they threw my door closed, and I thought, “Oh, this is wonderful,” and went back to sleep on my straw bale. The next morning I realized that I had made it, and had gotten 15 years in a German prison instead. Later I learned that the German historian had waited until the Germans were throwing a party for their successes in Russia. They had taken over a million prisoners at that occasion and were celebrating. They were extremely pleased and were drinking champagne in Hitler’s headquarters. As Hitler was sitting at the table, the historian, General Scherff, approached with the letter from my mother and explained the story. Hitler looked up and said, “A friend of yours, eh?” and Hitler himself crossed out “Death Penalty” and wrote “15 years Zuchthaus” instead. When the people at my prison got the telex message from the Wolfschanze, they got drunk and came to my door at 2 or 3 in the morning to tell me that I had made it.

SAR: Well, there’s a project for some of our better connected readers. Somewhere, there is a piece of paper with Adolf Hitler’s handwriting on it that freed Henk Visser from a death sentence.

Visser: Yes, yes, I would pay $10,000 for that piece of paper! I was then transported to prison in Germany, a prison with small factories inside. There I had to work very hard, we had to make little aluminum cylinders. After the war, while taking apart a 20mm shell, I found one of those little cylinders. It was an aluminum detonator. We had to fashion them and drill a hole through them and of course thread them. We would make 5,000 of these per day and if you didn’t make 5,000 then you only got a liter of cabbage soup instead of 1.5 liters. Cabbage soup may not sound very special, but in the prison, an extra 0.5 liter of soup was important! So we made 5,000 per day.

We were in a very old prison called Zuchthaus Reinbach, near Bonn. Then I was moved to another prison called Zuchthaus Siegburg, on the other side of Bonn, and there I also worked for my dinner. I repaired military uniforms, and worked in a tool making shop. We worked about twelve hours a day in shifts, sometimes during the day and sometimes during the night. I must say I was lucky; in a concentration camp I would have died. In these prisons you had a roof over your head. It was a big building with thick walls, and if it was 20 degrees below zero outside it was only just freezing inside, which was cold but you didn’t freeze to death. We had guards who had been guards for all of their lives, they were professionals and so there were not many beatings or much abuse. We had some new guards who came in from the Eastern front missing an arm or something, and since they really couldn’t do a good job they would sometimes beat us to take revenge.

Anyway, I got very ill. I had tuberculosis in my lungs, intestines, on my vocal cords, and on a heart valve. I was dying and my weight was 100 pounds. Still, I was always treated a little differently from the other prisoners.

SAR: You must have had some pull from somewhere.

Visser: They knew I had received a pardon from Hitler himself, and the General Scherff sometimes inquired about how I was doing, so yes, they were careful with me. I was taken to the prison hospital. It was unbelievable, there were 3,000 prisoners with half of them sick and there were only 14 beds in the hospital. I got one of those beds, and I was dying. My uncle, who’s company Philips also owned a lot of factories in Germany, started inquiring about how I was doing. He was told that I was ill, but treated very well, and that I was cared for by nuns and that every day I would get an egg, but my uncle didn’t trust them. He sent someone who talked to the director of the Zuchthaus who reported that I couldn’t talk anymore and that I was dying. So he had his lawyers look over the German law regarding prisoners, and they found an old law that said if you were incarcerated and dying, you could go home to die. All of the judges that condemned me would have to sign off for my release, so my uncle went to see all five of the judges, at that time they were dispersed all over Germany because of fear for an invasion in Holland. When all of them signed I was sent home, but because of my contagious disease, I wasn’t allowed to go back by train. They didn’t want me infecting anybody else. The Phillips people had an ambulance that ran on propane, but since the gas stations were so far apart in Germany, they put the ambulance on top of a truck and trailer which ran on a wood burning gas generator. They came with a nurse to the prison, and through my uncle managed to rescue my hospital cellmate as well, another Dutch student from Groningen. We drove back through Germany and I was very happy to see buildings still on fire from Allied bombings. We got back to Holland and they hid me in a Roman Catholic sanatorium in Bilthoven. I was there for two and a half years, recovering.

SAR: Was that the end of the war?

Visser: On the 18th of May, 1944 I got out of Germany. The liberation of Europe happened while I was convalescing, and at the end of 1946 I went home.

SAR: It must have taken a long time to build your strength back.

Visser: I felt ok, I did what I had to do, and I could even bicycle a little bit. My mother made me go back to high school; she said I needed a high school diploma. (laughs) Of course the military was out of the question for me, because of my weak lungs. I wanted to go to the police academy, but was offered a job as a sales inspector in Java, in the East Indies – formerly the Dutch East Indies – and I accepted. The company had me tested to make sure that my health was alright, it was, and I was approved to go and work in the tropics.

SAR: Was this a firearms related job you were looking for in the tropics?

Visser: No, it was in the tobacco industry. I was in Java for five years where I worked and hunted; wild boar, mostly. I had a German 7mm rifle with a 12 gauge shotgun barrel. My job was inspecting the cigarettes sold by our company in Java. We manufactured the cigarettes, and wanted to make sure that the cigarettes weren’t being sold or bought on the black market. There were many Chinese sales outlets all over Indonesia and the islands that needed to be inspected. I traveled a lot, all over Java, and for a while I lived in Jakarta, Malang and Semarang. There were about five Europeans running the factory, and for a year and a half I was the chief purchasing agent. This was from 1950 until 1955. (Dolf mentions that he was there at the same time, too bad they hadn’t met at that point.) It was a fantastic time; the company was really well run. The Dutch people who were running it were no-nonsense and everything was always ok. Holland had given up Indonesia in December of 1949, and the bad thing was (and I’m very pro-American) that under American pressure, they pushed the Dutch out and threatened to stop the Marshall Plan for Holland. There were millions of dollars going into rebuilding the Netherlands. So you can understand that our government gave in.

SAR: (Dolf) The Americans pushed the Dutch into giving up the country. My father was very bitter about that, too.

Visser: Yes, yes, the Americans had the idea of instituting liberty and democracy and everything Western, but we were not ready for it! Our Queen Wilhelmina had already said in 1942 that Indonesia would be a free country in the future; the process would have only taken about 15 years to complete.

SAR (Dan): In America we tend to think that there’s a magic wand for those who’ve been under colonial control or subjugation or despotic control, that they can suddenly handle freedom. I don’t want to get too far off the subject, but I’ve seen it too many times in too many places. Often we think we can touch a country and suddenly it’s free. It’s certainly not that simple. Henk, you lived right through the middle of the Jakarta incidents? Is this the point where you started to develop more of an interest in machine guns?

Visser: No, Dan, I have always been crazy about weapons. But going through the war years changed my perception of the world. When the Germans first “arrived,” they acted nice and very friendly. Holland was very wealthy and a rich booty. When it came to food I saw German soldiers go into Dutch shops to buy and eat an entire stick of butter, they hadn’t seen real butter in so long. Other things too, pastries, breads, all sorts of foods, they took them back home to their families. So in the beginning there wasn’t any ill treatment, but as every good Dutchman, I hated them from the very first moment. It wasn’t until later that the Germans showed their real character. They cleaned out the whole country. I actually started my collecting interest with military weapons when I got home from prison and the sanatorium. There was a gun in almost every home, taken from the Germans when they fled. I had friends at the police department, so if they had a really nice machine gun I was able to shoot it or buy it if they didn’t require it.

SAR: This was before your journey to Indonesia? Were you able to pick up many rare guns?

Visser: Yes, this was from 1947 to 1949. My interest in collecting military firearms was very intense, starting then. In those days it was all the common guns, also French guns that the Germans used. For instance, the first French machine gun that I got was a Hotchkiss 1914. It was a great big machine gun with cooling fins and a huge tripod. I was very interested in German sniper rifles at the time. When I went to Indonesia, I had to hide my collection in my mother’s house, since I had no license for these guns.

SAR: Are we seeing a pattern of youthful disregard for gun laws here?

Visser: (laughs) Yes, yes, and they were all cleaned very well before I left, so that when I returned there wasn’t a spot of rust on any of them.

SAR: When did you get involved in arms trading?

Visser: On my way to an appointment I stopped at a gun shop in a small street in Groningen. The guy that owned the shop had also spent some time in a German prison, as well as a concentration camp. In the shop I met a gentleman who was on the board of an ammunition factory in the south of Holland, he invited me to come and see the operation. I went there; it was a small factory that had just received an order for .30 carbine ammo from the Americans. The factory itself was a mess. I was told that the chairman of the board from the factory would like to talk to me; he offered me a job as director. He told me that the founder of the factory had died and that his younger brother wasn’t doing a good job running things. I said no, I didn’t want that job; I wanted to go back to Indonesia.

My boss back in Indonesia was a colonialist. He worked us to death, we never got enough salary, but we still led a wonderful life. He would always say, “Do this and I’ll give you a raise and a promotion.” I learned that even if I got a promotion, there would be no raise for me. He told me to go to Jakarta for a year and if I did a good job there, I would get a raise and a promotion, but when my review came up, I got a good promotion but no raise, as usual. He always had another task for me but I never got a raise. After five years, I got 8 months furlough. Usually when people went on furlough they would go straight home to Holland, but I asked if I could go to America. My boss agreed to pay for it, saying that I wasn’t such a bad guy. I flew to the Cocos Islands, Australia, lots of other small islands, Samoa, and then on to Hawaii, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Boston to visit a friend, and down to Washington D.C.

SAR: That doesn’t explain your start in the arms trade…

Visser: I am getting to it, Dan, patience. Before I went on vacation my boss in Indonesia began to worry about the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, which was getting more and more attention in America. He asked me to see how the American tobacco companies were dealing with it. I went to Philip Morris, and they told me that more and more people were buying mentholated and filtered cigarettes because the public thought that they were not as bad. I wrote back to my boss what the Americans had told me, and he quickly started ordering the machinery to manufacture filtered cigarettes. These of course are more dangerous than unfiltered cigarettes because it allows you to smoke the cigarette all the way to the filter. You end up inhaling far more tar, etc. than you would get from smoking a cigarette without filter.

My boss had told me that upon my return from furlough I would become the Inspector for the Island of Sumatra. And so again I asked him if I would get my raise, he said that we would discuss it when I returned. He was in Holland at the same time, so I traveled to Eindhoven where he was with his family and had dinner with him. I asked him during dinner if I would finally get the position I wanted, with a higher salary and the ability to sign for the company as a representative. (Editor’s note: In Europe, the right to sign documents in the name of the company puts you in a much higher level socially. You generally get a much better salary.) He said that if I did a good job working in Sumatra that I would get the position I wanted. At that moment I realized he was lying, and the next morning I started talking to the people from the ammunition factory again. I asked for what was at that time a fantastic salary, not at all contingent on how the company did at the end of the year. They accepted!

SAR: So your international weapons career started in the ammunition factory in Hertogenbosch in Holland.

Visser: You might say it started when I was making those fuzes in a German prison (Laughs). But, I’ll tell you, my first day as director there, I almost cried. There were two secretaries, and neither one could write or type a letter without mistakes. Everything looked horrible and unprofessional from that office on down to the factory. I had to fight to straighten out that company. When I arrived, there were 63 people working there, and when I left there were over a 1,000.

SAR: Did this job lead to you becoming a member of the 7.62 NATO council?

Visser: After the cigarette factory in Indonesia, I think this was a really big start for me. I got a call one day from an American friend at the Pentagon who said, “Henk, we know you’re working on blanks with a lengthened case so that they feed automatically. We don’t have that, and this morning during a mock battle in Panama the American side had to shout “Poof! Poof!” because they had no blanks that would function automatically in their weapons. The general who was responsible for Panama got mad and demanded immediate delivery of the special blanks.”

I said to my friend that I could get some of my guys and some of our new blanks, cases, powder, tools and the necessary weapons, and fly over to see what we could do. We flew to Washington and went from there to Frankfurt Arsenal, where testing began on our ammo. Whether fired from a gun that had been in a freezer or not, our blanks worked perfectly! The guys from Frankfurt Arsenal wanted to inspect our blanks and see how they could copy them, but they didn’t have the time. The Pentagon wanted 45 million blank rounds in cal. 7.62 NATO, and we would get one-third of the order, which for us was a very, very big order. We were very excited until one day I got a call from them with sad news. They said that Congress refused to release the money needed for that big order and instead specified that only 30 million rounds would be purchased, with the order going to Frankfurt Arsenal, so we lost out. This was a big blow to our company, but there was also good news. They told me that they understood that we wanted to make 20mm aircraft ammo. They offered me a 20mm ammunition factory for free, with new machinery and everything, in St. Louis, that had been used to manufacture .60 caliber ammo and later 20mm aircraft ammo. It had been “mothballed” for use in an emergency.

SAR: The early M39 revolver cannon series, the T161s, were T130E3 .60 caliber machine guns before they were moved into the 20mm range.

Visser: Yes, it was the plant for that ammunition. We went to St. Louis to look at it, and we were flabbergasted. Everything, the machines, the tools, etc. was brand new, and just for us. I went back to Holland to arrange for transport. I came back to the Pentagon (which was very easy to just walk into in those days) to talk to Colonel Moor and a couple of other officials, but they had sad news again. “We cannot give you the plant,” they said. They saw my reaction…and after a long pause continued, “But we can sell you the plant for a $1,000.” We paid the thousand dollars and brought all of the machinery back to Holland. The end result was that once we got operational we supplied every NATO Air Force with the 20mm rounds: the Brits, the Norwegians, the Germans, the Dutch, everybody. Later, when the Vietnam War began, the US Air Force realized that they did not have enough 20mm rounds. They requested an order for 10 million 20mm rounds. Our Holland plant could fill that order so a meeting took place at the pentagon. One of the officials said, “This is crazy! Lake City is not the only ammunition plant we have. Don’t we have one in the South?” Colonel Moor pointed at me and said, “Yes, and HE has that plant.” (Visser laughs) So we used the plant from St. Louis to fill a 23 million dollar order for 10 million rounds.

SAR: Like all good arms dealers, I love a story where you get a plant for surplus and then get to sell the product back to your source (laughter). Henk, that probably would have been 1967 or 1968 and jumps us too far ahead in this story. When did you first get involved with Armalite?

Visser: Ah, patience, Dan, patience. First we must address the CETME (Centro de Estudios Technicales de Materiales Especiales) program. When I started to work in Holland for NWM in 1955, they had an advisor that was a retired Dutch rear admiral who became a very good friend of mine. He had been in Spain recently (he spoke fluent Spanish), where some Spanish and Germans had been working on a new gun made from sheet steel. I knew of some of the developments that had been done in Germany with the Sturmgewehr, and I flew to Madrid. The operations there were very isolated from the outside world. The main operation was on the CETME rifle. They showed me the whole factory, and pointed out some of the small tools and things that they were missing which I could supply, so I told them I’d help out. I became very friendly with them, and pretty soon I had my own CETME rifle to take back with me to Holland. That rifle…that’s a whole other story.

It was made for special ammunition, an aluminum bullet with a copper jacket…a very long bullet with a short case. The man who designed this ammunition was Dr. Voss, and he was the German Air Force ballistician, and he was also the ballistician for the CETME group. He was very knowledgeable about recoil and automatic fire and the physics of holding a gun. During that time, the first German armed forces were the Bundesgrenzschutz who were supposed to guard the German boarders. There were 20,000 soldiers armed with German K98’s and the MG42’s, as well as 100 new 20mm Hispano guns and of course the P38 pistol, and nothing else. The boss was Colonel Naujokat, and he had been in charge of the two flat cars before and behind Hitler’s quarters on his train (during WWII). These open cars had 4-barreled 20mm automatic cannons on them.

The Spanish went to the Colonel and demonstrated for him in Bonn. The Colonel liked the new Sturmgewehr and the ammo very much, but told them they had the wrong caliber. The standard caliber was cal. 7.62, but this new Spanish ammunition was cal. 7.92. So they went back to Spain and changed the gun, the magazine, and, of course, they had to make new ammunition. They also made new firing tables, it took a year. After which they had their new CETME ammunition in cal. 7.62.

SAR: This was not yet 7.62 NATO ammunition, correct?

Visser: Correct. After the Spanish finished their new ammo, they brought it and the guns back to the German Colonel, who turned white and said, “Oh my God. I should have told you that 7.62 also requires a new case: the T65 case.” The Spanish group was beside itself, returned to Madrid and decided that it was all over. The gun was mathematically designed for a low powered cartridge and the 7.62 NATO had much more power, so it needed a totally new gun. But one of the bosses at the Madrid factory pointed out that the factory had good relations with the American military attaché, since they had just received an order to develop caseless rifle ammunition and caseless 20mm. The boss said, “Go and get a barrel and 1,000 7.62 NATO rounds.” Which they got from the U.S. The CETME with that barrel fired 600 7.62 rounds before the gun fell apart. The cartridge was far too powerful, since the gun was designed for a lighter round. The German engineers rebuilt and strengthened the housing as the German army wanted to arm their soldiers with them.

They had contact with the Heckler & Koch people, who were all old Mauser people working in two wooden barracks, making tools for pressings and so forth, and that’s how I came into contact with Heckler & Koch. The Germans at the Weapons Department in Bonn were always making changes in the gun, and it was Heckler & Koch who made the changes on the CETME. I told the CETME people, “You guys have no sales organization….let NWM have the rights to act for you all over the world.” They told me I had to pay for the right, which was no problem for NWM. They gave me the world rights for the CETME rifle, excluding Spain, Portugal and Germany. The rest of the world was ours. They also said that if I wanted to set up production elsewhere, they would help us get started.

In the meantime they were still working on the guns…making a new grip and so on…they had spent millions making the guns and making the changes. I went to the Dutch army, who agreed to test out the gun with all kinds of different ammo, including French steelcased ammo. They fired the steel ammo. When the trigger was pulled, there was a BIG noise, the rate of fire was 1,800 rounds per minute, and about half of the empty steelcases got stuck in the wooden wall. I told the Colonel to stop the test…it was a hopeless case. As it turned out, they never actually manufactured the steel ammo, but it was a hopeless case nonetheless.

To make the gun work, they had added grooves in the chamber, so that some of the gas would press on the exterior of the case to release it. The main fault of the CETME rifle is that as soon as the climate gets moist, firing the gun without immediately cleaning it results in sticky cases. This design of the roller locking system is only good for lightly-powered ammunition. We had a very fortunate thing happen; the Germans had improved the gun enough so that it functioned, but later on I learned that Heckler & Koch had a trick up their sleeves. All of the guns were tested, and they had seven different-sized sets of rollers, so that if there was a problem they would put other rollers on the locking mechanism. They would change the rollers until everything worked properly!

SAR: Very pragmatic from the point of view of a demonstrator. What year was that?

Visser: 1958 as I remember. Because the Germans had changed the rollers and had gotten the first order for 400,000 rifles, the whole world wanted the CETME rifle in the form of the G3. They had to say no to worldwide orders, because they didn’t have the rights to sell outside of Spain, Portugal and Germany, I did! We did have plans to make the rifle outside of Spain, but I stopped those plans because I felt the design was not good. I got a call from Bonn, it was my good friend from the Ministry who said, “Henk, we cannot have this. Here we are, a great nation, and we cannot sell our own rifle. I’ll offer you a deal: I know you want to make 20mm ammo for those thousand Starfighters we have bought.” They were so far back, they bought 1,000 Starfighters and they didn’t know what gun was in it! He said, “You’ll get 33% of all orders for 20mm ammo if you relinquish the rights to sell the CETME rifle.” I said, “OK.” He immediately went and got his secretary to type up a document saying that I would forever get 33% of all the 20mm orders for the Germans. ANY 20mm ammo. It saved our neck. It was one of the best days of my life…I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the end of our CETME involvement.

SAR: You were the link between CETME and Heckler & Koch?

Visser: Partly, yes. Heckler & Koch were not big shots. Their company wasn’t large enough at that time to make the big deals. They grew because of all these orders that came in from everywhere. Later they designed many important weapon systems. It was really something to see.

SAR: Henk, I would like to come back to the rifle design programs in more depth, later. If you share your experience as a collector with our readers, I am sure they would be interested. This may seem somewhat insensitive, but to obtain your collection must have cost a fortune; far above the income of a young Dutch boy who was on the Nazi death row.

Visser: Yeah, that’s about right. I have been very fortunate in my business decisions and made some very nice commissions. We can come back to that business later.

SAR: So, what was your passion?

Visser: Collecting guns. Well…really the military guns. That was the start, anything military I could get. Later it was the Dutch firearms and I sold my military collection to Bonn, it was the beginning of the museum they have now in Koblenz. 849 of my guns are still there – even my Gatling gun – the beautiful brand-new Gatling gun with the carriage and the ammunition car.

SAR: What was the Gatling, a British one?

Visser: No, an American one. The Colt 1883 model with the jacket around the barrel, and the tripod. One day in a military base, somewhere in America, near Picatinny I believe, a sergeant was cleaning up the attic, and he found this Gatling gun. It was brand new but completely taken apart, no one had ever looked at it. He went to his Colonel who said to get rid of it. And there, magically, was Val! (laughs) And who do you think bought it on the spot?

SAR:(Dolf) Yes, Val would certainly have been there! (We are discussing the late Val Forgette of Navy Arms, another international arms dealer of the good old days.)

Visser: I knew Val very well and he sold the gun to me. Very cheap, I might add. It was really a big affair, and when I left NWM they wanted to take it, but instead I sold it to Bonn, and the Gatling is in their museum today. Two of the magazines disappeared, it is sad that there are always people in museums stealing things. There were many rare guns in the military collection. One that I thought was very rare was a 7.62 NATO Gatling gun from GE. I was the only private guy in the world who had a brand-new one.

SAR: Gatling Gun, you mean an M134 Minigun?

Visser: Yes, I got it out of Vietnam…I had so much stuff there….I was working for Dutch intelligence at the time, so they arranged for a Shell tanker to haul all the stuff I had gotten to Singapore. I had 10 RPG-7 anti-tank launchers, with 200 rounds of HE grenades. The Dutch and the Germans wanted to test them.

SAR: And how about the testing?

Visser: Well, we finally got the shipment and it had to go on the deck of a Dutch destroyer in Singapore. They loaded it from the tanker onto the warship. I had managed to get a lot of interesting items for the collection during my time in Vietnam. With the RPG-7, we had to do some testing for the government. They decided that this test they wanted to run was too big for them and they made a deal with the Germans, who did a tremendously detailed testing. They even tested the glue on the wooden cases, they checked the labels to see where they were made, in Russia or East Germany. I still have one RPG-7 and an inert rocket at home. I was very interested in the American M72 LAW. I once owned six LAWS.

SAR: When did you get into the antique guns?

Visser: Slowly I got more and more interested in the antique guns…I had always hated them, so crazy and ugly they seemed to me…but then, because of my historical interests, I decided to get rid of anything that was non-Dutch. I had the best automatic pistol collection in the world, all the early Mausers, Bittners, Schonbergers, Borschards, Gabbit Fairfaxes, etc, etc. I sold them all in one lot to Dr. Sturgess, a good friend of mine. He came to my place the first time and I opened drawers for him, and he started sweating, he was going crazy. He was…really, I’ve never seen anybody so excited by my collection.

SAR: (Dolf) Even the Maxim automatic pistols came from you? I have them in my latest book.

Visser: Yes, Dolf, the Maxims as well! I was collecting automatic pistols when nobody was interested. I went to every gun shop in Switzerland where they hadn’t had the German occupiers to take everything, and there were a hell of a lot of people saying, “That old gun there, 150 francs and you can take it, with ammo too.” Those days are gone, you know. There was a gunsmith who I was talking about Lugers with, about how the prices of the Lugers had started going up, and he said, “You know, I have Luger serial number 0001, which was presented to my neighbor, an officer, in front of the troops.” It was the first Luger that the Swiss Army officially adopted. I said “That’s interesting, can I see it?” and he brought it to me in the holster. He said, “The normal price for this is 225 francs, but if you give me 275 then it’s yours.” Those were better days, you know? You would go into a gunshop and there would be a Mondragon rifle with special bayonet. It just doesn’t happen like that anymore.

SAR: Basically Henk, all the money you made you put into collecting guns?

Visser: Everything. I had no capital, no shares; I only had substantial commissions from sales. Eventually I sold my pistols and all my special ammo to Geoff Sturgess…but…it’s like a sickness, you know? I was at the Las Vegas Antique Show and there was a very rare Dutch gun there. It looks like a single-shot pistol, but it’s a three-shot pistol with a little channel where the powder goes for the first, second and third shot, and there is a Maastricht mark under the barrel. It was from the Funderburg Collection, a very famous collection. It’s in a catalog. I bought it for a lot of money! It’s crazy!

SAR: You’re preaching to the choir when you talk to Class 3 owners in the United States. You did a series of books on your collection of Dutch guns….

Visser: Yes, they are available commercially, but are out of print at the moment. The set weighs 22 kilos. Now I’m writing more books, one with the names of all of the Dutch gun makers, about 1,400 of them. Another book project that I was working on with two technicians, both specialists with Master’s degrees in History Drs. Martens en Drs. de Vries, was to write the story of Dutch weapons starting at the Napoleonic era. As these books were written in Dutch they will be translated into English and the 3 volumes will be condensed into one. There is another book in English, almost finished, about a very special German – who later became an American – Otto von Lossnitzer, the father of the modern aircraft revolving guns.

Look for a link to the second half of our smallarmsreview.com interview with Henk Visser in an upcoming SAR newsletter when we look at Vietnam, Oerlikon, the changes to the Stoner 63 system and the innovative Mecar rifle grenade programs, as well as Visser’s work to restore Dutch firearms in Russian museums. – Dan Shea

Since the company’s inception in the 1980s, Barrett Firearms has made leaps and bounds from the former garage that Ronnie Barrett used to make the first M82 anti material rifles. Today the company is expanding into the AR market, machine guns, and precision rifles with their MRAD design. Taking that momentum into the 21st Century is Christopher Barrett, the current president of the company. Chris was kind enough to sit down with SAR as we interviewed him about his history with the company, and where he wants the company to go in the near future.

SAR: Were you involved with Barrett Firearms from the beginning?

Chris: My earliest memories were of my dad shooting, and his firearms interests. He had machine guns in the 1980s, was a big time hobbyist, always shooting in sub-gun matches. He just had the coolest things in the world to a little boy. I’ve always been a part of the culture of this industry. I was around four years old when dad really came out with the company in 1982. I was shooting at a very young age, which a lot of people might not agree with these days, but it came naturally to our family. It helped make me the shooter I am today, and also helps with the designing aspect. I mean, people who actually shoot a lot, can identify what works and what doesn’t, and we put that into our designs. You could call it the Barrett “DNA” of the company, a lot of us are shooters, and we use the products we make. As an example, we don’t make submachine guns, but we still learn things from them that we can put into our other designs. If you are always in tune with that sort of thing, it makes you a good designer.

SAR: How did the company develop, throughout its history?

CHRIS: Well we started with the garage years, we lived in two different houses, with two different garages that dad was putting the rifles together in. The first house was in downtown Murfreesboro, and it was literally a wood walled garage, with gravel on the floor. They rolled out carpet over the gravel, and they realized that if they dropped a pin or other small part, they couldn’t find it. So they took the carpet and turned it over, and you were walking on the back portion of a carpet. But dad made a lot of guns out of there. Then from the garage, we actually leased a building because we outgrew it, out on Manchester highway. It was a former bus repair building where they fixed Bluebird school buses. It was owned by a man in Murfreesboro who invested in the company early on. We had that building for several years, during the 1990s. Then in the early 2000s, we moved over to this building. We built every M107 of the initial contract in that old building. We quickly outgrew that new building, and then built an extension to it, which is where we are today, connected by a ramp and it was a much higher ceiling for the running of CNC machines. Very thick concrete floors because these machines have to be on a very stable base, because of the vibration and harmonics.

SAR: When did you really start getting involved with the company?

CHRIS: Even as a young teenager and a child, I was tinkering at the plant. I remember being a kid, around 10-12 years old and I was operating acetylene torches, and doing stress relieves on welds. When you see your dad doing stuff like that, you always want to be a part of it. Another thing that helped was that we worked on cars together, we restored cars together. When I was 14, he bought a 1964 Corvette and we restored it together. I did the small jobs while he did the big stuff, but what you learn about metal working, fiberglass working, engine building, playing with gears in a transmission, you really take with you for the rest of your life. Most people just don’t have that opportunity anymore. We were doing that as the company was growing from the very early times. I went to High School, took computer aided drafting as a class, specializing in AutoCAD, working with two dimensional drafting. We don’t really even do that anymore, we do all our work in three dimensions now. When I graduated High School, I had no aspirations to attend university or go to college whatsoever, didn’t even occur to me. I wasn’t a good student, so I came right out of high school and that summer I came to officially work for the company full time. I got to work in the back, doing some of the jobs that I was already doing as a teenager, sand blasting, operating a band saw, sawing up raw stock. Every job I did, I wanted to improve immediately. For example I said, “Hey, let’s get a new sandblasting cabinet, let’s automate this sawing process”. So I got to move around the company and do a number of these jobs. This was around 1997 or so. After having this spot for a while I started realizing that this was all still on paper, there was no automation to it. We needed to make a revision to this. Chris Vaser, one of our oldest employees, was still drafting designs on paper for the company. Absolutely phenomenal draftsman, old world type with the lead pencils and putting things on paper. But this was what our technical data package was at the time, and this in the 1990s! It was on pencil and paper. It is beautiful and romantic when you think of it, but the technology of the industry at the time had far surpassed this. I mean, as a high schooler in 1995, I was working with AutoCAD programs. As an example, it automatically verifies geometry, with a pencil and paper, you could “cheat” and could get away with making mistakes. Computer aided drafting has really changed this industry in ways that we can’t imagine. I mean, we are in the golden age of firearms design. There is nothing like a brand new off the shelf rifle, a $400 hunting rifle that can outshoot the sniping rifles from the Vietnam War. A lot of this is because of computer aided modeling.

SAR: What role did you play in this computer revolution?

CHRIS: I bought the first engineering computer for the company, I remember it was a monstrosity of a tower and a monitor which was probably only 18 inches at the time, and we thought it was huge. We spent almost five grand on it, and in that day it was considered a major investment, along with the Pro Engineer software package. At the time it was the leading computer modeling software, so I sat there and learned how to use it. Not the most intuitive thing in the world, but after about a year or so, I designed the very first Model 98 on that. The prototype was actually a semi automatic .338 Lapua. Up to that point, it was the most radical departure we had made from our .50 caliber designs. The .338 Lapua Magnum was just starting to really gain some traction in the U.S. in 1997/98.

SAR: Accuracy International was becoming successful with their .338 Lapua and the Swedish contract in the early 1990s.

CHRIS: I hate to throw a bone to a competitor, but that rifle, at the time was recognized for there being nothing like it outside of AI. We heard the buzz about .338, and through that we kept plugged into our community of military and police buyers, so we knew there was beginning to be a need for the cartridge in a sniper rifle. It was sort of the thing in 98, but then it went dormant. We then heard of military solicitations for a .338 rifle in 2008, about 10 years later. At the time, we only had the Model 82A1 series, and the Model 95 and that was it. We only had two products back then, and they came in one color, and in one caliber. We essentially had two fixed products, like Henry Ford with the Model T, just coming in black. They were of a certain architecture at that time, and stamped sheet metal. They were .50 caliber, and were actually precision limited, in some part due to the ammunition. The .50 BMG round is not developed like a .338, a .308, or even a .223 is. It’s a machine gun round. Getting into the world of precision shooting was tough because we really didn’t build things like that.

SAR: Essentially they were 3 MOA anti material rifles.

CHRIS: Exactly, I mean even the Model 95, you probably could get an inch, inch and a half group out of it, depending on handloading. At the time we knew we needed a precision rifle. We did like semi autos, but we looked at what was the most accepted, most accurate, and precise rifle at the time. And it was the Accuracy International line. So dad bought one of their AWs for testing and evaluation. And we were looking at certain things, about what made it shoot so well and we found out it had some principles that we liked. But we wanted a semi-automatic, and were thinking along the lines of what would a semi auto version of the AW look like. So in the Model 98, you can see some of that inspiration with a strong rigid, bedded chassis, a flat bottomed receiver that looks a lot like a bolt action. A free floated barrel with a handguard beneath it. There was some influence there, but on the inside it was one of the most novel things ever. Although we never put that design into production at the time, we were able to take certain design elements from it and use it in our current rifles. Aside from that, when it comes to firearms design in general, you have to learn to only take the good elements from other designs, and make sure to reject the bad. However, I hate novelty for novelty’s sake; I want to design things for a practical purpose. But moving on, we weren’t and aren’t financially managed. We don’t have a list of share holders to report back to, we essentially do what we think is best for the company. Thus, the Model 98 project was sort of shelved until 2008. We noticed other companies were starting to produce their own single shot .50 caliber rifles, but no one was really getting into the .338 production. So that is where we focused our efforts on production and design. Looking back on it now, the original design we had for the Model 98, was interesting and forward thinking, but it wasn’t designed for production. And that goes back to our Advanced Research Group, a term that I prefer to R&D. Ideally those designers back there should be dreaming, not developing. They should be building up a design library, coming up with concepts such as the Model 98, that although might not be feasible to produce, will all us to come back to them in the future when we might actually see the potential for such products. Separate from this we have a product development team, that does that product development, because that has to happen, in order to keep the company on track.

SAR: So what kicked off development of the single shot Barrett?

CHRIS: We saw all these cheap single shot fifties springing up all over the market, and it really hit us because we established that lead with semi-automatic .50 caliber rifles. We didn’t want to lose that edge we had in the .50 caliber rifle market. We developed the Model 99 immediately. That was entirely new architecture as well. It looks much like a Model 95 on the outside, but it is entirely different. The Model 95 and Model 82 series are all sheet metal, fabricated, and welded. The Model 99 was really the first use of the architecture that became everything that we build now, in the Model 98B and MRAD series. It is made from a single piece of aluminum extrusion that forms the foundation of the receiver, with the barrel rigidly affixed to that. The Model 99 is really the genesis of what I believe has become the new defining architecture for precision rifles. The 98B and the MRAD basically are really different. When they came out, people were still just taking sporting rifle actions and solidly bedding them into fiberglass stocks that mimic wood stocks. We called it “B” because it was a revival of the 98 program, B for bolt action. But it was a head scratcher to people when they first saw it because they would look at it and say, ‘Where’s the action? Where is the stock?’. Well, there isn’t an action or stock in the way that you know it, like a Winchester Model 70, or a Remington Model 700. That doesn’t exist in the Model 98. It is a barrel rigidly affixed into an aluminum chassis that surrounds the barrel, and puts the bore axis really low, and gets the scope up higher. Then a lower receiver that separates from the upper like an AR does. So I think it really set a new course in the industry because after that I started seeing a lot of chassis going around. Another thing that is significant about the Model 99 is the breech mechanism, it has that interrupted thread that has been a significant design feature of the 98B and MRAD series.

SAR: What motivated Barrett’s movement towards the AR15 platform?

CHRIS: It started with the Barrett M468 in around 2003, and prototype production in 2004. What got us into the 6.8 SPC experiment was that the Army Marksmanship Unit, and some other entities at 5th Special Forces Group, specifically Master Sergeant Steve Holland, came to us back then and were showing us all this 6.8 stuff. It wasn’t even SAAMI standardized yet, AMU was hand loading these cartridges out of .30 Remington cases. They also had a .22 SPC, a 6mm SPC, a 6.5mm SPC, and a 7.62mm SPC. People don’t realize just how extensive this testing was. They were shooting all these odd cartridges, and they finally settled on 6.8mm. They came to us with a Mark 12 Designated Marksman’s Rifle, and said, ‘We need this, in 6.8, or a Recce sort of rifle, also in 6.8mm. We had no interest in getting into the AR game at the time, it wasn’t even a blip on our radar. But this whole 6.8 thing piqued my interest, the fact that it goes on a standard 5.56 lower receiver. We shot some of it and realized it was significantly more powerful, and it wasn’t some sort of niche that fills a gap between two cartridges that you can’t tell the difference between. So we started looking at it and that is how the M468 came along. I made some enhancements to it, such as the larger gas block because of the increased bore size. But we made a novel front gas block that had a flip up front sight and a suppressor interface for a suppressor design that would surround the barrel and actually attach to the gas block. If you look at an M468, you will see a ratchet on the gas block that attaches to a suppressor. The idea doesn’t really work nowadays because people are wanting suppressors to be modular and have the ability to be put on different rifles, but it was just something we were experimenting with. We built a good amount of M468s, probably put more into civilian circulation in the U.S. than any other company.

SAR: Development of the M468 then led to the REC7?

CHRIS: We started looking at the viability of a piston operated AR because of that, although the M468 itself was a mid-length direct gas impingement rifle. At the time there wasn’t much of a choice when it came to piston operated ARs. 2007 was the official release date, and we came up with REC through Reliability Enhanced Carbine, and 7 for the year 2007. The piston system on it, in my opinion, is the finest piston operated system on an AR out there today. It is one piece, it comes out the front of the rifle with one other part that holds it in. A lot like an FAL really, but the handguard doesn’t have to come off, and it doesn’t separate into seven different pieces. It is indicative of what we strive for at Barrett, making it well, but not overly complicated in a smart design. Anyone can make something complicated, but a good designer will strive to make something simple.

SAR: What sort of inspiration did that piston design take from?

CHRIS: I would say it is a hybrid of the FAL and the AK. The gas plug is a little like the FAL but doesn’t have this spring loaded mechanism like the FAL does, to retain it or switch it to a grenade position. The piston design takes a little from the AK, but we patented the fluted cylinder that is in there. This is important because a lot of other piston operated AR designs try to trap the gas in there, using gas rings, etc… We wanted the REC 7 to be simple, and hard to break. Ours runs without gas rings, like an AK. We found out a way to let the gas out of the gas block by incorporating a fluted cylinder. Early prototypes weren’t allowing enough of the gas out of the system and the piston was actually getting stuck in there from the carbon build up. We then put four flutes in the back of the gas block cylinder, cut with an end-mill that took away surface area at the rear, but we left it sealed at the front, where it needed the power stroke, then when the piston gets to the rear, it enters an open area, similar to an AK. These flutes allow that gas to blow around the piston and not allow it to clog up. The gas will then flow into the handguard, and this is why on REC7s with thousands of rounds, you’ll see some soot underneath the handguard. One of our earlier prototypes went 22,000 rounds without any sort of cleaning. From there we advanced the design to a Gen 2, with a better handguard system, and built-in steel QD mounts.

27 June 2009, Titusville, Florida at Knight’s Armament Company

George E .Kontis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1945….

Kontis: (Interrupting) Wait a minute, Dan, we can’t start The Interview like this. I was indeed born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but that’s a little misleading. I was conceived in North Florida, in a tiny town called Carrabelle, my father was in the service there. He was a lieutenant in the Army. My mother had come down to stay with him in Carrabelle, and my mother got pregnant while she was in Carrabelle. Just before I was born she got on a train, went to Pittsburgh, and I was born in Pittsburgh. She then turned around and came right back down and raised me in North Florida where I was immediately labeled as a Damn Yankee. And all these years it’s been tough being a non- native born, native Floridian…

OK, now that the record is straight… George Kontis was born in 1945 to a family that started in the Greek community in Smyrna, Turkey, and left for Athens during the 1922 genocide. He’s been married to his wife Marcy for 38 years and has four children, Cherie and West, Alethea, and Soteria. George has been involved in the small arms business for all of his adult life. His designs include GPU-5A 30mm Gun Pod, numerous single barrel machine guns including the GE150, liquid propellant weapons, and improvements to ammunition handling systems.

He worked variously with Colonel George M. Chinn (who thought so highly of George that he included him on the inside cover of The Machine Gun Volume Five as one of the most promising small arms designers of modern times. George worked at General Electric’s Armament Systems Department, At FN Manufacturing, Inc. in charge of engineering for the M240, M249, and M16A4, was operations manager at HK-USA, and is currently Vice President of Business Development at Knight’s Armament Company in Titusville, Florida. George is a mentor to many of the young engineers in our community, and was the 1998 recipient of NDIA’s Col. George M. Chinn Award.

SAR: George, was there a firearms influence in your life when you were very young?

Kontis: My father was quite interested in firearms, even though he was an immigrant. Actually, he was an “illegal.” He didn’t have a country anymore; the Germans had occupied Greece, so he jumped ship in New York. He worked on a barge line for a number of months as a chief engineer even though he couldn’t speak English.

In those years, illegal or not, everyone had to sign up for the draft – those were the rules. When he passed his physical, they immediately snagged him into the Army. Why the Army and not the Navy? Well, because he didn’t understand the directions that they gave him, in English, for where to sign up for the Navy so he ended up in the Army. As a private he learned English, shortened his name from Kontaridis to Kontis, and he got his citizenship. He was not a shooter in Greece, but when he came to the U.S. and joined the Army, he loved to shoot, and he served in the Philippines. He was very proud of his military service and always liked shooting and above all, taught me safe gun handling.

SAR: What was the first gun you fired?

Kontis: I was five years old and it was a .22 rifle that was given to my dad to give to me by one of the barge line captains. Even at age five my dad used to take me out to shoot rats at the dump near the Ohio Valley General Hospital in Pittsburgh. We also went “plinking” there in the daytime. My .22 rifle was made in Chicopee Falls, I think it was like a Stevens, I can’t remember the exact name, but it was a dropping block .22. It was a great little rifle.

My uncles all went shooting and often went with us. One day at the dump, one uncle shot himself in the foot, and that taught me a very important safety lesson about shooting. He put a very clean hole right through his foot. Luckily, he missed all the bones. I learned to be extra careful after that. When I was in the third grade we moved to Tallahassee, and shooting is what I did almost every day. I didn’t go to soccer camps or any of that stuff. The money my parents spent on me was for ammo. My friends and I were in the woods all the time shooting, hunting, bringing home rabbits, birds, whatever. There was a lot of game there. I finally got a shotgun, and started buying up guns, even at an early age.

I also received an M1 Carbine as a hand-me-down from my Dad. It was “service” gun; he had the bring-back paperwork for it. It had a carving of a dog on the stock, done by a GI, quite a nice carving, and some hand-done checkering. I still have it. I restocked it because I wasn’t crazy about that dog being on my hunting rifle. One day I ran into Pete Kokalis, and he was telling me about trench art and explaining how valuable it was. I said, “You mean like if you had this rifle and there was a dog carved on the stock and some really nice checkering?” Kokalis’ eyes got really big so I knew this was something special, and I went home and threw that other stock away and put my original stock back on.

SAR: When was the first time you were around a machine gun or a silencer or anything unusual?

Kontis: Well, that didn’t come until I finished college at Georgia Tech. I went there to study Mechanical Engineering. My father was a marine engineer; it sort of was in the blood. As I kid, I always played around with a lot of mechanical things. My favorite TV show was called The Big Picture. Probably nobody remembers it, but it was put on by the government. They would go from one factory to the next and they would show how a helmet is made, they’d show how a rifle is made, show how ammunition is made. I was just fascinated by that. I liked to fix things, take things apart and fix them and play with them. I got Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. I was a big reader there and spent a lot of time in the library. I used to read books on how to make things yourself. I was particularly fascinated by Henley’s Twentieth Century Book of Formulas, Processes and Trade Secrets; it was a book that taught to make various compounds with different formulas. There are about 20 types of gunpowder formulas in there.

My friends and I did a lot of experimentation, too. We made some gunpowder and other things: bicycle spoke guns, firecracker guns, you name it, we did them all. We were pretty safety conscious for a number of reasons. One of the kids I knew had made a bomb and blew off most of his right hand. None of the girls would hold hands with him at the skating rink, so I decided girls were more important than bombs. And then of course, there was always the lingering memory of my uncle, screaming and hopping around the dump on one foot, with blood everywhere. Guns and shooting were my primary hobbies. I spent all of my spare time with them.

SAR: When was the first time you ran into a machine gun?

Kontis: That would’ve been my first day of work, my first day at a real job. It was as a design engineer at the General Electric Company in Burlington, Vermont, 1967. My first machine gun was a 20mm Vulcan cannon. We were the engineers in charge of testing, but not allowed to push the “fire” button. There was always this nagging thing that you really wanted to shoot that gun, but you weren’t allowed to. Finally, after a few years, I got an opportunity to go to an NDIA function, which at that time it was called the ADPA (American Defense Preparedness Association). There were some machine guns available and I got to shoot an M3 Grease Gun. I was impressed by the simplicity. It was such a clever design, but I was also amazed by how uncontrollable it was – for me anyway.

Georgia Tech had been an amazing experience. It was a very, very tough engineering school. I never worked so hard at anything in my life, and it taught me hard work, perseverance, how to take a problem and look at all the aspects and filter down what’s really important. They taught us how to identify the problem, focus on that alone, and then use the laws of physics and engineering to solve the problem.

I was at GE for 15 years. When I started, it was in the middle of the Vietnam War era, so they were making M134 Miniguns and M61 20mm cannons for all of the fixed wing aircraft, some helicopters, and gunships. The M61 started its life on fixed-wing aircraft. While I was there, they removed three of the barrels and developed the three-barrel M197 to arm helicopters.

I spent a lot of my time in R&D. We had developed the 25mm caseless program. That was going to be an aircraft cannon. We worked on case-telescoped ammunition, and I worked for about a year on liquid propellant guns. I spent about another year working on gun barrel improvements, trying to figure out why gun barrels fail and what we could do to extend the life. A very, very difficult problem, not well understood even today.

SAR: Did you work on the 5.56x45mm Miniguns, the Six Pack?

Kontis: No. That gun was invented by my boss, Bob Chiabrandy. He was probably the most brilliant engineer and designer I’ve ever worked with. That project started just before I got there, in the early 1960s: Bob had developed that weapon, a very, very clever design. There were no moving parts in the bolt, other than the firing pin. Although it was designed to fire at 6,000 shots per minute, they accidentally increased the power causing it to fire at 12,000 rounds a minute. This set the world record for the highest rate of fire of any machine gun. It fired linked ammunition, which was always a problem. Those links weren’t designed for side stripping, which would have been more ideal.

Preceding the 5.56 Minigun, there were two 7.62mm Miniguns that were being developed, A and B. The A gun was designed by Ray Patenaude – it’s the gun we know today with a two-piece bolt. There was a B-model Minigun designed by Chiabrandy with a one-piece bolt with dropping-block action same as his 5.56mm Minigun. That gun fired great – it was fantastic. The Army would come to review progress on the A model, which wasn’t firing, and they’d hear the B model firing. “What was that?” they’d ask. “Oh, that’s another project down at the other bay. We’re not allowed to talk about that one.” That was the B model. The A gun was continually failing, one problem after another, which they finally straightened out, of course.

SAR: What kind of problems did you see?

Kontis: The Minigun bolt from the A model that the military adopted, was difficult to make. As the two-piece bolt compressed to lock, there was this little finger that stuck out from the bolt head that followed a cam path in the rear portion. We used to call that thing the “fickle finger.” Because it was a casting, it was hard to maintain the dimensions, and it was a nightmare to machine. That was part of the problem. The rest of it was mostly in feeding, because to feed the round required something that looked like a gun with the sole job to delink the round: it was a tricky design.

SAR: It was always interesting to me that the geometry worked out where you had to have seven pushrods in there to coordinate against the six barrels. Did you ever get any feedback from the field?

Kontis: That was the beautiful thing in those years, and the thing that we’ve complained about just in recent times. GE used to get daily reports from Vietnam and even non combat areas, on what worked and what didn’t. It was fantastic feedback from the end users. They were reports, similar to faxes, providing important information that gave us a head start on finding solutions.

SAR: Did you ever go out on a military site, looking at the weapons?

Kontis: Yes, but remember, I worked mostly in R&D, so most of my time was spent on the research side of things. GE had a very big single-barrel cannon program. I worked on these for a number of years. The first one was the GE-120, 20mm, dual-feed cannon. The basic design was an inspiration of Dick Colby – he’s famous from the SPIW program. Then we went to the Hispano-Suiza 20mm. I was a project engineer on a 7.62x51mm version, the Armor Machine Gun (AMG.) That was on its way to becoming a successful program. We thought we were going replace the M73/M219 machine gun.

SAR: Good idea.

Kontis: Fantastic idea. That was overtaken by events because of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. They canceled all of the development programs and selected the MAG58. Those single barrel programs were fun, and I learned a lot about taking a weapon from inception, right through prototype design, to pre-production. On the AMG program my technicians and I developed a new instrumentation technique. We found it very useful and we had never seen it done before. Usually in firearm development you instrument the bolt to develop a time versus displacement curve. This lets you “see” how the bolt is moving through the cycle, and you measure its performance against time. We placed two transducers on the bolt: one to measure time and the other for velocity. In the end we developed a velocity versus displacement curve, getting rid of time altogether. This “VD” plot tells the engineer the velocity of the bolt throughout the cycle. Since velocity is related to energy, a sudden dip in the curve and you know you’ve lost energy. Using the VD information, you can find the exact spot where energy is lost and identify cycle problems easily.

SAR: What was the inspiration for doing the Armor Machine Gun; was that trying to shorten up the receiver?

Kontis: Yes, it was to replace the M73. Everybody, including the Army, knew the M73 was a dog and had no future. The M1 tank was coming along, so we needed a gun with a short receiver. In 1968, Springfield Armory closed and during the first part of 1969, GE took over the Springfield operation that included production of the M73 and M85 machine guns.

Bob Chiabrandy was named as engineering manager and I was one of the guys working with him. Bob and I spent all week down at Springfield operations working production problems.

The Armor Machine Gun appeared to have a promising future. It was recoil operated using the Browning short-recoil cycle. It had a very interesting triangular accelerator that worked in a cam on the receiver. The accelerator pivoted in the barrel extension and kicked the bolt to the rear during recoil. It could feed from the right or the left and the feed components were right there in the weapon. It had a neat little built-in solenoid, and it could fire using a solenoid or manually with a little palm trigger. The gun worked really quite well.

It was able to fire the two ammunition types including A127 that the M73could not fire. The case of the A127 was very soft and had a high incidence of ruptured cartridges, but only in the M73. The Army had to come up with special hardened case ammo for the M73. Like the M60 machine gun, the AMG could fire either ammo.

GE had a great prototype shop. When you completed a design, it was reviewed by manufacturing engineers, production engineers; it was textbook John Pederson. Tolerances were studied, the manufacturability was studied, and the drawing was not released until a manufacturing engineer, the big guru, Charlie Tudhope, signed off on it. Only then was it released, even if only a few units were to be made.

The engineer was responsible for designating what the significant characteristics were. Those were the dimensions that were inspected by Quality Assurance. If you had 10 dimensions specified as significant, you could be assured that those 10 dimensions were inspected 100% on every one of those parts.

The Burlington GE plant was formerly a Bendix operation that made turrets during World War II. GE went up there to build the Mark 12 reentry vehicle – a nose cone for a missile. At the same time, GE Schenectady was working on an Army project for Gatling guns and the project was moved up to Burlington. That’s when it all started. Vietnam hit, and it was just, “Katy, bar the door.” We went all out on designs. GE developed the linkless feed system from a design that was conceived by the Roy Sanford Company, in Connecticut. GE took the concept, solved all the problems and made it work in production. Those 20mm linkless feeds were used on all of the major aircraft, starting on the F-105. They were in the F-4, the A-7 and the F-111. They had refined the linkless feed systems to be scalable – even the 30mm GAU-8 round for the A-10 aircraft. That was one beautiful design from start to finish.

SAR: You worked on caseless ammunition there?

Kontis: 25mm caseless. The weapons system was for aircraft and the idea was to go to 25mm. They figured 20mm was going to be limited down the road, so they wanted to go to 25, and they developed a 25mm caseless round. It was a coffee-mill gun, much like a Gatling gun, but had ten chambers for six barrels. Rounds were fed into empty chambers under the gun, which were moved to line up with barrels and fired. The empty chambers rotated out of the gun so more rounds could be fed.

The round used compressed propellant and a percussion primer. The case telescoped 25mm was the same idea, when caseless didn’t work, case telescoped was tried next. Case telescoped is basically taking what you normally think of as a cartridge and replacing that with a cylinder. Everything is packaged into the cylinder, including powder, primer, and projectile. The difference is that the projectile is not seated right there at the origin of rifling. The projectile is back inside the cartridge case, so when the projectile gets launched, it flies out and then contacts the origin of rifling and then begins to spin up.

SAR: So it has to transition from its own case into the rifling? Did you use progressive rifling on that?

Kontis: Yes. In order to get the projectile started up so it didn’t jump right into the full rifling. That wasn’t the design challenge, though. The big issue with these weapons is sealing the high chamber pressure.

SAR: You were there 15 years. Any other projects you worked on at GE?

Kontis: I designed the GE-150, an externally powered .50 caliber machine gun. We were going to replace the M2HB and the M85 with a .50 caliber externally powered gun. This gun would use a two-rotation cam, unlike a Gatling gun that moves a bolt back and forth in one rotation. The GE-150 cam turned two times and translated the bolt all the way to the rear, and all the way into battery with a firing dwell at the front end and a feed dwell at the rear. We made the feeder in such a way that it would handle either link; the rearward end stripping M9 for the Browning style, and the forward end stripping M15A2 for the M85. Ammunition linked either way could be fired using the same feeder: no changes, no adjustments, just load in the rounds and shoot.

We actually built that and tested it at full rate and it worked great, so we were pretty excited about it. There were two drawbacks to this design. One was that the heat from the barrel would head right into the drive cam and that could lead to problems. The other drawback was the fact that the M9 link is a pull-to-the-rear link. There is no other way to get the round out of the link. Pulling the round to the rear, feeding it into the bolt, then chambering all takes time. The time to fire the first round fired was lengthy, all due to the link, and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

For sure, the most exciting job and the most fun I had the design of the GPU-5/A 30mm gun pod. The success of the 30mm in the GAU-8 type round in the A-10 was something that we thought would be good for every one of the aircraft to have, so we made a pod that all the fighter jets could carry.

Lew Wetzel and I worked on that design together. He was the project lead – it’s surprising when you look at the GE Gatling designs and realize how many of them he designed. One of the things I learned from Wetzel was the way you to make a new design successful. The trick is to prove out the high risk areas first by building prototypes and testing them. For complex designs, we’d start with simple prototypes then continued to refine them until finally all of the high risk design issues were proven out. By the time you go into the first full prototype you’ve only got the small problems to clear up.

The GPU-5A was a very unique design. GE never had anything quite like it. Wetzel came up with the ammunition handling system concept. All the rounds were stored and transported in little conveyor buckets. Wetzel and I spent a lot of hours trying to figure out how to make the thing work.

What we did was to spiral the ammunition around the full length of the pod. There were two layers of conveyor buckets that moved up and down the pod taking a helical path. The inner layer went toward the gun feeder and outer layer of conveyor buckets moved in the direction of the muzzle – turning around at the end and becoming inner conveyor buckets.

In the center of the pod was a four-barrel GAU-13/A not the seven-barrel GAU-8. (The five-barrel is in 25mm.) My part of the design was the feeder, the recoil mitigation system and some of the feed storage system components. Since it was a gun pod, everything had to be as small as possible, yet be rugged enough to handle those huge 30mm rounds.

The tricky part of the gun feeder was that the four-barrel gun needed the ammunition to be spaced apart somewhere on the order of five inches. In the conveyor system the rounds were spaced with a “pitch” of about two inches apart. This level of acceleration of the ammunition was needed to match the speed of the bolt, and conversely to decelerate fired cases from the gun in order to place them into empty conveyor buckets. This was common practice in aircraft weapon systems. Round acceleration was always done the same way – with a sprocket. The sprocket would pick up a round at a slow speed and while rotating it would accelerate the round from the root of the sprocket out to the tip of the sprocket to gain speed. If I had used this conventional acceleration technique, I would have had to use about nine sprockets passes to get the rounds properly accelerated. There just wasn’t room in the gun pod.

That’s when I thought about using elliptical gears. I went through the equations for the elliptical gear calculations and theoretically it appeared everything would work perfectly. All I needed was a four-lobed elliptical gear pair, and by God, the round would be accelerated up to speed to match the speed of the rotating bolt, and using only one sprocket, not nine.

My next step was to figure out how to construct the gear and it was then I realized something was bad wrong. I found out the gear couldn’t be cut with a standard gear cutter. Now I was stuck so I decided to contact the guy who developed the elliptical gear equations I was using and ask him, “Hey, what’s with your equations. They don’t work for my application?” I found his number and called him. His name was Fred Cunningham; the guru who wrote all the equations and lots of articles about elliptical gearing. Cunningham told me, “What you’re trying to do won’t work because gear teeth have to be symmetric and in your design, the gear teeth will be asymmetric.” He made a suggested design change but it would require a lot more gears and sprockets and there probably wasn’t room for them.

It was no cause for worry; I knew just what to do. Whenever I was faced with this level of problem, I did have one more option. Go see Bob Chiabrandy – which I did. Bob listened attentively to my problem, looked at my equations, and seemed rather amused that I had actually called Cunningham and challenged his design methods. A couple hours later Bob hands me a table of numbers and says, “Here are the x & y coordinates of your gears.” “You need to figure out how to make them, but I think these will work.” We cut the first ones out of a piece of sheet aluminum, filing them here and there. The technicians mounted them on a nice board with a hand crank and they ran together perfectly. In the pod they picked up the rounds at the 2 inch pitch and fed them right to the bolt….

SAR: …Making a proper presentation….

Kontis: … matching the bolt velocity perfectly for a smooth transition. That was just one of the gear pairs! The second pair picked up the fired case from the bolt and decelerated it, dropping it back into the conveyor bucket so no fired cases were ejected overboard. The conveyor bucket held live rounds and fired cases. When the pod fired the ammo handling system, and it went from totally full of live rounds to totally full of empty cases after it fired out. Nothing was ejected overboard.

SAR: That’s a thing of beauty.

Kontis: It was a fun design project that worked really well. It was used in Desert Storm. The other part that I designed was the recoil system for it. When you’re designing a gun pod, you’re trying to make everything as absolutely small as you can. This big cigar was going to be far too fat unless Wetzel and I figured out how to compact everything. That’s why we put the gun inside, wrapped the ammunition around it, and then put the skin around that. It’s also why the elliptical gears had to be made to work.

There is a tremendous amount of recoil from the 30mm cannon firing in an aircraft. We designed what we called a strong-back; it was like a skeleton to take the loads. Much of the recoil energy from the gun was converted to friction using two recoil adapters and this reaction was taken from the strong back and into the aircraft mounting hooks. Recoil adapters for a system that big use ring springs: concentric rings have high energy-absorbing friction when compressed. To that point, all ring springs used on Gatling guns operated inside a tubular housing. We had no room for a tube, so I figured out how to put a “housing,” if you will, inside the rings.

The spring pack was double acting, so that when it was pulled apart the stack of ring springs was compressed and when the ends were pushed together, the ring stack was again compressed. This was kind of a wild idea I had. We made some prototypes and we played with them with some coil springs, and by golly it really did work. I refined the design from prototype stages, and ended up getting a patent on the design, and they still use this particular design today. It was quite successful.

SAR: Did you have any problem with GE when you got patents? They didn’t claim your work?

Kontis: Oh, they did claim them. When you work for a company, generally your patents are assigned over to the company. Now, I must say GE was very good about giving you an honorarium for your patent that involved a nice gift, an expensive dinner, and a monetary award. It wasn’t all that bad.

SAR: You went to an ADPA meeting, which was the precursor to the National Defense Industrial Association and the Small Arms Symposium.

Kontis: That would’ve been in the ’70s and early ’80s. In those years, it was a who’s who of small arms people. Berge Tomasian, who ran Saco Defense, was chairman until Jay Trumper from GE took over. From the government side, there was Frank Marquardt who designed the Marquardt 20mm Navy Aircraft Cannon used in the Mk11 gun pod. Gene Stoner was there quite often, as were the guys from Saco: John Rocha and George Curtis. I took advantage of these opportunities to get to know people like Uzi Gal, Israel Gallili, and Bill Ruger, who showed up once in a while. They were all a great bunch of people to associate with.

We held yearly meetings just like we do now as NDIA, with papers presented. Usually one year it was east coast, one year it was west coast. They were rarely held at Picatinny. I was a participant, but later on, I was more active in the organization.

The Colonel (Chinn) and I had gotten to be pretty good buddies. You’d see him there all the time and as well, Rod Spies who was the head of marketing from Hughes. The Chain Gun was a Hughes development that wasn’t ready in time for the Armored Fighting Vehicle (Bradley) competition, so TRW with Gene Stoner’s 25mm cannon won the competition between GE and TRW. Out of nowhere came Spies, who figured out how to get his chain gun considered. In the end, it was the 25mm Chain Gun that won out. Spies was an amazing marketing guy – he won the Chinn Award too. As I said, ADPA was a great experience.

SAR: Any other projects or programs at GE?

Kontis: Near the end of my days at GE, I had an idea for a new project, a .50 caliber Gatling gun. It just seemed like that was something that could be a hot seller. It would be something that was needed to replace the aging aircraft cannons. The concept was for a six-barrel gun or a three-barrel gun. I would make the rotor big enough to be a six-barrel gun for fixed wing aircraft armament, but start out by making a three-barrel gun, since that would be more saleable. As the design progressed and proved itself, three more barrels could be added to make a new product. Just the opposite of what was done for the 20mm from the M61 to the M197. A lot of people liked my .50 caliber concept and I got money allocated for it, and I was ready to lead the design team as the project engineer. That was the time frame where I decided that I wanted to get into management; I didn’t want to be a design engineer anymore. I felt like I was getting pigeonholed; and I really liked working with people. I also thought I’d like to work in sales some day. I liked the whole NDIA (ADPA) scene and being inspired by all those great gun designers, and I felt like it was time to move on. I left that project and in 1982 I took the opportunity to go to FN and be the Product Engineering Manager. FN was having trouble getting the M240 off the ground and I was sure I could help.

SAR: Where had FN come from with the M240 program?

Kontis: The M240 was brought on by the failure of the M219 (M73) during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis complained to the U.S. what a terrible gun they had been sold. There was even a congressional investigation. There were other candidates being trialed but the money for these got canceled. My Armor Machine Gun was a casualty along with others. The GE AMG and other guns coming down the pike weren’t ready yet. Congress demanded a worldwide competition with the objective to pick the best gun to replace the M73.

FN won that competition with the MAG58 Coaxial machine gun. It was the tank version of their Infantry MAG58. They were given a contract for a limited number of guns as well as providing a Technical Data Package (all the drawings) so that the guns could be built in the United States. FN in Belgium began delivering the guns from the Herstal, Belgium factory, so the immediate need for a reliable tank coax was filled.

Then FN won the competition to build the same gun (now called the M240) in the U.S. Since they didn’t have a U.S. factory, they built one in Columbia, South Carolina. They were in quasi-production for one year, but it was a huge mess. From the engineering side, they needed an engineer who could interact with the Army representatives and convey the Army message to the Belgians. The converse of this was also needed. I used to jokingly say my job was as a translator – converting English to English.

The U.S. factory, FN Manufacturing, Inc. (FNMI) suffered from growing pains: a new factory with inexperienced personnel, the language barrier, and inexperience in understanding exactly what the U.S. military wanted. I was only on the job a few days when I realized how bad things really were, but we had a good group of people, and I felt pretty confident we’d get things moving in the right direction. After all, they had a nice factory and had some decent new manufacturing equipment, and a reputation for building good stuff.

It took a long time for the workforce to understand what was needed, as many of them weren’t experienced gun people or machinists. The Belgians had sent quite a contingent over to get production going. The first year they had built some M240s, but not to the Army’s Tech Data Package that they had drawn to U.S. format. The Army demanded the gun be built to their new tech data package, but the Belgians wanted to continue to use theirs.

SAR: Because they knew those worked.

Kontis: Exactly. This was how they built the guns in Belgium. The U.S. didn’t buy the manufacturing package; they only bought the technical data package, and there’s a big difference. I had a great engineering team and we finally got the Army drawings into a condition where both the Army and the Belgians were happy with it. The FNMI manufacturing engineers made new manufacturing drawings that worked best for the new factory.

You know, even though these were tank guns, the Army did something very, very smart when they redrew the drawings. It would’ve been so easy to eliminate all of the infantry features of the original MAG58 that allowed those guns to be used on the ground. It would have been cheaper too.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about. The back sight bracket had steps that were used for the rear sight. Those steps were hardened so that they wouldn’t wear, and here we were at FNMI, installing back sight brackets with hardened areas where the steps were, and no sights on the gun. We also hardened the area where the dust cover latched underneath, even though there was no dust cover on the coaxial weapon. We did all the little infantry nuances, from the MAG58, even though these guns were going into tanks. Hats off to whoever decided that, or we would have never gotten the M240G and M240B off the ground.

There is an interesting story of a problem we had to solve right off the bat. Product Engineering’s job was to go through the M240 design dimension by dimension, comparing the Army drawings with the Belgian’s manufacturing package so that we could accommodate both. In doing that, we were very successful with one major exception.

One thing that didn’t work very well at all was the feed tray, and this is the very heart of every automatic weapon. The ammunition links were digging trenches in the top of the tray causing malfunctions. The FN Herstal design was made out of nine components that included an investment cast round stop, rivets, and stampings. The first U.S. made feed trays looked just like the ones from Belgium, but ours didn’t work well at all and nobody could figure out why.

The feed tray started out its life as a stamping of very soft steel, “tin can steel” we used to call it. Then it was masked for certain areas that we didn’t want plated, and then it was chrome plated. After it was chrome plated, then it was phosphated black. This was just an inordinate amount of time to manufacture a part, requiring a lot of handwork. They’d sit there painting the masking on these things. It was an awful, awful part.

My idea on that was that we’ve got some really good casting companies in this country, so let’s get a couple good houses to make us a casting. We called in Hitchner and some others and said, “Can you guys investment cast this?” They said, “Sure. What material do you want?” I picked a good material that I knew would come out harder than the links and we ended up with a nice hard feed tray. It was absolutely beautiful. The Belgians were screaming, “What are you doing? The part’s fine like it is.” They weren’t real happy with the American team at the time. We took that thing out and fired it and we couldn’t fail it. It just shot and shot and shot. That was one of the first times that the American engineering team there “grew legs.”

SAR: Did you get to go shooting at FN if you wanted to?

Kontis: All the shooting you wanted [laughter]. That was a nice part about FN. We got to do all the demos but we engineers were authorized to shoot all the time for testing, it was great. We did lots of demos, and our first demos were something we called the GMAK, Ground-Mount Adaption Kit. I always have to be selling and I figured, “You’ve got a great design. Let’s put this thing on the ground.” The number one M240 complaint from the tankers wasn’t anything about the gun or how it worked or functioned, it was that you couldn’t take the gun out and put it on the ground. We decided the thing to do is sell a ground kit for it, use it as an infantry weapon, basically a bipod and butt stock to dismount with. We couldn’t get any buyers. We heard asinine comments like, “If you take the gun out of the tank and put it on the ground, you decrease the fightability of the tank.” Wait a minute. The tank is already dead [laughter]; you’ve got no more fightability. Get the hell out of there! Put the gun on the ground so you can get moving and keep fighting. At NDIA, Ed Gripkey our marketing manager, would be holding the weapon, with me doing all the soft-shoe dancing and verbiage for the demo. We had the wooden stock from the MAG58, but wood could not be decontaminated in an NBC environment. We had developed a pipe stock with a rubber pad on the pack and it worked well. It was comfy to shoot and troops really liked it, but we couldn’t sell any of them. The GMAK went nowhere at the time.

We got pretty busy at FN because we won three major contracts at once. We won the M16A2 rifle, we won the M249, and then the Mk19. These represented all of the major contracts in U.S. small arms – all won within a period of about three months. We figured, this is never going to fly. Number one, the politicos from all the other states were screaming. Maine was screaming, “You can’t have the Mk19. That’s for Saco.” Although Sako had never built one, this message came from the Navy. About the M249, FN diehards were saying, “Oh, that’s our baby; we want to build it.” As for the M16, FN had hired a lot of ex Colt employees including the head of manufacturing and some other top people. Their mantra was, “We need to bring the M16 into FN.” In the end, we let the Mk19 contract go to Saco and the rest is history.

The Mk19 was Colonel Chinn’s baby. I hired an old friend of mine named Charlie Mooney, who worked with Chinn. Charlie was another one of the best engineers I ever worked with. Charlie is now deceased. It was sad to lose Charlie at a young age. Charlie took the Mk19 from a gun that wasn’t working very well, although the concept was there, but the details, where the devil lives, weren’t there. He made it into something that would work. Then Saco took it and made it into something that could be produced as well. Just because you have a drawing that works out and a prototype that works, doesn’t mean you can produce it and have mass quantities work: it takes a lot of time. I was working in product engineering for about half of my career, and by the late ’80s I was getting a little tired of working in engineering and I saw a lot of marketing opportunities that we weren’t taking advantage of. And I always want to get new things into the hands of the troops. When I saw a need, like this GMAK, it was just driving me crazy.

I had to get it out into the field. When we didn’t succeed, I had to go somewhere else and get something else out into the field. FN had a lot of products over in Belgium that weren’t being sold in the U.S. and they came in and gave us an orientation on what they had. When I saw the list I said, “Wow, those are some really cool products. We could sell those in the U.S.” Without anybody asking, I wrote a marketing plan, the first one I’d ever written. I didn’t even know how to write a marketing plan, and there was no Internet to search. I showed it to my boss and he said, “I don’t want to see that anymore. Don’t show that to anybody.” FN was pretty good about hiring consultants and they hired these top-notch consultants to come in and look at business, and while one of them was interviewing me we talked about the new products. He saw I was excited about the new products and he said, “There needs to be a marketing plan.” At first I held my tongue, but then I remembered what Julien Labeye, the president of FNMI, told me. He said, “Tell these guys whatever you want, no holds barred.” So I said, “Well, sir, I wrote a marketing plan, but I was told to hold it close.” He said he wanted to see it, so I handed him it to him. He said, “This is a pretty good marketing plan.” The next thing I knew I was sales manager of North America for FN, and I was off selling FN products in Canada and the U.S.

That was really a great experience for me. It expanded my horizons. I went to Belgium, to France, and up to Canada. We really started things moving and got FN products on a roll. We had the M249 in production, the M16A2, and the M240. Now there was the opportunity to product improve, do R&D, and hopefully sell the GMAK, but now my goal was to sell it on the ground and not just for dismount, which I finally succeeded in doing.

I wanted to sell the Para kit for the M249 and to bring over the quick-change barrel .50. Another pet project was the adaptation of the M3P .50 caliber to the Boeing Avenger. The origin of this system was the FN HMP (heavy machine gun) gun pod. FN was real unhappy with my proposed plan because they wanted me to sell them a complete gun pod, but it just didn’t make sense on a ground vehicle, particularly with the weight constraints (the Avenger had to be air transportable.) What I had in mind was to sell the guts of the pod – gun, charger, mount, feed system, etc., without the rest of the HMP system, the bulk of which was the big “cigar” that enclosed everything. Some of the FN Herstal people were really against breaking up the gun pods to sell components, so I arranged for a meeting with both the FN Herstal and FNMI people, including Julien Labeye.

At first my presentation was a comprehensive, multi-page report to show which parts of the gun pod would be used and which not, with technical discussions etc. Then I remembered somebody told me that most company presidents won’t look at any more than one page of anything. I decided that a 1-pager would be my whole presentation. For each of the dozen or so attendees, I made black and white photocopies of the page in the HMP brochure that had nice isometric sketches of each of the HMP components. There was no such thing as a color copier back then, so I took the black and whites home to my young daughters, aged 7 and 9. I offered to pay them to color in red the parts Boeing won’t need, green for the parts they would use as is, and yellow for the one part that needed a slight modification. The girls, both very artistic, did a beautiful job with colored pencils and everybody at the meeting was impressed not only with the good sales prospects of a new gun system for the Avenger, but for some good ingenuity in using “available resources” to get the point across.

SAR: George, you just rolled through a whole lot of stuff there. Let’s stroll back down the line a bit. You were there when FNMI bid the M16?

Kontis: I went to Rock Island Arsenal and sat down with a gentleman, I believe his name was John Irons. He was the project manager of the M16. And I said, “John, we’re from FN. We’ve got a great factory in Columbia, South Carolina, and when that M16 comes up for competitive bid, we want to be there and we want to bid on it.” This was the M16A2, right out of the JSSAP program. I had worked with Jim Ackley before and I had met (Lt. Col.) Dave Lutz and some other folks, but basically this was more oriented towards “We’re a firearms factory and we’re eligible to bid on this, and by God, we want to bid on it.” M16A2 was now in the production arena and we were to get a TDP. FNMI’s ex-Colt guys were ecstatic because, “Hey, we know these parts. We can bid.” At FNMI, we put together a really good package and we bid it and we won. There were only two bidders, Colt and FNMI, as I recall. There was a $14 per rifle difference in the bids, or something close to that. It was quite a challenge for FN to build those parts; I remember that. I don’t think it was a moneymaker for a number of years for them.

1 August, 2007, Dayton, NV

David Edward “Dangerous Dave” Cumberland was born 18 November, 1932 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He married his wife Elsie in 1955. Dave was Interarmco’s man in Thailand in the 1950s and one of the early machine gun and cannon dealers in the US. His company, The Old Western Scrounger, was renowned for helping shooters around the world get their odd ammunition needs filled. This author has known Dave for thirty years, and we caught up with Dave at his home in Nevada, where he was pleased to sit down and recap many of his experiences for SAR’s readers. A lot of Dave’s experiences interact with a number of our other interviews, and help “fill in the blanks.” In Part I of The Interview, (SAR Volume 12 Number 9) Dave takes us on his journey through Southeast Asia with the military and as Sam Cumming’s man on the ground in Thailand, atomic bomb tests, the French evacuation of North Vietnam, evacuation of the Nationalist Chinese troops, the AR-10 program in Thailand, and his coming home and starting his gun business. In Part II, we take up where Dave is running the Old West Gun Room, and then meets with Dolf Goldsmith and starts in heavier on machine guns. But first we touch upon a few historical stories…. – Dan

SAR: Korea – you ran into more interesting firearms than we have discussed, didn’t you?

Dave: Hell yeah. When I was in Korea for a year, I’d located an ordnance area up there where they kept stuff that they captured or was turned in one way or another. That was the Army’s First Cavalry Division area. There was everything you could think of and more piled up. One thing that really caught my eye was over in the corner of the room, there was an original Gatling gun that had been converted to 7.62x54R, the Russian caliber. It had a tag on it that said, “Aberdeen Proving Ground.” I’ve always wondered where that ended up. I’m pretty sure that was one of the Russian contract Gatlings, but I didn’t know enough about them at that time. That was probably the neatest gun I saw over there, plus there were some really interesting Winchester Model 1895 rifles in caliber 7.62x54R that appeared to be leftovers from World War I.

SAR: Did everything run smoothly in the Old West Gun Room?

Dave: Of course not. We had a great time, lots of interesting stuff, but like the Chinese say, we were “Living in interesting times.” I had a scary run-in with the predecessor to the ATF once. That was in 1965, when I was running the gun store at the Old West Gun Room. A guy came in and sold me a Dewat (De-activated War Trophy) Reising submachine gun. Back then, they didn’t need to be registered, they were just wall-hangers. This Reising Model 50 looked like it had crossed the Atlantic on a rope underneath the Queen Mary. It was just all rusted to hell and beat up. It didn’t work and it was missing parts. All I had to do was call in to the ATTU and they would have issued the registration paper for me and I would not have gotten in trouble with the law. But, I was broke at that time and I needed money, so I took the non-functioning Reising and sold it to a guy for $50. About two months later, I was in the store one night. That guy came in and said, “I’ve got that Reising you sold me here.” I said, “Oh, you have. Why are you bringing it in to me?” He said, “I want you to take a look at it.” So, he opens up a paper sack and the damn thing looked brand new and had a Thompson magazine converted to work in it. I thought to myself, there’s only one guy I know in this area that’s good enough to do that. Bud Matthews was his name, and he made a left-hand action at one time for bolt-action rifles. That guy was a helluva machinist and he was crazy on machine guns. When he pulled that thing out of the bag, I looked at it and I said, “Somebody’s been working on this, this isn’t what I sold you.” Right then, the doors open up and the cops came in from three different ways. They put me in binders, threw me in the back of the car, and dragged me to the Oakland jail to check in for the night. I was bailed out the next day. They were trying to say that I sold this gun as a functional weapon, because at that time, a machine gun had to work; otherwise they couldn’t get a conviction. I said, “Well, this thing has been modified considerably and I didn’t do that.” I ended up having to hire an attorney, which I couldn’t afford. We went to court in San Francisco; the main courthouse. I didn’t know this at the time, but there was a local FBI agent who knew me. I didn’t know that he’d gone to the ATTU and also to the FBI to speak on my behalf that I was a good guy and that I was helping him from time to time, which I was, acting as an expert witness on several cases. He didn’t believe the ATTU testimony picturing me as a true SOB, who would probably sell dynamite to children and that I was as crooked as a snake going over a washboard. The ATTU agent kept on about what a bastard I was and a danger to society. The judge finally said, “I want you all to come into my quarters.” They’re all standing there and the judge said, “Mr. Cumberland, I realize that you know that you’ve broken the law but that, under the circumstances, you didn’t have any idea that this would turn out this way or you would never have sold it.” I said, “That’s right, Your Honor.” He said, “Well, I’ve got to make a ruling now. You are on two years probation. You have nothing to do with machine guns during that time period.” It was just after that when I got together with Dolf. That’s the only problem I ever had with the government.

SAR: At the time, deactivated guns didn’t require registration, and someone had taken it and made it into an active, live gun, to set you up? Scary. How was the business in the Mid-1960s?

Dave: The Old West Gun Room was in the second building by that time. I moved the business three times. The last time I moved it I bought the property, which we still own. It had to be like 1967 or ’68 or so. It was during the time of the civil riots and there was rioting in Richmond. In fact, we had a situation occur where the police called me up one night. They said, “We just got it from one of our informants they’re going to hit your store about midnight. Take all your stuff, put it in the walk-in vault and lock the door.” I said, “They’re going to burn me out or something. I could lose everything I’ve got.” He said, “Well, that’s the way it is. You don’t want to get shot.” I had a different opinion; I didn’t want to lose my livelihood and was in a position to defend it. I called three or four buddies of mine. We had just gotten in a bunch of Model 97 riot guns. I had about a dozen of those and six or eight G3s that had just come into the country secondhand. Four guys came over. We each took a shotgun and a G3 – these were the semi-auto only Golden State Arms guns, no full autos. I put one guy on the roof of the lumber yard across the street so he could cover the front door. The back door was bolted shut with steel bars so they couldn’t get out once they got into the ambush. I said, “If anybody looks like they’re going to set anything on fire, just shoot them.” When we were ready, I called the Richmond Police Department and explained the whole thing and the sergeant says, “Good Lord, don’t do that. We have enough trouble now.” So I said, “Then, get your ass down here and protect my gun store.” [laughter]

SAR: I take it there was no problem at all with your store? Nobody tried to burn it down?

Dave: No, I guess the bad guys got wind of our planned response and thought better of visiting us. We also had a bit of other local “insurance” against troublemakers. The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club were all good customers of mine. Their President, Sonny Barger, was well-known to me. In fact, I saw him in Reno not too long ago, and he was talking to some newscaster type. I walked over to him and I said, “Sonny, do you remember me?” He looked close and said, “Course I remember you and the Gun Room.” He had a body guard by the name of Big Red who collected Model 70 Super Grades. I got him a 7mm Mauser, which in that model is a rare rifle. Sonny came in one day and he said, “You know, we spend a lot of money with you.” I said, “Sonny, I do appreciate that.” He said, “I think that you ought to give us a discount.” I said, “Sonny, I don’t give my own brother a discount. I just simply won’t do it.” He reflected for a moment then said, “You know, we can make you do it.” I stated plain as fact, “No, you can’t.” He thought about it for a moment then smiled, chuckled and said, “Well, I know you’ve been fair with us, ah, just forget it.” They also bought all the Nazi memorabilia I could get my hands on, and were really big into collecting the daggers and the accessories. Sonny Barger didn’t buy any guns. I don’t know if he had a record at that time. Mostly his interest seemed to be in shotguns, doubles, pumps, .45 automatics and Lugers. In one particular interest, there was one pattern that had Swiss script that came down and had the little knob on it like the regular Luger has. It also had the squeeze safety on it, and instead of a skinny barrel, it had a 6-inch standard-rate barrel like on a Navy model. They made 100 of those and they’re rare as hell. I found one the other day at my old gun store down in El Cerrito. He wanted $1,100 for it. That’s a good buy.

SAR: Still watching for the deals, Dave? You did some work with Hollywood, right?

Dave: Of course I’m always looking for deals, it’s in the blood. On the Hollywood sales and rentals, we did a pile of work for movies. The first call we ever got was from Ellis Mercantile – they later became Ellis Props & Graphics. I sold them a bunch of ammunition first, and Bert sold them a couple of guns. Pretty sure Bert was still with me at that point in time, you know Bert broke off on his own. He decided he wanted to fool around with machine guns a lot more than I did, and he and Dolf decided to go that route. That worked out better for them. We all did really well. We were out on the East Coast looking for things, and on the West Coast we were the people to see if you wanted to buy anything up to an artillery piece. We had all kinds of stuff. We had a 4-1/2 inch Howitzer, just about anything you could imagine. I did get one of Val Forgette’s 1895 brass Maxims from the Argentina deal. Got it the same time as when I bought the gun store. Dolf was working with us later and he loved those Maxims. As Dolf tells it, one day he just waltzed in the shop and saw a couple of us messing around with the ANM2s and Brownings. Bert wasn’t having much luck with them, and Dolf jumped in and got them together. He was a Browning armorer among other things. Dolf started doing a lot of business with us and working at the Gun Store. Since I wasn’t that into the machine guns, that was fine with me. As far as that brass Maxim went, I paid $150 to Val for it. He lost a pile of the other ones to the government confiscating his and he never got ’em back. Rumor is that the government handed them out to museums, and some got dumped in the Atlantic. Those brass Maxims were pretty much all Dewats, and you can tell today if one was dewatted by Val. Take off the fuzee spring cover on the left side of the receiver. Slide a hacksaw blade between the barrel extension rails and the left sideplate, and see if it is blocked. What they did was drill a hole through the left side of the receiver under the fuzee cover and welded a rod on the inside rail to the plate so that you couldn’t move it. If you took that hacksaw and went down the inside, you could hacksaw that weld out and the Maxims worked just fine. If you take the fuzee cover off of any of the 1895 Argentines, you’ll see a spot of different colored metal there where those were repaired but the hole was hidden under the fuzee cover.

SAR: Did you keep it?

Dave: Everybody wanted it. George Repaire, the gent I bought the Old West Gun Room from, he wanted that thing in the worst way. I didn’t want to sell it to him and he finally said, “Look, Dave, I’ll send the $150 right now and you can buy another one.” I didn’t know that all the rest at Val’s had been confiscated. George knew it, because he had tried to buy one and they wouldn’t sell him one as they didn’t have one to sell. He didn’t tell me that. In the end, I sold him my brass Maxim for what I paid for it and I never got around to getting another one. When I did get around to trying to order, it was too late. There were lots of characters around the machine gun business, though. In Southern California, it was mostly Ed Faust and ARMEX: they did a lot of business. One day we had a strange guy come into the gun store. This was during our machine gun business time. His wife was with him. He had on white cotton gloves, he wanted to see a couple of guns but he wouldn’t talk to us. He would talk to his wife and she would talk to us. He would just stand over there against the wall and he’d wipe his hands. He was Bill Thoresen. His wife eventually shot him, and wrote a book about their crazy travels and machine gun deals.

SAR: Louise Thoresen’s book “It Gave Everybody Something to Do.” Dolf makes sure we all read that book. There’s a lot of speculation about who was which character that she used pseudonyms for. “Orval Lee” was supposedly J. Curtis Earl. Curtis never indicated to me, either way on that. I do know Curtis traveled across country with them buying machine guns though.

Dave: Yeah, that’s the book! Thoresen was really odd, a very strange person. He spent quite a bit of money but she always made the deals. He wouldn’t physically touch anything, he wouldn’t talk with us, and he made her do it all. Thoresen was apparently hoarding up some legal but mostly unregistered machine guns, anti-tank guns, and tons of ammunition. There was supposedly 72 tons of it when the government got them. We got into a deal with the ATF on that. The government had confiscated everything he had. We went up to his mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco. It was a very nice place. Then we had to go up to Marin County at the old Navy/Coast Guard base, I guess it is. They had bunkers up there and the government had moved all the ammunition and guns up to store and sort. We went in there and I never saw so much ammunition in my life. We bought 280,000 rounds of 8 mm Mauser and about 100,000 rounds of it was APIT. Very neat and fun to shoot. He had a couple of machine guns in there that were so rare that I’d only seen pictures of them. I never have seen one in my life and I can’t remember what they were today. One was a Swiss machine gun. None of that stuff was for sale, of course, because it was all illegal or had become illegal. The ammunition got sold. I knew Curtis Earl, and we outbid him on the ammunition. My group got 1,600 rounds of 25 mm Puteaux. Thoresen had bought out everything Interarmco had left in Puteaux ammo, that’s the reason it disappeared in a hurry and was so dried up. Bert, Tom, George H. and I split the Puteaux ammo. I sold mine to George for around $3 a round. If I’d known he wasn’t going to shoot it I wouldn’t have sold it to him. From what he says, he has yet to fire a round of it. He’s in his 80s and when he decides that should hit the market, it’ll be the biggest pile of desirable ammunition that’s been around for 50 years. Among other things, he’s got one of those Swiss 24mm anti-tank guns that has a toggle action on the side. They’re pretty rare. I remember he had two Solothurn S18-1000s, one of them on the wheeled carriage. A bunch of Lahtis, and a 3 inch Navy deck gun which is actually that cute little thing they used in the movie The Sand Pebbles. It had a little short barrel on it, maybe 5 or 6 feet long. Some of these neat collections go on, and on.

SAR: Speaking of interesting collections, you were working on the Stembridge Gun Rentals collection; you did the inventory there.

Dave: That was 1973. Stembridge wanted to value it, and sell it off. They wanted $600,000 and much as we tried, we couldn’t find that much value there. Dolf valued the machine guns and worked on counting parts, bayonets, etc. too, with Tom Phair and Hal Ross. They were pretty much working for me on that. That was one huge pile of stuff, well you know, you bought all that.

SAR: No, we appraised it then brokered it all off. LMO did the Class 3 and assault rifles, I brought in J.R. & Diana LaRue and they handled the Title I. Collectively, we sold off five major Hollywood inventories. Altogether about 14 000 firearms.

Dave: There weren’t near that many when we did the appraisal. We couldn’t see $600,000 for the pile back in ’73, went for a heck of a lot more than that in the 1990s, I’ll bet. One thing I noticed is when the guns came in from rental use, like a bunch of single-action Colts and some 1892 Winchesters that were all original, they were pretty nasty. “These things are filthy, don’t you clean them?” I asked. They said, “Yeah, we know they are, but they’re just rental guns.” There was every imaginable gun there, some really rare stuff. We had other deals of great interest. The San Francisco art museum, the Golden Gate Museum, used to have a collection of World War I memorabilia and a Renault tank. They had a 150mm German field piece, a truly big gun. There was a 75mm Italian gun that was the first gun ever made to have a split trail on it. Then there was an Italian 150mm Howitzer complete with a limber that was just gorgeous. It weighed 10,600 pounds. These were all in excellent condition because they’d all been indoors in that museum for 50 years: no rust, no rotten wood, just in really nice shape. When they took that display out of there and put it in storage in Southern California, they decided nobody’s interested in this old garbage anymore and they were going to sell it. They went to a local auction outfit, the Raben Brothers. That guy could sell vacuum cleaners to Eskimos with dirt floors. He really could, he was talented, and a great auction place. We went down there, Bert and I and Tom. We got a paddle and bought all the cannon except the French 75mm. We had agreed not to bid on that because someone wanted it for the museum in Los Angeles. I said, “That’s a fair deal. Let them have it, we won’t bid.” When it got around to that Renault tank, we saw that it had taken a round in the engine compartment on the left rear. Other than that it had World War I paint on it: that camouflage paint. It was restorable. It had the wooden drive wheels up front instead of the steel or metal ones. We bid on it and at $600 the bidding stopped. I was at $600. The auctioneer looks around and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I can’t believe that this extremely rare piece of ordnance from the First World War, so rare that the Smithsonian doesn’t even have one,” (which was probably true), “and you’re going to let this man steal this valuable artifact for a lousy $600.” One guy shouts, “Hell no, $700.” Then $800, $900, and up, and it was gone. [laughter]

SAR: That’s such a sad story, Dave, you didn’t get the tank.

Dave: No, sadly, we didn’t get that, but we sure did get a lot of good cannon. That tank now belongs to Hayes Otoupalik. He’s been around for almost fifty years in this business himself. Guess I was involved in most of the cannon deals around the US. I ran the Old West Gun Room for around 20 years, and I got more and more into cannons. Sold over 50 Lahti 20mm 1939 anti-tank guns. Thousands of other pieces and over 15,000 rounds of Lahti ammo. Had a few Gatling guns as well. About eight years ago I had this Model 1903 Gatling, it was an experimental, in .30-40 Krag. There’s a radio show and people call in and ask questions. One day this guy called in on the program and said, “I got this old Gatling gun. How do I find out more about it?” The radio guy says, “Call Dangerous Dave.” The owner calls me up and I asked what he wanted for it. He said he didn’t know. I said, “Well, you’ve got to have some figure in mind.” He says, “It’s yours for $25,000.” I said, “Sure, I’ll give you 25 grand for it. I’ll send you $10,000 right now and I’ll pay you the rest when I get there. I can’t come out for three days; I’m busy.” He said, “You don’t have to send any money. Your word’s good enough.” I got on a plane, rented a car and trailer and drove up into Massachusetts. We walked in his living room and there it sat; a beautiful 1903 Gatling. I gave him the $25,000 and drove off with it. It was later sold at Butterfield’s Auction and brought $58,000.

SAR: You had that nickname “Dangerous Dave” for a long time, and the company was called The Old Western Scrounger. When did you start that company?

Dave: I would say it was about 1975. The reason was that people would come in and always ask for something unusual, and we didn’t have a source. “Where can I get ammunition for a 43 rotary rolling block, or a Spencer or this or that or the other thing?” Of course, there isn’t any available. There’s nobody left that makes these odd calibers. I got thinking, “Hell, there’s a market here for this stuff.” I started out with making odd caliber ammunition, had a couple of guys custom-making it for my store. I made a deal with RWS for the exclusive right for the entire United States for their set of rifle and pistol cartridges. I was the distributor for the whole country for that. That’s how we really got the Old Western Scrounger started. We’d make custom ammunition for customers that couldn’t get it any other place.

SAR: I can remember buying 8mm Nambu from you and some weird Italian cartridges that I needed way back in the ’70s. Everyone I knew bought from “The Old Western Scrounger.”

Dave: It was a helluva good deal for everyone. People got the cartridges they needed; we made money and made the business grow. One of our specialties at the Old Western Scrounger was something that many SAR readers will be very familiar with, that’s the Rock Crusher Loading press and our reloading for artillery pieces for recreational shooters. I designed it in about 1974. I had taken a .55 caliber (14.3x99mm) 1937 Boys anti-tank rifle, and converted it over to .50 BMG (12.7x99mm). I couldn’t find any good ammo for it, and reloading for .50 was almost unheard of. I made the Rock Crusher for this to start with, and ended up adding calibers and ability as we went along. Eventually, we got it up to 37mm Short for the US 37mm Model 1916 Trench Cannon. No problem at all. It takes 960 grains of FG together with machine gun primer, one fuse and fill her up with black powder. We used original brass on that. Then, there’s the Two-Pounder, 42mm, we can load for. The Rock Crusher could load for 20mm Lahti (20x138mm) and load for any 20mm. We turned conical projectiles out of bar stock. (Dave starts holding up brass from his cartridge displays.) You know what gun Teddy Roosevelt took to Cuba? He took a “Dynamite gun.” The Zalinski Dynamite Gun used a black powder cartridge to fire a captive piston down a tube to compress the air, which was then released and tossed a dynamite charge for a long distance. Here’s the blank case for the Zalinski gun.

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.

Please join Small Arms Review as Contributing Editor Christopher R. Bartocci brings you a rare insideinterview with General William Keys, CEO of Colt Defense, LLC. Many rumors have circulated about how Colt is doing in the industry. SAR gets the opportunity to speak with General Keys about his background, how he came to work for and eventually run Colt, Colt’s corporate status, military production, new product development and much more.

SAR: General Keys, what is your professional background?

Gen. Keys: I had a great Marine Corps career. I commanded everything from a Platoon through a Force. It was a great experience and I loved every minute of it. Given a choice, I’d still be there. I was an Infantry Officer; I served my whole timeas an Infantry Officer. I had three combat tours, two in Vietnam and then I commanded a division in the first Gulf War. My first combat tour was as a rifle company commander with the First Battalion, Ninth Marines and I was a company commander almost my entire first tour in Vietnam 1966 and 1967. For my second tour, I went back in 1972 for about a year as an advisor with the Vietnamese Marine Corps. I was there at the end of the war. Then of course, my third combat tour was as the Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Division during Desert Storm, the First Gulf War.

SAR: What was your first experience with the M16 rifle?

Gen. Keys: That was in Vietnam. The first time was not a great experience. The weapons were just being introduced to the field and we had almost no initial training with them. They may have been fielded too fast but, mostly, we got hardly any indoctrination with the weapon when it was issued. We were told to be at a certain place at a certain time near Dong Ha and the M16s were issued and the M14s were taken back.

The M14 was a solid combat weapon. As I indicated, the M16 had some problems initially, but I think a lot of those could have been solved if we had more training with the rifle early on. I think those initial problems were sorted out in a few months or so and the gun performed well during the rest of the war. It turned out to be a very effective combat weapon that took out a lot of the enemy ground forces. You have to realize that there were a tremendous number of the enemy killed with this weapon. So to say that it didn’t do the job, is not true at all. In short, it turned out to be a very effective combat weapon, and its follow on design, the M4, has battle tested superbly.

SAR: Do you feel that you having been an end-user of military small arms affects the way Colt is run?

Gen. Keys: Absolutely. I feel that it influences my every day here at Colt; not only everything that I learned in the military, but leadership principles, etc., and the fact that I’m making a weapon for Soldiers and Marines in the field and know that they are going to have to use it in combat. So clearly that’s at the top of my priority list all of the time to make this weapon almost flawless, and I will accept nothing less.

SAR: Have you always had an interest in small arms?

Gen. Keys: Yes, I’ve always been kind of a gun guy since I was a kid. I still have my Dad’s guns, rifles and shotguns. I didn’t have a lot to do with handguns early on but as I got into the Marine Corps, I picked up on that experience. Now, I wouldn’t say that I was a “gun nut” but I certainly like guns and feel they serve a necessary purpose.

SAR: How did you become the CEO of Colt?

Gen. Keys: When I retired 1994/1995, I was looking for something to do. I wrote the owner of Colt, Donald Zilkha, at the time and told him that I would like to work for him and run his company because I heard they needed a CEO up here.

He said he didn’t need a CEO but he would put me on the Board. So I went on the Board of Colt in 1996 and remained a member until early 1999 when the company was having problems. They had numerous issues with several CEOs before me and so the Board asked me if I would come up here and take the job of President and CEO. I accepted on the condition I was really allowed to run the show, which they did and I have been here since 1999.

SAR: What is Colt’s current status in the industry? Rumors have been floating around about Colt not doing well and in danger of going under.

Gen. Keys: Well, that’s completely false. In 1999, we had some financial issues. We were very close to facing a serious dilemma but today Colt has never been in a more viable position. Our performance since we separated into two companies, Colt Defense and Colt Commercial, has been superb. The last three years our profit on the defense side is vastly improved and we are coming around on the commercial side as well. Today we are – well last year Colt and I made over 100,000 rifles, primarily M4s for the US Military. So Colt’s never been in a better position all round in probably the last 25 years.

SAR: How would you describe the focus of Colt Defense? Would you consider it mainly military?

Gen. Keys: Yes, it’s mainly military, clearly. The Army is our number one customer and by the Army I mean all services. So without question the U.S. Army as the contracting agency is our number one customer. We service them on a priority basis but we clearly want to make commercial guns, law enforcement and even some Match Target rifles as well. If we don’t make them, it’s because our priority goes to the US military. And we are obligated, especially in a time of war, to make nothing but U. S. Government guns if we have those orders.

However, as I said, we don’t want to get out of the commercial business. We would like to make more guns. One of the reasons that we bought Colt Canada was to allow us to expand production. They are making some law enforcement guns for us now, hopefully more in the future. So we clearly want to make all models of guns but without question, the U. S. Government definitely takes priority. We do service the law enforcement market as our second highest priority. And then finally we will make some civilian rifles.

SAR: Another rumor floating throughout the industry is that Colt is riding on the M4 and that no new products are coming out. Is that a true statement?

Gen. Keys: No, absolutely not. That is not a true statement. We have several guns that have already been developed and we have numerous guns that have been in R&D for a while. We have several piston guns. We competed very well for the SCAR program and were number two in the selection process. There have been a lot of very good enhancements to the basic M4/M16 over the years and they are without question much better weapons than went to war in early Vietnam. They may look similar but they are not the same guns.

We have two different versions of the piston gun, the LE1020 and the M5, which would be another version of the M4 down the road.

SAR: Accusations have come from military as well as industry professionals that Colt has done no improvements to the M4 since 1995. Is this true?

Gen. Keys: No, again, that is absolutely not true. Throughout the years we have worked closely with the Army and among the improvements include the buffer, heavy barrel, extractor spring assembly, compensator washer, bolt life, buttstock, barrel chamber, side swivel adapter, back up iron sights, burst cam, receiver extension and nut. We have also developed modifications for improved “over the beach” usage and more.

SAR: How difficult is it to make improvements and get them adopted into the Army?

Gen. Keys: The Army does not readily accept improvements to the weapon without a lot of detailed engineering work. For example, there is no reason why you couldn’t use a hammer forged barrel, as well as a drilled barrel. In fact, the Army has recently shown an interest in reviewing the hammer forged barrel and we are working on that now. They were going to allow it in a new XM8 program and it is used on the 240, etc. It’s proven over and over again that one is not really that much better than the other one. So to answer your basic question, it’s not easy to get a change into a government gun but on the other side that is not all that bad because the weapons are put through many series of tests prior to them being adopted as the service weapon.

We have a great group of engineers that look at every proposed modification. Wemake guns for a living here and we are not going to recommend anything that’s clearly not what I perceive as being in the best interests of the troops in the field.

SAR: Another rumor is that the company is being sold. Can you confirm or deny this rumor?

Gen. Keys: I think the company’s been up for sale since the day I got here, 10 years ago. You know, the people that own the company are investment bankers, they buy businesses and sell businesses, but we are very secure now and are not up for sale at this time.

Clearly the company is worth a lot of money now and much more than when they bought it. So maybe – if the right buyer came along, and it would have to be the right buyer. Someone who is going take care of the brand, take care of the quality, take care of the government contracts, then yes, of course, they probably would consider an offer.

For the most part I don’t see a change in ownership of the company changing the company. Basically they would probably run it the same; most of the people would be here. I’m not sure about me as the CEO; they may want to bring somebody else in. But clearly, I don’t see the company changing except to improve if it’s sold.

SAR: Okay. You sort of touched on this question already but we will get it out there. Due to the absence of many Colt rifles in the commercial market, the general consensus is that Colt does not care about civilian sales. Can you clarify Colt’s policy on commercial sales?

Gen. Keys: Again, Colt clearly wants to service the commercial market. I mean we feel that we make a very good product. We would like to make more of them. I know, I read the blogs all the time and they say that Colt doesn’t care about the civilians. That’s just not true at all.

But we are a company and we prioritize our capacity and clearly the priority has to go to the military. And that’s really the only reason we don’t make more commercial rifles. Our next priority is the law enforcement market. The LE6920 (Colt’s Law Enforcement Carbine) is the premiere law enforcement gun in the country. It’s very well thought of and is very competitive with the other companies that make a black rifle. We are always looking for ways to grow in this market and I just put on a very high quality and experienced person in that sales area.

SAR: The company’s motto is “Quality makes it a Colt.” Can you explain what sets Colt apart from the other manufactures of the M16-type rifles?

Gen. Keys: Well, that’s our motto, “Quality makes it a Colt.” To make quality products is everything to me. We really adhere to strict Colt quality measures here both on the military side and the commercial side with the handguns.

Our rifles are made to government specifications and by that I mean there are certain manufacturing processes that go into Colt weapons that I don’t think the other people use. I mean they are more costly and they require tighter tolerances and they just – you come out of it with a much betterrifle. We have to have interchangeability of rifle parts on every lot we build. I don’t think any other manufacturers do that type of production. So the guns are truly quality guns and I’m not trying to knock another’s product here but I think our quality is above the other products in the field of similar nature.

SAR: Are you referring to things such as proof testing bolts and barrels?

Gen. Keys: All that. All that plus the specific manufacturing processes and everything is gauged. The rifles – all of our guns are put through tremendous endurance testing and if one gun in the endurance lot fails then the whole lot fails and the whole lot has to be retested or brought back.

SAR: Does Colt plan on gearing up commercial sales for the rifles in the future or near the future?

Gen. Keys: We want to go into the commercial rifle business a little more. We would like to get our new piston guns out to law enforcement people if they want them, both the LE1020 and the civilian version of what I would call our new M5. We are working hard to make that happen.

SAR: Colt not too long ago acquired Diemaco, or now Colt Canada. Can you tell our readers how this will affect Colt?

Gen. Keys: Colt Canada was our licensee for about 15 years and they were kind of spun off from the parent company and we, number one, wanted to enlarge our footprint in the world. As I said, Colt is now doing well financially. We are growing and we felt this was a good acquisition for the company.

It gave us the ability to go into the Northern European areas, some of the Balkan countries and then with the change in the Soviet bloc, over there. We felt like we could move more of our products into Europe. The company itself is a good company, well run. It’s even more modern of a facility than here and their capacity is about 1,500 rifles or so a month.

SAR: Do you use Colt Canada more as an R&D firm or for manufacturing?

Gen. Keys: We use them for both. One of the reasons we bought them is that they had good R&D capability. And so, we were high on that when we bought them and we use the factory for parts and as I also indicated they make law enforcement guns for us.

SAR: Recently it was on the news that Colt is entering into a license agreement with Turkey to produce M4 carbines. Will this just be to produce for their army or do they intend to sell to other countries?

Gen. Keys: Colt sells weapons to numerous foreign countries: all of course with U.S. State Department approval. We tried to and have had past arrangements with other countries where they make the products, a version of the military weapon. It’s only for that country itself. We could later on expand the license so that they could sell to other places in proximity but at this time only in Turkey – that’s only for Turkey itself. They would have to buy a number of weapons before we actually go over there and set up the factory. Maybe they would buy the parts and put them together over there, etc.

SAR: Where do you see Colt in ten years?

Gen. Keys: I see Colt in ten years as a very viable larger defense company. I mean we are growing every day here. Sales are good. Our production capability, our financial portfolio looks very good for the future. The Army has indicated that clearly they are more than satisfied with the M4 and they are going to look towards putting more of these M4s into the combat unit. The term “pure fleet” has been thrown around: we look very good to the future.

I would see Colt, like I said, as a defense company. They could be a platform company to acquire other smaller defense products, companies, or whatever in the industry type environment that fall under this umbrella. And Colt as kind of the bottom platform company that shores all this up and pulls this together. So I would see Colt in the next ten years could easily be a several hundred million-dollar company.

SAR: Do you have concerns with 2009 coming up with a sole source ending?

Gen. Keys: No, I don’t see it as a major, major concern. Because really and truly that is not something the Army has to do by law. They don’t have to compete the weapon. All they did was give it to Colt for that period of time and so, if they’re satisfied with production, and they appear to be. And we are working with them on price. I don’t really see it is a major issue. We have orders far in the future. I just see it as something that will come and go if we work together.

SAR: The M16/M4-type rifles have been the longest serving family of weapons in U.S. military history. Many attempts have been made to replace it throughout the years and failed. What do you think keeps this weapon system in the hands of our troops?

Gen. Keys: Number one, it’s been highly effective. It’s been a good weapon. It and the AK-47 are the only really combat tested rifles in the past 50 years. I am talking about day-to-day combat. Like I said, after the kinks got worked out of it after Vietnam, the M16A2 and A4 were the basis for our military into the Cold War up until the Gulf War and it served the country well. Then along came the M4, which is even a better weapon because under today’s combat environment, everyone is mounted in a helicopter or some type of a vehicle. You get the same quality and the same range out of the M4 as you do out of the M16 and it’s a lot easier to handle.

And the weapon caliber overall has done exceptionally well and clearly this round will kill the enemy. You can carry more rounds and that’s primarily why it’s been around a long time. There is always going to be the heavy or light argument but when you put them all together, this rifle does the job and it enables you to complete the mission. And it enhances other capabilities as well. You know, you can put all the equipment on this – the rail system, the flashlights, the laser sights, etc. It’s just a perfect combat weapon for today’s environment.

SAR: Does Colt intend to keep revolutionizing this weapon system?

Gen. Keys: Yes, we do. As I indicated, we have several piston models available for both these weapons (LE1020 and M5) but there is really no solid proof piston firing systems are better, just different. We have a lot of changes on the drawing board. I have a great engineering staff here now. Along with Colt Canada, I think I have some of the key engineers in the industry and we are working everyday to enhance the weapon. They keep coming up with new ideas so we could be ready for any competition down the road; but until that comes, we will just improve the weapon. If the Army will take the changes: fine. If they don’t, we will continue to make quality weapons, as they want them. And then we will put these weapons in the civilian market.

SAR: Do you see the M16A2/A4 and the M4 serving this country for the next 20 years?

Gen. Keys: I would say it would be. It’s hard to put a time on it – I don’t know. But it would definitely be ten or so years. I don’t see a need to change. Improve, yes. We always need to improve to make it lighter – make the rounds more capable but the gun itself – the basic gun is a good weapon. Enhance optics, work on weight, etc.

To bring a weapon into the military system, it’s not an overnight process. It would take you 4 to 5 years to do it and do it correctly. All the proper testing, get it accepted by all the services and finally, get it accepted by the troops who use it in the field everyday. I feel it’s going to take 6 to 8 years probably to complete this process.

SAR: Does Colt have a stance on the reliability of the direct gas versus piston systems?

Gen. Keys: Again, both work well, you know, the argument sometimes is that thepiston system doesn’t foul as easily. But there is not really a lot of solid data that proves that. Both these weapons can work well but why change if there is nothing gained. If the individual Solider or Marine takes care of his weapon it’s going to work for him on a consistent basis and we know that the M16 works with the gas system. The piston system is certainly not new. It’s been around for a long time and a lot of weapons had it but there’s just no clear vote on which one is better and I know which one works well, the M4.

SAR: What is the difference between the M4 and the M5?

Gen. Keys: The M4 is just the basic gas system. The M5 would be a piston gun and we are just looking in all aspects at what we just talked about. Whether or not we want to – you know, we would change it to a piston gun; we would offer it down the road, if they want it. But clearly right now they don’t have an idea of whether they want this weapon. They are very satisfied with the M4 as it’s built with the gas operating system.

SAR: My final question is, do you have any message to convey to our readers that we haven’t discussed?

Gen. Keys: I would just say that Colt – Colt’s is America. Colt’s is quality. Colt is going to be around for a long time. I trusted Colt my whole life and I would recommend that you look at Colt weapons as something that you can count on in the future, both for quality and for getting the right weapon out to the people who need it, both on the military and commercial sides.

We’ve got a lot of new developments on the handgun side but we haven’t put them out yet. We will compete for the military pistol when it gets posted. So I think to sum it up, I think Colt has a great future. It’s a great company with great people who work here and I think our record speaks for itself.

SAR: Thank you very much.

By Chuck Madurski

Collector Grade Publications has been publishing high quality, high-value books on the world’s most important small arms for over 25 years. Beginning with their initial title North American FALs, published in 1979, they have provided advanced collectors, researchers, military historians and other arms enthusiasts with an ever-increasing catalog of in-depth historical studies. From the very beginning, R. Blake Stevens, the man behind Collector Grade Publications, has ensured that his books were printed using the best materials with sewn binding, full-color laminated dust jackets, and an attention to detail that has set the standard for the genre. Profusely illustrated with excellent and often rare photographs, Collector Grade books never fail to impress. However, it is the subject matter that truly sets Collector Grade Publications apart.

Today, Collector Grade books are the best-known sources of detailed, accurate information on various military small arms, and the good news is that a large percentage of them are about machine guns. From the esoteric WWII German FG42 Death From Above; now sadly out of print, to the politically controversial but now near-ubiquitous M16 (in two classic studies The Black Rifle and Black Rifle II), over half of the thirty-three Collector Grade titles currently in print are about machine guns or other automatic arms. When one considers the consistent quality of the books, the wealth of information and the subjects covered, it is obvious that the Class 3 community owes quite a debt to R. Blake Stevens and Collector Grade Publications.

With all of this in mind, and recognizing the important niche Blake has created for Collector Grade in the gun world, especially regarding machine guns, SAR paid a visit to his office in the charming country east of Toronto, Ontario to talk about gun books and the publishing business.

SAR: How did you get started writing and publishing gun books?

Blake: Like a lot of writers in the gun business, I started out as an avid gun collector. In fact, at one time I had my own small mail-order gun parts business called Collector Grade Parts & Accessories, which is where the name of the publishing company came from. My ads always included the phrase “Description Guaranteed,” and I’m proud to say that I never had anything come back.

The gun parts business wasn’t my “day job” though – I had a regular career going. But after a number of years of beavering away in the corporate environment, I found I had had enough. Unless you are working for yourself, there is always someone above you to make sure you know who is really in charge. I got to the point where I didn’t want to do that anymore. This was much tougher than I had thought, however. I had to learn a new way to think: instead of looking outside for my paycheck, I had to look inside and ask myself, “What do I know enough about so that people will pay me to do it?” No one teaches Entrepreneurship 101, at least not in the schools I went to. When I was younger I knew I wanted a job where I couldn’t wait for Monday morning to get back to work, and lo and behold, I found it. Due to my interest in the C1, the Canadian service rifle of those days, I already had a lot of research at hand, so I thought I’d write a book about the “North American FAL”!

SAR: That explains how you became an author, but what about creating the publishing company at virtually the same time?

Blake: I wrote that first manuscript by hand. Computers weren’t nearly as common or affordable then, and I found it easier to just write. It was a learning curve in a number of respects. So I’m going to write a book, well that’s great; lots to learn. Then I get it written and think “Oh thank God, the end!”, you know? It’s finally over. But no, that’s just the first step. Next thing was I had to get it published and printed, and that’s a big job. Not to mention distribution, otherwise you end up with a garage full of books forever. I tried to find a publisher who would take my project on and pay me a royalty, but I soon found that all the “general-interest” publishers viewed a large, in-depth gun book as obscure and off-the-wall, and nobody really wanted to touch it. The only other approach was for me to do it myself, which is quite an undertaking. Had I understood just how large it really was, I might have not attempted it. However, it was publish or perish at that point, and I didn’t want to waste all the work I had done, so I did it.

SAR: What did you do before the book writing and publishing business?

Blake: Well, I played trumpet in a dance band in high school, and considered music as a path. However, I got a job in a trust company in the financial sector in downtown Toronto and worked there for some years, advancing into systems analysis and computer programming. Then I went to General Motors for a short time, working as a programmer on early IBM mainframe computers. Then out of the blue I got a call from an IBM salesman who had made a sale to another trust company whose first concern was, “We don’t have anybody who knows how to program a computer.” He put them in touch with me as someone who could head it all up. So, not for the first time or the last, I took a leap. It brought me back to my home town of Toronto and it was a much better arrangement financially, but after a few more years, when the system was up and running well, that’s when I decided to go out on my own.

SAR: Why did you start with the North American FAL?

Blake: I guess it was mainly because the research material was comparatively close at hand, but it sure stood me in good stead when I had to fly to England and Belgium to dig up the information to do the second and third FAL books.

SAR: Did you plan from the start for your books to be the large format, high-quality reference tools they are?

Blake: Back when I started there were very few gun books which focused on a specific gun or system. The type of guns I was interested in were expensive even then, and I wanted to create the kind of books that would do them justice, in a quality format that would complement the guns in my own collection.

A large specialist book dealer told me that he has lots of gun show customers who want a book dealing with some gun or another they like to collect. The dealer will point out the several choices usually available, from a copy of an old military manual for a few dollars up through a series of books designed to sell at various price points, and then conclude by explaining that if they want the best, here is the Collector Grade book that will provide complete and authoritative coverage of the subject. Often the customer will buy one of the cheaper books, and come back a few gun shows later to tell the dealer he was right – they need the Collector Grade book.

Some of the better books out there have a lot of good information in them, but the text seems to jump around and can be hard to follow. I lay mine out chronologically, so the reader can see what happened, and why, throughout the entire history of the firearm. And right from the start with the original paperback edition of North American FALs, which by the way is a bit of a collectors item itself these days, all our books have had sewn-in pages. I wanted these books to be read and studied, and to last without falling apart.

SAR: Why don’t you include an index in your books?

Blake: Frankly, the reason why my books are not indexed is simply that I find myself genetically unequipped to produce such a thing. Every time I try (and I have), I get the same frustrated feeling: “Browning, John: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…”. With my original premise in mind, that “Collector Grade” books are designed with the needs of an advanced collector in mind (myself, originally), I have consciously tailored the layout and content to be not something just to pick off the shelf for a quick check of a model number or caliber, ala Small Arms of the World, but as an enduring reference which will bear repeated readings, so that the greater the reader’s knowledge and familiarity with the text, the greater the dividends it will pay him. Added to this is my deliberate editorial arrangement of the material in a logical, chronological fashion, and the expanded Table of Contents, including up to five levels of subheadings, so that anyone even remotely familiar with the subject can reference any particular portion of the text quickly and easily.

SAR: Have you considered going offshore for printing, to cut costs and lower prices?

Blake: I could go offshore, and God knows they are doing excellent work these days in Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and places like that. But if you send your money overseas it never comes back. When I spend my money in Canada or the USA, it stays here, you know? Every few books I get a comparative quote from some printer I haven’t dealt with before but in the end, well, the longer I stay with the company I’m with, the better the relationship we have. They have come to know my needs and will do some little extra “custom” things for me. I am very happy having my books printed by the Book Division of Friesen Printers in Altona, Manitoba. Friesen’s specialize in high-quality image reproduction and are generally recognized as the finest coffee-table book producers in Canada. The extra touch of quality they bring to everything they do is much appreciated, certainly by me. They are also among the very few printers in North America who are equipped to print and bind right in their own facility. That does away completely with the problems one can (and often does) encounter when dealing with separate printers and binders, who both try to point the blame for wrinkled pages or worse at one another, to the ultimate dissatisfaction of me and my customers.

Also, today’s hi-res scanners, ultra-fast computers and photo imaging programs have allowed me to greatly improve the appearance of my books without increasing outside costs. The manuscripts for some of my early books were typeset in galleys on equipment which had no memory, and consequently every alteration required a laborious paste-up of a few new lines of galley type. Now with word processing programs and layout software, setup doesn’t take nearly as much time and the end result is a much better product.

SAR: Why are some of your books done in the landscape format as opposed to the usual portrait format?

Blake: I was following the content of the book. I chose the landscape (horizontal) format for books on large, long guns like the Lewis, the Bren, and even the Thompson. In a “vertical” layout the biggest image I can place on a page is eight inches wide, as the paper itself measures only eight and a half inches wide. In the horizontal or landscape format, I can make the same image nine and a half inches wide, which is 20% bigger. I got the idea from a publisher who specialized in commemorative books about famous warships – destroyers and so on – where the landscape format showed off the long ships in the water to their best advantage. I thought that was a really good idea, so I used it for some of my books where the format made sense. However some customers complained that landscape books don’t fit on their shelf properly and, due to these complaints, I discontinued the use of this format. After all, this is a business, and the clients should certainly have a say in what they are willing to pay good money for.

Conversely, I have had nothing but praise and approval for our continued use of upgraded matte coated paper and library-quality hardcover binding. This “reader acceptance” factor applies especially to the sewn-in pages I mentioned earlier. I feel that this is really an essential element for a reference work to which repeated returns are invited. Nothing is more annoying than to pick up an interesting book and find yourself holding a folio of loose pages!

SAR: What books do you have coming up?

Blake: We recently published Volume I of The Browning Machine Gun series by ex-US Army armorer Dolf L. Goldsmith, wherein Dolf covers all the rifle-caliber Brownings in US service. Volume II, subtitled Rifle Caliber Brownings Abroad, will be our next title. Our latest published book is called Desperate Measures – The Last-Ditch Weapons of the Nazi Volkssturm, a really fascinating look into the last desperate days of WWII in Hitler’s Germany. There is also a big Luger book in the cards. I don’t want to give too much away, but as you know there are already a lot of Luger books out there. So why is Collector Grade doing a Luger book? Wait and see…

Some people have asked me if I will be doing more Mauser books, for example, assuming that our Swedish Mauser title was a natural “follow-on” to Backbone of the Wehrmacht. The answer is that there is no master plan. I’ll get a call out of the blue from someone who will say something like, “Hi, my name is so-and-so and I’ve been collecting such-and-such for the last xx years. I like the way you do your gun books, but I can’t find anybody interested in doing mine with that degree of quality. Would you be interested?” I’ve had to turn down a few projects, such as a book on the Gyrojet, which would doubtless be very interesting, but I have to remember what happened to our SPIW book. This was one of the most fascinating projects I ever did, but sales were very slow. They’re all gone now, but basically the only guys who bought that title were cartridge collectors. The flechette-firing guns themselves were all experimental, and there just aren’t any in private hands, you know?

SAR: I am surprised at how small the Collector Grade operation really is. Do you have any assistants?

Blake: My wife, Susan, is our financial person, and also my proofreader.

SAR: How did she become your proofreader?

Blake: Because she’s really good at it. She hasn’t got a clue what many of the technical terms mean, but she knows if the words are spelled correctly or not, and she also knows her grammar. She was educated in private schools in Scotland and Switzerland, and she’s very quick and sharp. I can read the text over and over and miss some of the typos she finds right away, but of course I’m reading it for sense, which is different. Don’t forget, we do books in British English (calibre; armour; defence) as well as American English.

SAR: Which is your favorite Collector Grade book?

Blake: The Black Rifle has probably been reprinted the most times, though US Rifle M14 and The Browning High Power Automatic Pistol are also very popular titles, which we’ve reprinted several times over the years. But I think perhaps the best example of our work is Hans-Dieter Handrich’s Sturmgewehr!, the complete story of the WWII German MP43/MP44, which we published in 2004. This was written by a prizewinning military historian working directly from German archival material, and I consider this to be the most important book we have ever done.

SAR: Do you find it difficult to edit or change the painstaking work of others? I mean with how strong personalities can be in this business.

Blake: It can be a problem at times, but since it’s my money on the line and our customers, who deserve the best for their money, it’s my job to keep things on the straight and narrow. Personalities can come into it. Rarely does the author’s manuscript come into my hands ready to go. I’ll just get a big box full of all sorts of great information, and start sorting through it. The first thing I do is to prepare a chronology. I go through a whole text putting everything in order based on the date on which each event occurred. This shows up a lot of discrepancies right away. For example I’ll see an important point which the author has placed in say, chapter three, followed by something that really belongs in chapter two.

SAR: How did the change from writer/publisher to editor/publisher happen?

Blake: I had completed most of the FAL Series when a very good friend of mine who’s unfortunately no longer with us, Tom Dugelby, said to me, “Gee Blake, you’re doing a great job here, how about doing a book for me on the EM-2?” That was the first book I did for anyone else, and it worked out rather well. He was really pleased with it.

SAR: You currently have 33 titles in print, several of which are now revised editions. How many others are now out of print?

Blake: The EM-2, The SPIW, Modern Military Bullpup Rifles and Death From Above, the book about the FG42. That’s about it, at least on automatic weapons.

SAR: Who was your greatest influence, or was there possibly a mentor of sorts?

Blake: That’s easy. Ed Ezell – the late Ph.D. military historian, Dr Edward C. Ezell. Ed was just a super guy. He was a real mentor to me. He was the most, not driven, but just on-the-go-all-the-time guy I think I’ve ever known. I got tired just watching him. We met at one or other of those great old Houston gun shows, when he was the historian at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. At the time I was doing the M14 book, and he became one of the major contributors to that project. Then he moved back East and was appointed Curator of Military History at the Smithsonian in Washington, and we collaborated on the SPIW and the M16 projects. Ed just said to me one day, “I’ve got all this material on the M16 and I don’t really have time, and you’ve already done the M14 book, so…”. And he gave me this mass of absolutely incredible archival documents and photographs on the M16 controversy.

So Ed was certainly the greatest influence and help that I had. Everybody has to have somebody, you know – this doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Thinking about this, I feel somewhat obligated too. If there is anything that I could do to help anybody coming along in this business, I’d be more than happy to do it. It’s a tough row to hoe alone.

SAR: How much longer do you plan to continue?

Blake: I’m 67 now and one of these days I’ll have had enough. But for now, certainly in these last few years, I have had more work in front of me than I’ve ever had before. The “specter” of completing one job and having nothing else to do is over, long gone. If I decide to stop it will be a decision, not a necessity.

SAR: After you retire, will Collector Grade carry on as a name? If so, do you think (or demand) that this future Collector Grade publisher maintain your high standards?

Blake: The most likely (so far) successor with whom I have talked feels, as I do, that it would make all the sense in the world to carry on with the Collector Grade name. This is still a year or two down the road, God willing and the creek don’t rise – but I think it’s just good economics to keep the same format and name. Content will be a different story. I will probably be available to act as a consultant for the first one or two projects, but after that, of course, I can make no guarantees. However, I’m sure the purchaser, whoever he might be, will recognize and appreciate that the niche we have created, or at least inhabited, is built solidly on quality presentation and reliable, in-depth content.

SAR: What was the most difficult project you ever tackled?

Blake: Every project is a challenge, both in the “learning curve” which is necessary right off the bat in order to be able to critique someone else’s manuscript intelligently, and the sheer amount of work involved in producing and editing that much text, scanning and enhancing all the images, and then putting it all together. But since I mentioned at the beginning of the interview that I wanted to make this article an inspiration for younger people who might consider such a writing and/or publishing career as their life’s work, I have to say frankly that for me, the greatest challenge lay in the early days, when I had to confront and overcome some serious doubts and hesitations from within myself.

I well remember contemplating the first copy of the little pamphlet I showed you, which I did for another publisher back in 1974, on the Canadian Inglis “Hi-Power” pistol. It was my first published book and an accomplishment, to be sure; but I immediately found myself playing my own devil’s advocate with the thought that it was as nothing compared to a comprehensive book on ALL the Browning High Power pistols. But that was such a daunting thought! How would I be able to travel to Belgium and convince the busy engineers and department heads at Fabrique Nationale to co-operate? The whole idea seemed so impossibly beyond my reach! But, a few years later, that’s just what I did, numerous times, and, if I do say so, the results were even better than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.

And don’t even get me started on the “window of opportunity” – suffice it to say that those early books, especially The Metric FAL, simply could not be done today, as all the people who so kindly did assist me have died or retired. Most of the early documentation has long since been thrown away, and no one is left who remembers the events of those days.

SAR: Thanks Blake!

Blake: You’re welcome.

By Matt Smith

SAR: How did you get interested in manufacturing?

JONATHAN: It all started when I was five years old and my grandmother bought me a Tonka truck, which I played with. Later, the mechanical stuff started when I would buy junker motorcycles, taking them apart and putting them back together. I started with a Comet motor scooter that had a Briggs and Stratton motor in it. My dad and I made it run and kept it running. One day the frame broke, and I dropped by a machine shop to get it fixed. The machinist made me a gusset on a Bridgeport and heli-arced it onto the frame. I thought this was the coolest thing, and told myself that one day I would own one of those machines. I finally bought a Sears Atlas lathe for $200 that I used to make my first silencers on, and I still have it. Later, we bought a bigger lathe for $600, and were using a drill vice in the drill press to drill the holes. We finally got a manual Bridgeport after a nine month wait and paying $2000. The last machine we bought was for $400,000, and we bought two of those!

SAR: How did your interest in firearms develop?

JONATHAN: It began when I started going to the local gun shop in Cocoa, where I would buy a gun, put some money down, and pick it up when I paid the balance of the money. I got an AR-15 way back when I was in college, then I got an Atchisson MK I .22 conversion kit. I started playing around with silencers, and found them to be pretty nice, so I decided to build some of my own to see if they would sell. I put a one or two inch ad in Shotgun News, and I was the first person to ever do that, to commercially sell silencers. The phone started ringing. At the time, I was building houses with my brother. He was a contractor and had the big crew cab Ford pick-up trucks with the old style mobile phone that hung down from the ceiling. It was as big as a damn shoebox. My brother complained because I had put the mobile phone number in the ad. It got to the point that I was spending lots of time on the radio phone at the construction site and it started to get in the way of the contractors getting a hold of me to build houses. When the housing boom died during the Carter Administration, it allowed me to turn all my attention to building silencers. Instead of doing this in the evenings and on the weekends, as I had been, I went full time in the garage at home.

SAR: What were the first models of silencers that you made?

JONATHAN: They were the M16, 10/22, and the MK II pistol. These designs, although considered old technology by some, still hold up well next to the newer silencers on the market. As I tell people, it’s like a car. Give me an old ’66 Mustang, and I’ll still be driving down the road when you’re in getting your computer box on yours fixed. I can get any parts I need at the local auto parts store for pennies, compared to having to buy a $400 carburetor that you can’t take apart any more.

SAR: Is that what you drive, a Mustang?

JONATHAN: No, classic Mustangs are now too expensive because people realize the value of old technology.

SAR: How long did you operate out of your garage?

JONATHAN: I did that less than a couple of years, and bought a building in Titusville, in 1979. We moved to our current location in Cape Canaveral in 1991, after outgrowing the Titusville shop. The new machines that I needed wouldn’t fit in the old shop. We had to cut a hole in the ceiling for the one we had and have a crane set it in through the ceiling. We had to build a stack hood on the roof because of the height of the machine. The old shop had been 3000 square feet, and the new one is 15,000 square feet. We are now at the point where we’ve about outgrown this place.

SAR: Before the machinegun ban in 1986, what were some of your machinegun conversions?

JONATHAN: Mostly AR-15’s to select fire, AK’s. Uzi’s, and HK’s including the MP5 with the integral one stamp suppressor.

SAR: How much notice did you have that the machinegun ban was coming in 1986?

JONATHAN: Lots! So we built sears like Fleming and others did, as fast as we could build them. My design was different though. I actually stopped making them after so many, figuring that I had more than enough to sell in any reasonable amount of time. Now, this turns out to have been a serious mistake.

SAR: Were the manufacturers worried that they would also ban silencers at this time?

JONATHAN: People that didn’t listen to what was going on may have thought this, but if you paid attention to the news and the congressional record, it was not in there. The way it came down, the Democrats conspired in the 11th hour and 55 minutes even though they weren’t that prepared and didn’t think that the ban would actually go through. Unfortunately for us, it did, so the law was passed. Fortunately, we still had time before it was signed by the President to build all the stuff we wanted.

SAR: What about your destructive devices business?

JONATHAN: I gave it up, because there wasn’t any money in it. I made about 24 M203 40MM grenade launchers. It was fun, entertaining, and interesting to do something different for a while, but it didn’t pay the bills, and I ended up dropping my DD license.

SAR: Back in the early days of the business, who else was manufacturing suppressors?

JONATHAN: Doc Dater was. Later, he was connected with Lynn McWilliams and AWC. Reed Knight came along a little later, but he only sold to the military. I don’t care to do business with the military, too much paper work, red tape, and too many people trying to cut each others throats to get the contracts, and after spending a lot of time and money somebody else usually ends up with the contract and you walk away with nothing.

SAR: When did you first get involved with the .22 LR conversion kits?

JONATHAN: In 1984, we started the production of the Mini-14 .22 conversion kits. It was so successful that the people that owned the Atchisson MK II and were having trouble with their current manufacturer in Dayton, Ohio, called me up and asked if I would be interested in manufacturing their kits. After looking at it, we arrived at an agreement. I flew up to Dayton, rented a U-Haul Truck, picked up all the tooling, and brought it to the old shop in Titusville, and started building them. I eventually ended up buying the rights to the Atchisson kits, and now I own it all.

SAR: How did you get involved with miniguns?

JONATHAN: It started with John Wayne movies, where they used the old original Gatling guns. A person that likes mechanical things, who likes guns, what a perfect combination! I also had a hand crank BB machinegun as a kid that I ordered from the back of a cereal box for so many box tops and $5. I would set up my toy soldiers and then mow them down with my BB machinegun. I remember seeing my first miniguns in Viet Nam on the gunships. Later, at a Houston gun show, when I was on the road selling silencers at gun shows, I saw a minigun for sale for $5000. I stood drooling at this thing, and knew there wasn’t a possibility that I could come up with that kind of money at the time. Considering I was driving a Ford Escort stationwagon, building silencers on a $600 lathe, and lucky to sell $2000 worth of guns on the weekend, I knew I couldn’t lay down $5000 for something that was not going to create income and was just going to eat ammo. Dale Thomas of Paragon ended up with that gun, and then it went to Syd Stembridge in California. Dan Shea got it after that- from there I don’t know. I ended up building mine from scrap parts. I welded the housing back together, made the rotor, heat treated everything with acetylene torches on the floor of my shop and registered it before the machinegun ban. While looking for parts for the minigun, I picked up enough parts to put my Vulcan cannon together before the minigun was even finished.

SAR: When did manufacturing the .22 kits overtake the suppressor manufacturing as far as your time and interest?

JONATHAN: When the AR-15 kit came along. The Mini-14 kit was good and it moved along with the silencers, but when the AR kit came along, things really got busy. I updated the MKII to the MKIII by improving the firing pin, rails and other features and made it even more reliable. Three other AR-15 kits made by others have come and gone since I updated mine. My most successful conversion kit has been for the 1911 pistol. It has been unbelievable and has outsold all the others. The Glocks and Berettas have also been very successful and we recently unveiled Project X, a .22 conversion for the Thompson sub-machineguns. These are available for either the M1921/M1928 or the M1/M1A1 versions. With the current demand for my various .22 conversion kits and ideas for other firearms whose owners would like a .22 kit, it is to the point where we just don’t have time to devote to the suppressor business. There also are too many others who are making silencers now. I would eventually like to get to the point where I could just design and build the first prototypes of future projects and have someone else take over the day-to-day manufacturing and customer service. I would be content to do this and take a percent of the sales, wait a couple of months and then design and build the next prototype.

SAR: What .22 kit are you developing now?

JONATHAN: One for the Browning High Power pistol. SAR: Jon, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with our readers.

JONATHAN: You are welcome.

Jonathan Arthur Ciener, Inc.
8700 Commerce Street
Cape Canaveral, FL 32920
PH (321) 868-2200
FAX (321) 868-2201
www.22lrconversions.com

By Matt Smith

SAR: Recount for us how you got started in the business.

PHIL: It started in 1976, when I purchased a couple of Military Armament Corporation suppressors. One of the suppressers was on a Ruger MK 1 pistol, and after a brick of ammunition, it was not quiet any more. After the manufacturer refused to service the suppressor, I took it apart myself and figured out a way to repack it with copper scouring pads, in place of the original screen discs. In 1978, I got my first manufacturers license as Automatic Weapons Company in New Mexico, and started producing an improved suppressed Ruger pistol as well as other types of suppressors. In 1981, Peter Kokalis came out and spent a couple days with me and wrote an article for Soldier of Fortune Magazine, which did me an amazing amount of good. In 1983, one of my dealers, Lynn McWilliams, in Friendswood, Texas, approached me and we worked out an arrangement, where he would take care of the manufacturing and I would do the research and development. In about 1989, we went our separate ways as friends. In 1985, Lynn’s business became known as AWC Systems Technology, and is now located in Phoenix. I moved to Boise in 1991. In 1993, Jim Ryan and Mark Weiss of JR Customs and I formed Gemtech with Greg Latka of GSL Technologies coming on as a major partner in early 1994. We worked together for several years, but in 1998, we decided to split up. Greg and I kept Gemtech while Jim and Mark formed Tactical Ordnance. A year ago, I hired Kel Whelan to do our marketing, sales, and office management. Although we have always had steady growth, in the last four to five months business has really boomed. (Dan’s Note: Phil, is “Boomed” really the right term to use for a suppressor business?)

SAR: How would you characterize your customer base?

PHIL: We’ve been growing each year, since being formed. We’ve been getting a lot more law enforcement usage of our products, while the civilian market has increased with moderate growth. Our products have been exported with many going to the Asian rim, and have sold to the U.S. Military in sole source procurements. Currently, our products are being used by our military in Afghanistan and Bosnia. Our customer base is about sixty-five percent civilian, thirty percent law enforcement, and roughly five percent military.

SAR: Are any of your old designs still in demand today?

PHIL: Yes, the SG-9 integral suppressor for the Sten MK II and Smith and Wesson 76, which I designed in 1976 is still in high demand. I build thirty or forty of these a year in my spare time, and there is still a waiting list.

SAR: What are your best selling suppressors?

PHIL: Currently, they are the M4-96D quick disconnect .223 suppressor, the 9mm Raptor for the MP-5, and the .22 LR screw-on Outback suppressor.

SAR: Who are some of the other suppressor designers that you think highly of?

PHIL: I’ve always had a lot of respect for Doug Olson, who worked for years with Mickey Finn, and then with Lynn McWilliams, and currently for Reed Knight. He’s a very innovative man. Reed Knight is well known for his designs and makes excellent products, although they are expensive. Lynn McWilliams at AWC has historically been good at business and marketing, and has been able to promote a good product. Of the newer designers, I’m impressed with Joe Gaddini of SWR, who is an independent thinker. The men that I respect are those who think on their own. Any monkey can take someone’s existing products, cut them open and clone them, or stuff dimpled washers into a tube and call it a suppressor. Doug Melton of SRT Arms I respect, as he is an independent thinker and not a copycat.

SAR: What are your thoughts about research and development?

PHIL: Research and development is something you have to devote a lot of money and time to. First, you have to see a need for a new product or product improvement. Typically, on a suppressor, this means that it is physically smaller or more efficient. We strive for both of these goals. One of our R&D success stories is the M4-96D suppressor, which was developed in five weeks. Jim and Mark in Washington did all the paper work for the Navy request and Greg designed the mount and several ideas for baffles, which he sent to me for testing. I tested various prototypes with a meter over a ten-day period. We started off with a 24 dB reduction and ended up with a 32.5 dB reduction suppressor in the same size envelope. We conducted the required testing and ended up with a suppressor that exceeded the Navy’s requirements. Unfortunately, we did not win the Navy contract, but we did develop one of our best sellers in a short amount of time.

SAR: Do you have any new products you can tell us about?

PHIL: Currently, we have a new .223 suppressor that we are calling the Piranha M4-02. It has been designed for law enforcement entry teams, and priced under $500. The dimensions are 1-3/8’s inches in diameter, 6-1/4 inches long, screws on the barrel, and does 29 dB reduction on an 11 and 1/2 inch upper. We also have a new device we call the Linear Inertial Decoupler. This started with an idea from Joe Gaddini, which Greg modified. It works like a Nielson device, except there is no piston to drive the barrel backwards. This eliminates damage to the firearm, which occasionally takes place when the Nielson Device is not tuned to the specific model weapon. Our Decoupler isolates the mass of the suppressor from the barrel to allow the barrel to start the unlocking process. This device is so successful that it can even be used on a Glock 26 or 19 with our suppressor for flawless cycling. A patent is being applied for on this new innovation, which is currently available on our Vortex 9 suppressor and will be available on a .45 suppressor for the HK and other pistols.

SAR: Do you also have another version of the M4-96D for the belt fed M249 machinegun?

PHIL: Yes, it is the M4-96E. This is a ruggedized version of the D and incorporates laser welding of the baffle stack to maintain rotational orientation perfectly. One of the problems with prolonged firing of the M249 is heat generation. Running a 250 round belt with a suppressor in place develops a core temperature in the suppressor of 1200 degrees F, with the barrel temperature around 1000 degrees F. These temperatures cause ammunition to come apart and deposit copper residue inside the suppressor. Firing full belts is certainly possible with a suppressor, but will severely limit the life span of the suppressor. We will only sell this suppressor to the military, where fire discipline requires shooting in bursts, rather than complete belts at a time. We also have a new .223 suppressor we call the M4-96X for export, which will mount on any NATO standard flash hider. The mount is licensed from abroad, for the military and export only. Our .308 TPRS has been undergoing a lot of changes over the last two years with the revision of the baffle stack, to solve some accuracy problems. It is now also capable of handling .300 Win Mag with no problem. It is a frequency shift unit that places much of the sound into the higher frequency range outside of human hearing. The suppressor is also extremely quiet when shot with EBR subsonic ammunition, which we heartily endorse. The Black Hills subsonic .308 is also a solid performer.

SAR: Has the Internet been beneficial to your business?

PHIL: It’s of marginal value. The discussion boards seem to generate very little business for us, but are a value to the general public. We have a web site (www.gem-tech.com), which acts as a convenient international catalog. A number of law enforcement agencies have found and contacted us through our web site.

SAR: How have your printed ads in SAR done for you?

PHIL: We have gotten really good response to all of our ads in SAR. The people who read SAR are almost all potential customers for us, and this is what we strive for when we advertise. We will continue to support SAR as we have in the past, and encourage all of our customers to do the same.

SAR: Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.

PHIL: You’re welcome.

Gemtech
P.O. Box 140618
Boise, ID 83714
PH (208) 939-7222
FAX (208) 939-7804