I never paid much attention to ARs before a few years ago, I had many, many guns before that and the only synthetic stocks I had were on high end bolt action rifles and one pump shotgun.
I own a tool and die business, and one of my buddies who runs finished parts out of his shop came to me with some questions on programming for uppers and lowers. He had a guy move in next to him who is a former SEAL who was having rails made decided to get into making them himself rather than jobbing it out. This was during Obama’s reign and sales were sky high.
I got into helping him, with with programming and mostly fixturing, and I watched him go from a single Haas machining center to now a full dozen CNCs and just selling everything before it’s even made. I’ll show him this today when I go see him and I know what I’ll see, him reading the headline and just start grinning. He is all AR-15s currently but I’ve got billet and forging fixtures on the machine for him now for making AR-10s, and since he now makes all his own bolt carrier groups complete he is going to be just printing money from that place.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ……. That is awesome.
Interesting fact. If you look at a good number, if not most of the AR manufacturers, that sell the pricier rifles, the folks that started them were mechanical engineer types. Not necessarily “gun guys”, like Smith&Wesson, Remington, etc.
Many were folks like you and the SEAL that had an existing business or started out of their garages with a basic CNC. And off they went.