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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to the AR-15 Podcast. If this show is for you, if you just bought your first rifle, or you've been building them for years, there's something we can all do to take our black rifles to the next level. My name is Nick Dooley, and welcome to the AR-15 Podcast. I am joined tonight by Austin of Century Manufacturing.
And, uh, we have a little bit of technical difficulties here, but we're getting things sorted out. So if it looks funny on screen, don't mind that.
Uh, Austin, how are you doing tonight? Good, man.
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Chapter 2: How did Sentry Manufacturing get started?
I appreciate you having me on. It's, uh, it's, it's always fun to connect with folks throughout the industry.
Yeah. It's, uh, always a good time and always better when, uh, things start working properly. So now that we have that going and I have controls, we can actually start putting things through and get into what is Century Manufacturing and who you guys are and what you do.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. We're a relatively new company. We've only been around since the end of 2023. We started as a, you know, we actually started out of a small shop in South Louisiana. We have a range and a storefront. My business partner owns a range and a storefront. I come from a little bit of a different background.
Chapter 3: What makes the Deadlock charging handle unique?
My degree is in chemical engineering and math. I come from a corporate background and Um, so I'm a little new to the, to the, uh, to the, to this side of things, but, um, you know, but at the end of 2022, uh, my business partner and I had been friends for a while and, uh, he, you know, it's always been a, in the gun industry and I've always been a, a gun guy myself.
So we kind of combined heads and, uh, started, started a production company, um, started making some products out of our own kind of want and will, um, and ended up kind of falling into a little bit of a niche market? Is it where we had some product ideas that we thought we could come, you know, that would be a little fruitful? and ended up working out extremely well for us.
Obviously, we're somewhat of a parts company, somewhat of a OEM support. Most of what we started out to do was to do a little bit of everything, but we've kind of fine-tuned what we do over the past three or four years into being a little bit more of a parts specifically and OEM support company.
So some folks probably know us from our parts that we make and that we advertise to the public, but a lot of what we do behind the scenes is
oem support for manufacturers helping support manufacturing bandwidth um so that that's a little bit about us uh we're out of south louisiana um we're we're very proud of where we come from we're 100 south louisiana made and assembled um but yeah right on well that is uh that's awesome i know that i have uh
Of course, it's on the rifle I don't have beside me, but I have one of your guys' charging handles already, and I know that I've really enjoyed it. It's been solid. It's one of those where you hate to do things like, those things charging handles are supposed to do. Right.
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Chapter 4: How do gas-defeating properties work in charging handles?
The biggest compliment I can give to something is, it works. Right. I've yet to break it, and that sometimes can be a problem for me. Right. Yeah. With that, I know that you also have, like you said, you came from a chemical engineering background. Yeah.
So tell me more about like a little bit about you before we get too far into the weeds on how you guys came up with kind of redeveloping the charging handle.
Yeah, so I, again, my background is a little interesting compared to some of the other ones in the industry. I graduated chemical engineering and with a minor in math and some other material sciences, I always had a love for chemistry and math and Went out and worked in corporate America for several years. I worked in some larger manufacturing facilities in the South.
It's really big down here, especially with the Mississippi running through Louisiana. So I did that for many years. I wore a lot of hats.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Sentry Manufacturing face in product development?
I got to grow up pretty quickly in that environment. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there for sure. Corporate America kind of wasn't my favorite thing in the world. I loved what I did. I loved the people I worked with. Um, but all in all, I just wasn't, you know, terribly having as much fun as I thought I would.
Um, and you know, I've always had a love for firearms ever since I was really young, grew up hunting in South Louisiana. Um, whenever, uh, my business partner, Brandon opened up the range down here, um, we're a little bit different, um, than your normal range. We're centered around, um, really practical training.
Um, there's, uh, you know, there's a, there's a lot of folks out there that just have ranges for, um, The purpose of folks going in and some of the guys have the one shot a second rule and stuff like that. We're very different. My business partner is USPSA Grand Master in several different divisions. He's a real shooter.
We've trained a number of law enforcement agencies and even federal entities across the country.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of the partnership with Daniel Defense?
We've done a lot of work with the US marksmanship team and some other different entities. He's a freak with a pistol, so I grew up under his wing whenever I was working out in the plant still. And then one day, you know, we were having lunch and I was telling him, you know, I love what I do, but I was a couple hours away from home. I missed home. I miss my people.
And, you know, he was like, well, if you ever, you know, find a want and itch to want to make stuff, I've got some ideas for some products. And, you know, I told him I was, you know, I'm not that kind of engineer. That's not what I do. I'm not your typical CAD engineer. We run some big complex systems and stuff.
That's not really my cup of tea, but probably one of those weeks where you just had enough of your boss. And I was like, well, why not give it a chance? So we dropped everything and moved back home. And I mean, the rest is really history. We started.
Chapter 7: How does the material choice impact the performance of charging handles?
uh, prototyping. And I, I taught myself CAD and, and, uh, solid works within a couple of months.
Uh, I was just going to mention solid works.
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I taught myself solid works. Um, within a couple of months, I took a class that was about a week long. and just kind of got to work on a prototype, at least being able to show some kind of conceptual working function to some folks that might be able to make it a reality. And that's kind of where we came from. So the deadlock charging handle is kind of our flagship product.
I think one thing that's interesting about us and maybe some folks, we try to stress it as much as we can, is that we're not a charging handle company. That's just kind of what we've got stuck into in the past couple of years.
With the success of our charging handles, we've had a lot of manufacturers and OEMs that have reached out to us to either apply the technology to something of a different platform or to help them fix something on their OEM side. So that's really kind of the story of how Century Manufacturing began. We've been extremely blessed with our industry connections.
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Chapter 8: What future products are Sentry Manufacturing planning to release?
We've been extremely blessed with the folks we've worked with. We've accomplished some pretty incredible things in our short lifespan. And again, we're not a charging handle company by any means. We've just kind of got locked into this really niche arena where we've been slowly and surely supplementing more bandwidth for OEMs and picking up more clients in business.
Yep. And then, uh, so I know it's going to end up coming up that we talk about like, what is the deadlock and you have a unique feature that most other people, well, no other charging handle that I'm aware of has. Yep. Yes. That is good.
Yeah. So our, our deadlock charging handle, uh, our flagship product is a locking charging handle. So this was born purely out of out of greed for from my business partner, Brandon, where we were doing some some training and we got tired of. of charging handle snags, getting hung up on kit when we were doing some close quarter stuff, doing some room clearing practice.
We were doing it in a facility that was a little bit tighter than most. So you kind of having to squeeze through door frames and folks and people. So it's just an issue that we kind of said, hey, look, this is something that's maybe a little bit niche, but it has to be a problem for other folks, right? So that's where we started. The premise was to design a locking charging handle.
And that was kind of where it ended. And that's kind of where I was given free reign over the design and was like, well, what else? Right. So after that, we set out really to change everything that folks knew about charging handles and to become kind of the best you can get. Right. I think there's a lot of really good products out there.
There's a lot of companies that have built some incredible brands that have built some incredible products. But I think that in this industry, there's always a little bit juice left for the squeeze. And I think that that's kind of what we did. In a very saturated market, we were able to find four independent patents on our charging handles.
So we didn't necessarily reinvent the wheel, but we did reinvent a lot of the ways that folks would understand functionality of products. And that's kind of a lot of what our company stands for. We strive to find the things that give folks better quality of life, that improve safety features for our military and law enforcement personnel. For the average
you know, the average firearm enjoyer for everybody. So we kind of try to encompass the entire bandwidth of the shooting community, of the 2A community. And I mean, you touched on the, you know, a little bit about the deadlock. We are the only ones that have ever done it.
We have a patent on it that pretty, pretty cleanly protects any kind of, you know, anybody that would try to come behind us and do something similar. But again, that was the premise behind it. But the secondary features that we designed are really what folks stay for. One thing that we'll tell you is that we do a lot of law enforcement demos. We do a lot of shows.
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