Fierce Firearms

Fierce Firearms has a one-mile range just outside the back doors of its factory in Redmond, according to an Athlon Outdoors reviewer, so a rifle can be built and shot without leaving the property. The company says every rifle ships with a MOA accuracy guarantee. That is a confident promise to make when the test is out back.

John Mogle, the founder and CEO, started the company in 2013. Like many custom riflemakers, he began by putting together guns from available components in custom stocks, he told Grand View Outdoors in 2016. The first rifle Fierce built from its own action, the Edge, arrived in January 2014.

The early supply chain ran through Quebec. At his first SHOT Show, Mogle said, a man walked up and offered to build the best gun in the world for the best price, and Mogle's answer was "Yeah, whatever." A couple of weeks later he was touring Nutech Industries in Quebec and deciding it was one of the best machine shops in North America. In 2016 everything on the rifle was made in Canada except the barrels.

The barrels were the Utah part, and they still are. Fierce turns a steel barrel blank down thin and wraps it in carbon fiber, using both filament winding and hand lay-up, Mogle explained. The result is a steel liner in a carbon case, lighter than a steel barrel of the same diameter. The 2016 reviewer's Carbon Edge weighed about 6 pounds.

Production has since come home. The company says every rifle is now built at the Redmond factory by its own gunsmiths, and the Athlon reviewer reported that Fierce makes the whole rifle in house, down to its own magazines. The staff has grown from a crew of 10 to 30 people to more than 100. Its line now runs from bolt-action hunting rifles to over/under shotguns.

The 2016 reviewer found reports of delivery problems in the early days, and Mogle told him those had been resolved. The contact page still asks customers to give the company a chance to help before they "jump on the forums or post wild complaint videos." Anyone who has spent an evening on a rifle forum will understand why that line made the page.