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

It wasn't just that the actions were rough. They were also crooked; with sloppy tolerances to accommodate misalignment.The tang design was ill-advised.
It is a shame that someone couldn't have taken the machinery and put it to good use but, from what I have seen, the new owner is even more inept than Sipes. He killed his company before it was fairly started. GD

It wasn't just that the actions were rough. They were also crooked; with sloppy tolerances to accommodate misalignment.The tang design was ill-advised.
It is a shame that someone couldn't have taken the machinery and put it to good use but, from what I have seen, the new owner is even more inept than Sipes. He killed his company before it was fairly started. GD

... bet the action feels pretty rough.

Bb

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.