Profile of a gun maker who relies on the latest manufacturing techniques to produce quality crafted guns.
Only by relying on the latest manufacturing techniques can Ted Hatfield's company re-create the craftsmanship of his great-great-grandfather
After a youth that it would be kind to call misspent, Ted Hatfield decided it was time to make something of himself. He had been around the world twice, driven a bus through the Khyber Pass, been run over by a bull in Pamplona, and worked as a hunting guide in Alaska. He was nearly 30 years old and sensed that it was about time to settle down and assume some adult responsibilities. So, typically, Hatfield chose to go into a nearly impossible business. He would become a gunmaker.
Hatfield came to that conclusion at a time when the once-proud U.S. firearms industry was in a depression from which it did not seem likely to emerge. This was in the late 1970s, when just about all American manufacturing was in decline. The arms industry was a victim of the usual problems -- old plants, entrenched unions, intense foreign competition, tired methods -- and of a few problems that were either unique to or especially acute in gunmaking. Product liability, for one, and an increasingly negative image with the public, for another.
Hatfield was bright enough to be aware of all that and innocent enough to have virtually no idea of how formidable the entrepreneurial route can be. Otherwise, he says, "I might have just gone back to sea." He had decided to seek his fortune ashore after somebody had emptied an old military Colt .45 at him outside a Houston bar one night . . . but that is another story.
Hatfield did have some things going for him. First, he is one of those Hatfields, the ones who skirmished with generations of McCoys. Some of the mountain tenacity had bred true and, just as important, there was a gunmaking tradition in his family. In fact, he owned a Pennsylvania long rifle that had been made by his great-great-grandfather sometime before the Civil War.
Hatfield knew in 1979 that there was a growing, almost cultish interest in traditional firearms. Both sportsmen and collectors were eagerly buying black-powder rifles. They were handsome to look at and satisfying to hold. They fairly breathed tradition and were fun to shoot.
Most of those rifles were custom-made by artisans who worked alone and might turn out one gun a month. They were often highly skilled, but they didn't know much about business, and neither, for that matter, did Hatfield. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. Temperamentally, he is about as unsuited for the world of offices, meetings, management seminars, and ruthless attention to the numbers as anyone could be. His strengths are his vast supply of energy and his appetite for risk. He is most comfortable in the world of improbables. And he grew up with guns and loved them; he had taught himself how to take apart, repair, and rebuild the guns he loved best. A gun was not a mute, inanimate object to him but something that would respond to his touch.
So he had the talent necessary to become a good craftsman, but he also had something else. "I didn't want to just make guns," he says. "I wanted to make some money." He thought there might be a crease in the market somewhere between the custom-made guns and those that were mass-produced and looked it. He had in mind to produce guns that would not be custom-made, but would have custom quality and looks. Something the black-powder enthusiasts would want to own. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could sell several hundred a year.
He spent a couple of months in his hometown, St. Joseph, Mo., building a strikingly faithful replica of the gun his great-great-grandfather had built. He packed it and a few hundred brochures that he'd had printed locally and drove to a gathering in Indiana, where black-powder enthusiasts met to dress in the old buckskin clothes; engage in shooting contests; and buy, sell, and trade various items, especially muzzle-loading rifles.
Hatfield let enthusiasts handle the gun so they could get the feel of it and admire the richness of its striped maple stock. When he left Indiana, he had orders for 20 guns and no idea how he was going to produce them.
That did not deter Hatfield, who had some money from the deposits he had collected in Indiana and a friendly source at the local bank. The good relationship was due not to his own financial history -- not even a modern savings and loan would be that reckless -- but to his father's long and successful run at a sporting-goods establishment in town.
Hatfield rented space in an old garage and set out to discover what it took to produce guns in the 1980s.
The U.S. firearms industry -- located for the most part in the Connecticut River Valley, where it had been a vital part of the Industrial Revolution -- consisted of large factories full of machine tools that were run by skilled workers. They took billets of steel and, by cutting and drilling in scores of different operations, changed them into firearm components. The process was expensive both in capital and in the wages paid. Profits depended on scale. Winchester, Remington, and the others needed to sell thousands of guns a year.
A small operation was, by the nature of the industrial process, almost impossible. The logic of economies of scale ruled. Someone could, of course, buy a gun or the components and then assemble, fit, and customize until the end product was unique.
During World War II, however, engineers began to experiment with a process called investment casting, and developed it in a tentative fashion for arms making. Poured steel replaced cut steel. Capital costs were reduced to a fraction of what they would have been with the old machine-tool, drill-press factory system.
The man who recognized investment casting's civilian implications and exploited them is William Ruger, one of the most able gunmakers since the legendary John Browning. Ruger's company has been the one happy story in U.S. large-scale arms manufacturing since World War II.
