BB,
The Marlin guy I deal with is somebody I've come to consider a friend over the years. We talk at SHOT, we call back & forth, we email.
We actually communicate on personal channels about non-gun subjects, too, something that doesn't happen much in the industry.
I'm not all that easy to BS on a continuing level, and I get the sense he's an honest guy doing the best he can to make a difference as a mid-level manager in a very convoluted system.
He's not in a position to stomp his foot & make everything good in a day, so more patience is needed.
Marlin was going downhill before the buy & before the move.
Equipment was old & needed babysitting & nursing by operators who were, in some cases, third-gen machinists working for Marlin on the same machinery.
The move was not simple.
Those employees who knew how to nurse the machines along & what the specs were that were pretty much handed down from previous generations were not transitioned to the new plant.
The primary reason for that, in my understanding, was that the guns were going to be moved into new equipment & away from the older machinery.
The old employees who knew the old machines were essentially obsoleted.
To shorten the story, it's been a long process to bring Marlin back because of several factors.
Technical drawings for each levergun model had to be developed, which took time. There were none at the old plant, workers just "knew" what specs & processes to use on the old machines.
Those had to be integrated into new machinery & new processes.
Manufacturing space had to be created at Ilion.
The new machinery had to be acquired, and it was not cheap.
There was a shortage of engineers.
The Freedom Group combine was doing other things in other areas with other products concurrently, and engineers were sometimes shuffled away from the Marlin division to work elsewhere.
Workers had to be hired and trained.
Processes had to be tweaked.
Workers had to be tweaked.
Decisions had to be made on which models to concentrate on first.
Those got the attention.
Resources were not infinite.
Marlin is not a stand-alone company in the sense that it used to be, so Marlin execs don't always have the final say.
Marlin DOES have its own manufacturing space and its own "Marlin" employees.
Employees are not switched around from Remington one day & Marlin the next.
Marlin workers consider themselves to be Marlin employees, not Remington employees.
All of this took time. And money.
Marlin had to compete with other Freedom Group brands for attention internally.
Initially, after the move, the people assigned to Marlin's upper management were also a part of the problem, but those people are now gone.
QC remains an occasional issue, but efforts have been made to address it.
As far as my friend there goes, he's aware, he's working on it, I'm seeing far better workmanship on this sample (aside from the lever edges), and I doubt he'd pull a con-job gun on me.
Denis
