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vertically scale and keep in-house as much as possible, you have a very high fidelity of quality awareness. You can see and make interventions immediately and lead times are dramatically reduced.” This supports KelTec’ s positioning as a genuinely American manufacturer, built on facilities the company owns outright rather than leases.
That commitment to domestic production runs through the firm’ s remote Wyoming operation as much as its Florida headquarters. Rock Springs, set in the state’ s high desert, presents its own logistical challenges – however, the same principle applies: keep as much of the process in-house as the environment allows. In addition, KelTec’ s R & D process has evolved dramatically since George began designing firearms in the late 1960s, from punching codes onto 100-foot paper tapes for early CNC machines to working on some of the first CAD systems, run on
Macintosh computers with tiny screens. George reveals that traditional gunsmithing skills have given way to CAD- and CNC-literate engineers, and increasingly, AIassisted programming.“ Many of our programmers use software and AI to write the programs, rather than writing them manually, and I believe the use of AI is only going to increase.” Adrian sees this as evolution rather than loss.“ It’ s an evolving art,” he adds.“ They’ re mostly all young staff, so they’ re very quick to change, learn and adapt.”
Growth at KelTec has always been deliberate rather than reactive.“ We want to be financially independent,” George highlights.“ We have never borrowed money from any major banks or financiers – the advantage of that is you have no liabilities. If
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