Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Downfall of Montana Rifle Company.....

I was in my local Sportsmans yesterday - they had about 6 MRC rifles and all of them were marked way down. Their ASR (?) with the wood stocks were marked at $800. I'm sure some of them are great rifles, but it's just too big a gamble.

Pretty sad stuff - I remember obsessing over one of these rifles a few years back. Glad I never pulled the trigger on one.

Any left handers ?

Seller JD Outfitters on GB sure has a pile of them.

Not that I remember. I'll drop in tomorrow and double check

No special trip required. Just curious. $800 is about half that list price, and about 40% off the GB BIN prices. To me, the MRC ASR stock ergos are kinda "thick". For that money it would not hurt to drop the barreled action into a McM Hunter Edge or McM Edge fill FWT stock...

And seems to think they are worth more than they were when MRC was still in business.

Yeah, I saw that too. If they ever get reasonable on their prices, I may bite.

IMHO, the MRC rifles were a very good design. Their action had some slight improvements over the Win Model 70 design. The rifles were a little on the heavy side, which is not a problem for the bigger recoiling calibers, but may be considered a detriment by some for 30-06-size and smaller calibers.

MRC aspired to be a high end factory rifle and were priced as such, but . . . the company had terrible quality control, which was then compounded by terrible customer service. High price, bad QC, bad CS - no way was the company going to survive. It was a situation of a good vision, but without the manufacturing/management skills to pull it off. Which, is a shame since us consumers always benefit from more choices in the market place. I hope MRC is able to reconstitute itself into a better run company.

JMHO

Agree on the design, but I honestly never saw what made them worth such a premium over a Ruger Hawkeye. I've had three Hawkeyes, all good shooters, and not a lick of trouble from any of them. Of the three, I foolishly "upgraded" the .243 to a Number 1, gave a Predator .308 to my son, and kept the .223 All Weather, now in a nice factory walnut stock. If one is wiling to go used, an FN can be dropped into a Boyds or B&C for less than the MRC, and is IMO without question a better rifle.

Might just be that the failure of MRC stems from cash-flow problems due to lack of sales. Once the bean-counting impacts quality and CS, a company is doomed. Figure out why people aren't buying them instead of giving them more reasons.

Have followed them off and on since the late 90's and offer a brief history as I remember it.

25 years ago people who wanted a "real quality" custom rifle wanted a genuine pre-64 M70 or genuine Mauser 98 action, not some tubular push feed thing.

By the mid 90's the supply of unmolested pre-64 M70's and genuine M98's was drying up and becoming expensive so some guys got together and said "let's design a new action with the best features of both that we can sell at a reasonable price to the custom gunsmith market". So they did and called it the Model 1999 since it was designed in 1999. All they ever intended to do was supply custom gunsmiths with the raw material to make a quality CRF rifle.

They got the new action to market and said over and over and over and over and over - "this action is supplied in the rough to keep costs down, your gunsmith will have to do the final finishing". Did I mention that they said this to everyone who would listen? And that they said it to those listening over and over and over and over and over?

People, being idiots people, got the actions and were completely surprised and dismayed when it arrived in the rough so that their gunsmith had to do the final finishing. "Hey, this action is rough! WTF!? I expected something I could just attach a barrel and a stock to and show off to my friends!!"

So, somewhere along the line and this is where I stopped watching them for a while, they got together with a quality barrel maker of a confusingly similar name and Boyd's stocks and probably some other stock maker and started putting together a complete rifle. Complete rifles need a lot more company support than just sending an action out the door to a gunsmith who would then take responsibility for the finished rifle.

And that's when they pushed off on the slippery slope. They never could find the right people to build and support the product. They had one guy who was worth a damn and everybody else (that I talked to or communicated with) was sub-par in terms of being a dedicated employee.

They tried this and that but from what I can see they never found the people to support what was otherwise a fine design and mostly/usually a pretty well put together rifle. About this same time the demographics of shooters willing to spend moderate to big bucks was changing from guys in their 50's-70's wanting show off quality custom rifles to guys who wanted black tactical rifles in chassis stocks with push feed actions being perfectly suitable if not preferred.

They also put themselves in a bad niche. They priced the rifle at a point a good bit higher than a factory M700, M77 or M70 and guys wanting a "good quality" rifle couldn't see the reason to spend more money over a M700, M77 or M70, but it wasn't high enough and the quality wasn't truly top notch enough to capture the hearts and minds of the real carriage trade.

And that brings us to the present, requiem MRC.


The above is all IIRC, so if anyone recalls differently please chime in.

They had the Model 70-style trigger and, until Ruger began offering short action 77 Hawkeyes in left-handed, they were about the only game in town for a "reasonably priced" left-handed short action CRF action/rifle.

They were better at supplying gunsmith-ready actions than they were at making rifles.

Jim - Thanks for the MRC summary.

When recounting the history of the 1999 action, folks should know that for a few years in the early 2000's, MRC supplied their 1999 barreled actions to CZ-USA, who then put a nicely designed walnut stock on it (I am not sure who the stockmaker was) and sold it as the "CZ USA Model 03." Unfortunately, the partnership quickly fell apart because, apparently, the two companies couldn't agree on how the rifle should be priced - CZ wanted "affordable," and MRC wanted "high end":

https://czfirearms.us/index.php?PHPSESSID=2u2qe17l4j5uqadm2utpio1980&topic=11988.0

https://www.gunsamerica.com/959676959/CZ-Model-03-300-wsm.htm

I'm a big fan of the M70 Trigger, but the LC6 triggers on two of my Hawkeyes were (are) perfectly usable, and just as dependable, I believe. I know how to get them even lighter, but haven't felt the need on my remaining one. The Predator two-stage trigger is very nice, the reason my son picked that rifle from several choices he had available.

Hard to argue about the draw for leftys!

I too have been watching them for a while...maybe 2005 or so. I remember reviewing their website a lot, seeing that they had a .378" bolt face, LH short action listed as "coming soon" practically forever...which is what I was looking for. I even bought one of their stainless LH actions from a local gunsmith but ended up selling it before I could do anything with it.

As best as I can recall, your recollection of the company timeline is pretty accurate.

For me too heavy and crappy customer service. The worst!

I never stated the LC6 trigger was better or worse than the Model 70's, but the Model 70 trigger is a clean, simple design without an abundance of moving parts that often only requires an adjustment to meet the user's needs, while the LC6 takes a little more finesse.

Too many stories of poor CS. I don’t expect a company to get it right %100 of the time but I expect them to take care of it swiftly when they get it wrong.

Yeah I’ve always wanted one in .338 RUM but $1500 seems a bit much to me, even with the supposed free African safari...

It is a company I always wanted to like, but reading about a number of quality issues and rarely reading of good manufacturer support, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

I’d like to know who, if anyone yet, has bought their parts inventory and if they plan to market any of it.