“We have a great workforce in Ilion with gunmaking talent, but they had never built lever-action rifles before, so there was learning curve.”.

“We were training a new workforce to build these rifles,” says Fink. Many of these workers hadn’t made the move to Ilion, so much of that inherent knowledge had been lost. The plans at North Haven had simply been passed down through the generations. Once this equipment was moved to Ilion, many of the pieces were running at a rate that was even less efficient than before.”Ĭompounding the difficulties, Remington discovered dimensioned drawings of Marlin’s iconic rifles did not exist. “It required moving equipment, setting it up in a new location, and training people to build these rifles. “We realized it would be a challenging move,” says Fink. Just four hours away, in Ilion, Remington’s factory had some open floor space where it could move Marlin, keep it autonomous from Remington, and yet improve efficiency. Some of the equipment was in such bad shape that sheet-metal dams had been built around the machines to keep fluids from leaking out onto the floor.” “We were dealing with equipment that was old-in some cases, more than 60 years old. Machines were held together with what amounted to little more than Band-Aids, creating inefficient and costly production processes. While the craftsmen at Marlin were first-rate, the manufacturing facilities in North Haven were less than great. Part of that hard work was recovering from a poorly planned move from Marlin’s longstanding manufacturing plant in North Haven, Connecticut, to Remington-operated factories in Ilion, New York, and Mayfield, Kentucky. “We opened the door for Rossi and Henry, but with our new production process for the receiver in a side-bysideĬomparison, there is no comparison. To say we made a couple of mistakes is a bit of an understatement,” says Teddy Novin, director of public affairs. As Warren Zevon sang, it ain’t that pretty at all.

Now, thanks to an article entitled Marlin Makes a Comeback in the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s publication, we’ve got an inside, intimate look at Marlin’s cataclysmic decline. The quality control problems at Marlin went from bad to worse to completely unacceptable – to the point where Marlin modifiers like Grizzly Custom Guns now charge customers a premium to breathe on post-Freedom Group rifles (to pay for rectifying factory errors).įrom time to time we’ve had glimpses of the doofuses (doofi?) behind the curtain and reported the facts back to you. On May 6, 2011, we ran an article on an unfired Marlin 1894 whose stock split in half.

Marlin remington 1895 serial numbers