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Rocky’s Reloading Room |
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Bullberry Barrel Works: An Inside Look
I’ve been using custom Contender barrels from Bullberry Barrel Works for a number of years, so I felt a bit chagrined when I couldn’t find the place.
In fact, I had unknowingly already driven past it twice when I finally pulled over to the curb and dialed Bullberry for driving directions. When machinist (and my tour guide) Patrick Navarre told me to do a U-turn and drive a half block, he said “That must be you in the green pickup.” I was in front of the building and didn’t even know it! The only feature to distinguish the home of this highly esteemed custom house is a small steel silhouette of their logo. No proud, two-feet-tall glowing letters, no billboard, not even a mailbox with the company name. The home of some of the world’s best custom gun barrels and rifles is a low, half-buried stone structure at the end of the street in a light industrial park. Talk about unobtrusive!
I had come here on assignment from TVHM to see, photograph and talk to the people who craft an extremely diverse range of custom barrels and woodwork for the Thompson/Center Contender and Encore firearms as well as custom rifles. Unfortunately, the days available to me coincided with a long-anticipated African safari for Bullberry owner and founder Fred Smith. In his absence, I interviewed his staff and later talked with Fred via telephone. In hindsight, that may have actually been a bonus. With the boss far, far away, I was able to get a true feeling for the atmosphere and morale of the staff. In a word, these guys love their work. It shows.
For more than 20 years, Bullberry’s tiny staff of craftsmen has churned out thousands upon thousands of precision shooting tools. They average, by estimate, about a hundred barrels a month of all types, plus a few custom rifles and cords of stocks and forearms. When I say tiny staff, I mean tiny. The whole shooting match consists of Fred Smith and four employees. There’s no secretary, no receptionist, no janitor, no shipping clerk, no senior assistant to the vice-president for human resources, no Inspector No. 47. Just Fred and four very talented and happy workers who don’t even have formal job titles. Their pride and dedication shows in their work, I think. All five touch every job at some point. There’s no way to pass the anonymous buck here. If something isn’t right, they all know it.
All work starts with a customer order. There’s no inventory of goods made up in advance, even in the most popular calibers. It’s all made to customer specification, first come-first served. At the center of the long, narrow building stand racks of barrel blanks. Bullberry uses Wilson blanks for all except special orders. Douglas or Shilen blanks are available if requested. Calibers range from .17 to .45 but virtually any caliber made can be obtained in either stainless or chrome-moly. The same goes for the variety of chamber reamers. Hundreds of them stand in racks, ready to create almost any standard or wildcat chambering known to man. If they don’t have it, they’ll get it. Their standard caliber list has several hundred entries, and is constantly expanding. For example, Bullberry has not only already completed Encore barrels for the brand new .300 Winchester Short Magnum, but already has reamers on hand for several wildcats based on that round!
While Bullberry’s bread-and-butter work is with Contender and Encore barrels, their custom rifle business is growing, too. In fact, since one of their guns was featured in TVHM as a custom gun, they’ve completed five or six identical guns for various customers, and had their custom rifle orders expand greatly. They have a dozen or so custom rifles in work at any one time, with 20 to 25 awaiting start of work. It takes seven to eight months to complete a custom rifle, mainly because most or all Contender and Encore work has to be suspended in order to re-tool for rifle work. Still, the results are worth the wait, if the examples I handled are typical. I examined four such rifles and every one was a stunner in both metal work and wood.
In fact every rifle made is a one-off. Bullberry uses no stock duplicators, only rough machine inletting, and no patterns. Stocks are hand-selected, hand-cut, hand-inletted, hand-shaped, hand-sanded and hand-finished (more on the woodworks later). As a result, no two are exactly alike, but each and every one is as near perfect as can be done. Flawless and unique are the only apt descriptors.
That same degree of quality can be seen in Bullberry’s Contender and Encore barrels. Barrel blanks are hand-chambered on a precision lathe, checked for headspace, and then cut to length and crowned. Barrel lugs are manufactured on the spot in a fully computerized milling machine recently purchased.
As an aside, in order to fully utilize that high-tech acquisition, Bullberry is toying with the idea of manufacturing its own actions for custom rifles. No details have been firmed up, but it’s likely to be a falling block action of some type. If it ever comes to pass, I let it be known that I’d buy one. In fact, I’m hoping for the first one!
But let’s get back to the barrel operation. The barrel lugs are precision TIG-welded to the barrels, holes for sights or mounts are drilled and tapped, and dovetails for stock hangers are cut. The penultimate step for chrome/moly barrels is bluing. Finally, each barrel is stamped with the company name and chambering. Each is then test-fired and shipped to the customer. Waiting time for barrels only is from four to six weeks depending mainly on the existing workload. When received, each barrel is guaranteed to deliver sub-MOA groups when used with the Bullberry barrel hanger and forearm system.
This special hanger and wood system differs from the original T/C system by using a milled steel bridge that connects the barrel to the wooden forearm in a very uniform manner. Because the stock touches only the hanger and not the barrel or receiver, the vibrations caused during firing are more consistent. That translates to better accuracy. Even when used on a non-Bullberry barrel, the Bullberry hanger system adds to the accuracy potential. I’ve seen it in my own battery of Contender barrels, and I’ve spoken with other Contender fans who confirm it with their guns, too.
With a Bullberry barrel in .223, I’ve managed numerous groups at or just below a half-inch, and a Bullberry .17 Ackley Bee barrel I’m shooting now (for another TVHM article) has produced groups as small as 0.30” using a Bullberry hanger and forearm. Barrels from the T/C factory have also turned in sub-MOA groups for me when fitted with the Bullberry system. Oftentimes at the range I frequent, unsophisticated shooters suddenly turn bragless at seeing groups fired from my various Contenders. Their favorite deer-destroyer or coyote-crumpler suddenly doesn’t shoot as well as they’ve been crowing about when compared to targets that my Contender perforates right in front of their eyes! At any rate, the Bullberry guarantee of sub-MOA groups is a good one.
Speaking of Bullberry forearms and stocks leads to a further description of their woodworking operation. Believe it or not, Bullberry finds it easier to obtain fancy, highly figured wood than plainer varieties! That’s why for the past two years, they’ve offered a free two-grade upgrade on all wood orders. Order a semi-fancy grade, and you receive wood with figure and color two grades better at no charge. Is Bullberry wood pretty? Suffice it to say that the carbine stocks I saw being finished during my visit were some of the most gorgeous walnut I’ve ever seen. One finished stock was composed completely of what is beyond doubt the most beautiful burl that this writer has ever beheld, period. And no, no amount of pleading on my part worked. I couldn’t keep it, buy it or steal it!
The raw material for all this stunning wood is – literally - a pile of stumps dumped haphazardly behind the building. It looks for all the world like a pile of broken trees left after a long-receded flood. Except that this part of Utah is so dry that the wood cures naturally without so much as a roof over it. Next to the stump pile is a small sawmill where the stumps are turned into rough blanks. The blanks are stored inside the main building in several rooms and racks until needed.
Many of the better grades are “graft” wood. It is composed of stumps of tress created when English and American walnut trees were grafted together to combine the robust character of English rootstock with the high nut-bearing qualities of American upper wood. The junction of the two dissimilar woods creates some eye-popping changes in both grain and color, as witnessed by several other finished stocks that I was shown. No two wooden items are ever identical, of course, but to say that these are different from other walnut stocks is an understatement that even an Englishman would admire.
Part of the drop-dead gorgeous look of a custom Bullberry stock is the particular finishes used and the degree to which they are polished. Bullberry uses a special finish material (they wouldn’t tell me just what) that can be finished to either a gloss or satin finish. And, while many other fine finishes are final buffed with a 600- or 800-grit finish, Bullberry goes far beyond that, all the way to a 2200-grit polish! It’s a finish that looks as though you could dive in and swim in it.
When Fred returned from his African handguns-only safari (he may have taken the new number one waterbuck with a handgun), I talked with him on the phone about the future of Bullberry and his plans for other products.
According to Fred, it’s the quality of their wood work that’s now driving the business. In past years, one wood worker could stay ahead of production to the extent that finished wood awaited the completion of barrels to ship an order. But not today. Today, and largely due to the two-grade free upgrade sale, finished barrels now await the completion of stocks. And so by the time you read this, Fred will have added two new wood workers to the staff. If his other plans materialize, he’ll need them and more.
Fred’s other plans include a new computer-controlled lathe that will greatly speed up production of certain barrel styles, mainly tapered barrels. That added output will allow him to shorten the backlog and waiting period now accumulating in orders. This backlog of orders has grown despite the fact that the only place Bullberry runs printed ads is in TVHM. “I’ve been in Varmint Hunter since the first issue, and it’s the only ad I still run,” said Fred. “That and our internet sales have us working to capacity.” Word of mouth also has a lot to do with it, Fred admits. Shooters not only brag a lot about something that works, but other shooters are more than eager to buy gear like their buddies’, especially if that gear looks and works as well as Bullberry products.
“In the beginning, I just wanted to run a little gun shop. But this has mushroomed way past the point where we take orders on a yellow legal pad and operate on a shoestring. But I always have future dreams, too. I’ve never been satisfied to just do today’s work without looking toward something bigger,” Fred said. “It’s important that there be a light at the end of the tunnel, or else you’re only working in the dark.”
The light in Fred’s tunnel includes that single-shot action mentioned earlier, but includes another even more ambitious goal: true custom double rifles like the classic African doubles used by English explorers. Fred believes there is a real worldwide market for such guns, if they can be made affordable. I’ll bet he’s right.
With all the important questions out of the way, I had to ask just two more: Why Hurricane, Utah and why the name Bullberry? As to Hurricane (which Utahans pronounce not like the tropical storm, but as Her’ kun), Fred was born just north of there, in Beaver Utah, but was a firefighter for years in Las Vegas. “But it snows in Beaver at 6,000 feet elevation, and Vegas is too crowded. When my wife spotted a house in a pecan orchard here in Hurricane, she said ‘I could live there!’ and so that was it,” he explained.
The Bullberry name? That too is due to Fred’s wife. When Fred was younger, his favorite duck hunting sloughs were home to a berry bush much loved by native Ute Indians, who called them bull berries. One afternoon, Fred planned to sneak along the creek for ducks and asked his then-fiancee to pick him up at bull berry slough. She did so, and laughingly pointed to some huge Hereford bulls pastured nearby. Referring to their more-than-obvious male parts, she said, “Now I know why this is called bull berry slough!” It created such a private joke that they started packing some of their orchard’s pecans in specially-marked burlap bags that duplicate that sight. The orchard also became Bullberry Ranch, and the name just sort of carried over to the gun business. “I guess you could say the whole thing was just a nutty idea,” Fred chuckled.
Nutty idea or not, Bullberry barrels and stocks are among the most cherished aftermarket items for Contenders and Encores. Their custom rifles are simply stunning in their beauty, and Fred’s plans for the future include other products that will be just as cherished and hard sought.
Bullberry Barrel Works 2430 West Bullberry Lane Hurricane UT 84737 435-635-9866 www.bullberry.com
Published in The Varmint Hunter Magazine, Issue #44, October 2002 Copyright 2002 |
