While several sectors of the U.S. manufacturing industry are seeing slowdowns, the custom firearms industry appears to be recessionproof, and machine shops are reaping the benefits by providing a wide range of machined parts to gunsmiths and small to medium-sized firearms manufacturers.
It’s not just the major firearms manufacturers that are keeping machine shops around the country busy.
There are thousands of gunsmiths around the country who repair, restore and customize guns, and each of them needs machined parts at some point.
Machine shops can tap into this lucrative market by letting their local gunsmiths know the shops are interested in bidding on jobs.
While some jobs come with detailed CAD drawings, many times the parts need to be reverse-engineered from broken or surrounding parts. With the technologies available today, this process can be a snap. The following case study illustrates one such example.