Weatherby moves; Mark Vs to be made in the USA

Shooting Industry, Nov, 1994 by Jon R. Sundra

There's big news afoot at Weatherby. Since the L.A. riots of a few years ago, which saw a lot of damage done to the firm's retail store and warehouse facilities, rumors have been circulating that the company would be moving to Wyoming or some other Rocky Mountain state. Now those rumors can be put to rest.

After 50 years at the original South Gate, Calif. site, Roy Weatherby Jr. is packing his show and moving four-hours north of Los Angeles to Atascadero, in the coastal foothills of the central part of the state.

The announcement came at Weatherby's Annual Writers Conference held the first week in August. I was not able to attend this one but I had a good excuse: I was hunting Rusa deer on a tropical island in the South Pacific. It was a real hardship, but you know what they say about someone having to do it! It turned out to be the best deer hunt of my life in more ways than one, but that's another story.

The Weatherby folks were nice enough to send me all the information released at the conference and it was waiting on my desk when I returned.

Coincident with the move to Atascadero, Weatherby will be celebrating their 50th Anniversary in '95. One of the ways they'll be commemorating this milestone is with a Weatherby showroom and museum at the new facility. Scheduled to open before the end of '94, the museum will provide a look at the company from a historical perspective, including product innovation, development and promotion.

In all three of those categories the company has a rich heritage. Many unique, one-of-a-kind rifles, shotguns, photographs and memorabilia will be featured in the museum. Upon completion, the museum will be open to the public.

Another big move by Weatherby that was announced at the conference was that the production of the famous Mark V Magnum rifle has been moved to good ol' USA. Yep, after some 40 years of being manufactured first by Sauer in Germany, then Howa Machinery in Japan, the Mark V is coming home. An extended contract has been entered into with Saco Defense of Saco, Maine. Saco is a subsidiary of Chamberlain Manufacturing Corp. which has a long history in ordnance production going back to 1813. They are presently the nation's primary supplier of military machine guns -- among them the M2 .50 caliber and M60. It also manufactures replacement barrels and machine gun parts, as well as MK-19 grenade launchers. The company operates more than 1,500 machine tools in its 450,000 square-foot facility in Maine.

It will be interesting to see how this move will ultimately affect the used Weatherby market in the coming years. For 25 years we've seen Weatherbyphiles argue that the older, German-made Mark Vs were better than the Japanese-made ones. It got so that anyone advertising a used Weatherby had to state its country of origin -- and was priced accordingly.

Wouldn't it be nice to someday see U.S.-made Weatherbys fetching more money on the used-gun market than either the German or Japanese-made ones? I think that's a very real possibility.

With all that's going on with Weatherby in '95, it's understandable that the number of changes to the product line are being kept to a minimum. Perhaps the biggest news for the coming year is that there will at long last be an all-stainless Mark V.

Heretofore, Weatherby has resisted the industry-wide rush to stainless, the rationale being that it has a tendency to gall and therefore does not result in a Mark V that operates as smoothly as one made from traditional chrome-moly steel.

A lot of people assumed that the Weathermark Alaskan model of the last couple of years was made of stainless when in reality it was chrome-moly with an electroless nickel finish. In my own experience, I have not been able to get a stainless action slicked up to where it's quite as smooth as I can get one of chrome-moly. However, I'm not sure it's due to any less inherent lubricity of the steel.

Be that as it may, Ed Weatherby has reconciled the switch to stainless this year with the explanation that they "...have been able to combine the finest stainless material with a proprietary machining process..." that he claims results in a superior product compared to other stainless rifles on the market. We'll see.

This new stainless version will be set into an injection-molded synthetic stock having the same general lines as the traditional Weatherby Magnum. I say "general" because there were some shortcuts taken with the mold at the back of the pistol grip so that it is not an exact duplicate of the original Roy Weatherby design. All in all, I'd say that it's not as good as the McMillan-made stock of laid-up fiberglass used for the Fibermark. That stock was an exact copy of the original design in all respects, including the detailing at the back of the grip and its flaring out at the very end to form the cap. But then again I'm sure the new stock is not nearly as expensive as the McMillan-made one and hopefully that fact will be reflected in the price which hasn't been set as of this writing.