Shotgun Sports USA
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Shotgun Sports USA
FalconStrike Recoil Pads: Martin Gaudet
Martin Gaudet, the mastermind behind FalconStrike talks about a groundbreaking recoil pad revolutionizing the world of shooting sports. With roots in the aerospace industry, Martin's creation imitates the body's natural shock absorption, offering shooters an unprecedented 85% reduction in recoil and a 35% decrease in muzzle jump. Our discussion isn't just about the mechanics; it's a narrative of rejuvenation and passion, with stories of seasoned enthusiasts rediscovering their zeal for shooting, empowered by this game-changing technology.
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Speaker 2:Today we talked to one of our show sponsors, martin gaudet, founder and inventor of falcon strike. Falcon strike is a recoil pad that utilizes dampening technology borrowed from the aerospace industry and will scientifically reduce recoil by 85% and muzzle jump by 35%. This is a simple to install and simple to move product that has proven to work. In this episode, martin goes into great detail about his product, how it was developed and how it's produced, and where he expects it to be in the future. On the line with me today I have Martin Gaudette. He is the president of what I know him from is Falcon Strike. He's the man that's behind this amazing recoil pad is what we call it. Now, martin, you probably call it something different than that, but we call it a recoil pad and something that helps us reduce recoil from a shotgun. So what I want you to do is I want you to explain everything about yourself and how you came up with this cool idea.
Speaker 3:Fantastic, justin. It's a pleasure to meet you and thank you very much for having me. My name is Martin Gaudette. I had a lot of adventures in my life running a machine shop, teaching at a community college and rubbing elbows with some pretty smart cookies. I also ran a machine shop since I was 25. And in the process of teaching and being introduced to some influential people who were doing outside contracting in engineering terms, I was invited to make machines to test airplane parts and for 15 years or more I made destruction level test machines for landing gear and the rotor bits on helicopters and a bunch of other things that get off the ground and fly around. And in the process of that I discovered the circumstance.
Speaker 3:In one of the test machines I was working on, I discovered a circumstance that required a shock absorber, and the shock absorber that I developed is based on what happens between two hard surfaces and a thin film of fluid, like the joint in your knee. So when you pick up your heel and you stamp your foot down, the cartilage surfaces between your two leg bones come together and at a certain point the fluid film getting thinner and thinner has to go faster and faster to get out of the road, and at that point there is an elegant, simple, repeatable, mechanically robust shock absorber effect. Now the plus is that this is used in our bodies to cushion our knees and our spine. It's used all over in the industry for short stroke shock absorbers, but the problem is the stroke is short. So the flash of inspiration was well, let's put more than one of these layers on top of each other.
Speaker 3:And the first use of this new form of shock absorber was to test the landing gear. Yeah, there was a it's part of the machine that they used to test landing gear and, uh, it was a. It was, uh, an order of magnitude improvement on the current, uh, best practice. I saved them a lot of money, made a lot of money and, uh, and discovered a really neat thing and I went I'm sorry, I guess I've got to be clean with my language I went as hard as I could for patents in 2010. Now, in 2012, we incorporated to figure out what we were going to do with this thing. In the end, I've got at least nine patents all over the world for different machine and uses of it, of this new form of shock absorber, and now we have an industrially robust, well-developed shock absorber for end of stroke for robots and vibration reduction for high vibration signature machines. And we also have a very, very good use of a shock absorber, a hydraulic shock absorber, built into a form factor correct recoil pad.
Speaker 3:And that's a bit of a mind warp. And so, if I can equate the cushioning that would happen in your knee, or another way to visualize it, is if you knock the sheet of plywood over and as it's getting close to the ground, instead of going bang, it goes woof and it slides a lot. You know it, you know this, you know this, and this is exactly the physics that nature chose for your knee. And in essence, this industrial high-intensity shock absorber is spectacularly well-suited for reducing the energy that is transmitted between the gun and the shooter. And there it is. And so, in an inch and three-sixteenths length of package, I can put as much energy reduction as a muzzle brake on a big bore rifle, or more style recoil reduction stocks that you've seen, the high-end ones that look like a carbon fiber machine that costs thousands of dollars, or, in the case where there are others that have the guided chrome rod and piston anorphous shock absorbers built in, we can achieve equal to or better recoil reduction in a third of the installed cost by using this physics phenomenon that removes a substantial portion of the energy before you have to deal with it, before your body has to deal with it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let me paint you a picture, all right. So if you took and hit a stick onto a bowl of jello, the stick wouldn't get any, the jello in the bowl would get it all. And when you shoot a gun, we've done a lot of experiments with high-speed cameras and things to study how the impulse transfer occurs between the gun and the human animal. And so when you hit the stick onto the bowl of jello, all of the vibrations are going to happen in the Jell-O and all of the energy is going to get used up with the friction inside the Jell-O. And when you shoot a gun, that's exactly what happens With just the old bakelite plate that said Remington on the back, or Browning, or the old bakelite plates and I see a smile and I know you know what I mean or browning, or the old bakelite planks, and I see a smile and I know you know what I mean. So what we've done is we've put an extremely high-capacity shock absorber between the gun and you and instead of hitting the bowl of Jell-O with a stick. We're hitting the bowl of Jell-O with a bag of Jell-ello tied to the end of the stick, and so the first thing that happens is the two surfaces are going to meet and and and coupled to each other transparently. There's not going to be any point loading, and then the molecular friction that happens in the recoil pad is removed from the equation. That's going to knock him over. We remove a substantial portion of energy from being transmitted to you because the shock absorber is doing the job, and that's that multiple plate type self-compensating hydraulic damper that's built into the Falcon Strike.
Speaker 3:Now there are two other critically important things that happen when the gun begins towards you. First of all, because Falcon Strike is a bag full of juice that has the same density as human flesh, as chest wall muscle. When the gun starts towards you, the first thing that happens is it's going to flow to fill your nooks and crannies. Now, every other recoil pad that is, for example, rubber, only where it would be a closed cell foam rubber, think of a wetsuit cut out the shape of a recoil pad stuck on the end of a gun. In all those cases, the force required to bed, for example, your collarbone into the rubber, the force that your collarbone is going to see is going to begin to increase to the point where the little bits beside you that are still not loaded reach the recoil pad. The rubber only pad, you see, and in that case the collarbone gets loaded to a lot higher ratio of force than the little bits above and below your collarbone or the edge of your rotator cuff or any of the tendons or the blood vessels, the muscles, the sinew in your shoulder.
Speaker 3:In the case of the fluid behavior of the falcon strike hydraulic recoil reducing system, the fluid will flow to push equally all over the place.
Speaker 3:That's the first thing that happens.
Speaker 3:As this thing comes towards you.
Speaker 3:The second thing that happens is, as the pressure comes on inside the rubber bladder, there will be a distension.
Speaker 3:In other words, the rubber, the bladder is going to become pressurized from the inside as it flattens out. As the two bags of jello hit each other, the hydraulic fluid in the falcus stripe will become pressurized and the bladder will expand and our high-speed video shows that the leading edge of it, as it rolls out sideways, will climb on top of the shock wave as it's rolling outwards. We measured anywhere between 10% and 12% more surface area for the 3 or 5 milliseconds that the bladder is expanded sideways. So not only does the falcon strike fluid provide the best load coupling between top, middle and bottom of the pad, the increased surface area further reduces the force on any one part of your body. When you finally shorten the shock absorber that's inside the Falcon Strike, you remove a substantial amount of energy from the entire recoil event. That's a bit of a mind work, that's like, and we can name them all. We can name all of the competitors that have hydraulic shock absorbers.
Speaker 2:So what you're telling me, martin, is that the recoil of the gun it feels soft on your shoulder.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to Guns go bang don't hurt.
Speaker 2:Guns go bang, don't hurt, and it's tested. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's tested at 85% less felt recoil, correct?
Speaker 3:Correct, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2:Which is a substantial amount. That's a lot.
Speaker 3:It is a bold claim. It is a bold claim and we've got thousands upon thousands of units in the public domain and everybody's enjoying it. Absolutely yes, sir.
Speaker 2:So you and I were talking just a second ago, before we started this, and I told you that you could go to a gun club at any I don't care where it's at any tournament, any gun club, at any time, and you will hear people talk about this shell starting to give me a recoil issue with my gun, and the recoil of this stock now is starting to bother me. And this is where your product comes into play the 85% less felt recoil and then 35% less muzzle jump. You even hear people say I can't acquire that second target because of the recoil. Well, let me see how I can. Well, let me start shooting a different shell, let me start doing something different when all you really have to do is to try falcon strikes.
Speaker 3:Exactly right. I've not just measured in quantified a way with a well-built laboratory, the science of it, but I've heard it reported 100 ways from Sunday for that point exactly Less muzzle rise, less rock back Scientific reason or the mechanical reason why the whole thing gets rocked back less is because of the shotgun disorder, is because of the shock absorber, and it doesn't matter if it's a rifle sitting at a bench prone laying on the ground shotgunning sports. We understand, of course, that the shotguns and the rifle shooting is a whole different discipline. Each is specific onto the other, each is specific unto itself, but in all cases, because the shock absorber that's in the falcon strike removes a substantial amount of the energy, it's intuitive that you're going to get rocked back less.
Speaker 3:Now, since a man is shooting a gun, standing up has about a four-foot pivot distance between your kneecap and the center of gravity where the gun is pushing that bo head. If you push 30 less, the muscle goes up. 30 less done that means you're 30 closer to point for the next shot because there's a substantial amount of energy that has been eliminated from being transferred to you. Your your body's reverberating less. You have less sensory input. Your brain is not listening to the noise of being hit with a stick, you're able to think for a little sooner, think clearly sooner. You're able, with less physical effort, to be back on point for the next shot. You've lost less time by the flight of the second bird to acquire it, to plan mathematically and make the shot.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:All of those things are very subtle. You know it's funny because I talk to people all the time with sporting clays and cracking little orange plates there, like you do, and they all say the same thing my follow-up shot score is going up. My second shot score goes up. How come? I'll tell you why it's because you're not rocked right back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes a big difference you know, there's a lot of things that people have tried porting porting your barrels. I mean. You get a shotgun that's eight or 10 or 15 or $20,000 and you go port a set of barrels on it. You just devalue the gun. I have a couple of those sitting right here. The packaging, the presentation of the product, the way they go on the gun, the way they come off the gun is so simple that it's almost hard for me to believe that someone even came up with this.
Speaker 3:Well, it's not for my pride's sake, although I am very privileged to have been there when it was. You know it's pinched me. It's a really magical thing. I thank you for that, Justin.
Speaker 3:With all of the projects and adventures I've ever had in the industrial realm, it always devolves to the simplest object being the best. And in the case of Fog and Strike, we have a form factor. You don't need to have any draconian modifications to the stock. You just screw it on, clamp it on, go shoot the gun. That is elegantly simple and that's a basic tenet. The best part that you can ever design is the part that you don't need. That's the hardest one to put in the box is the part that's not there. And in this case we can get equal to or better performance than any guided chrome rod and I'm speaking in euphemisms. You understand what I mean to be the high-end stuff guided chrome rod, piston and orifice shock absorbers which, for varying reasons, have their own dynamic limitations. We can get this equal to a better performance in a flat mount inch and three sixteenths form factor custom fit to the stock package.
Speaker 2:Now tell me this, Martin how is it if I have one, if I only have one of these? Yes sir, how hard is it to take it off one gun and put it on the other gun?
Speaker 3:Well, it's dead simple. We have, because the bladder has juice in it. We can't drive a screw through the whole thing. Obviously, that would be the easiest thing to mount. So we devised a mounting system that involves a cam plate. The cam plate has two cams that pick up the sealing plate of the bladder. The cam plate is an eighth of an inch thick. It has two countersunk slots and those two countersunk slots provide a wide range of adaptability for different locations of screw holes in gunstocks.
Speaker 3:The synthetics are a little bit harder to match. We do have other strategies with with transition plates and things for that. But as far as as the cam plate getting mounted to the gun, if you can turn a doorknob, you can turn a screwdriver, you can mount the plate on the back end of the gun. Then the two cams which lock the pad onto the two cams which lock the pad onto the cam plate can be flipped open and the pad can be carried to another gun. Now, quite frankly, at the price point that we can wrap up all of this performance in, it would be the equating to taking the tires off your pickup truck to put on your ATV to go in the bush.
Speaker 3:Uh, everybody that's ever tried and asked me can I have another mounting plate? Sure, how many would you like? Yeah, I'll sell you as many as you want. They're cheap, but in the end, once you see what it's all about, I've had people put them on a half a dozen guns. I've had a guy I had a guy, a private man, put one on 30 of his extensive 30, 30, uh guns in his extensive collection.
Speaker 2:When I received the one I got, I opened it and I said I know this is easier than it looks, because I'd never seen anything like this before. You know the mounting plate, the cams I'm going to call them wings Okay, so you're going to call them cams. I I'm gonna call them wings. Okay, so you're gonna call them cams. I'm gonna call them wings.
Speaker 3:You flip the wings open and you set the mount, the pad, in the mounting bracket and close the wings and done, and there it is and I thought well, that was super simple by the time, by the time you buy those fancy chrome guided, chrome rod recoil reducing pads, um, I'm trying real hard not to just step on anybody's toes because, quite frankly, they all have a purpose and they all have a uh. They all bring something to the table for for uh. Yeah, that's uh, that's it. But to be fair, all the all of the higher end ones that incorporate a shock absorber to reduce the energy transmitted to the shooter, all of those uh will beat uh at least three to one for price yeah in a flat mount package that does not require modifying the stock to hog out all of that expensive mahogany or walnut not mahogany walnuts.
Speaker 3:I meant to say, you know, if, if you, if you buy a $3,800 piece of Turkish walnut and you tell a guy, here's a Dremel, go to it.
Speaker 2:Hog it up.
Speaker 3:And I'll be cutting an inch and a quarter off the end of it. But don't ask Right, right, because I've got to put all of these springs and all that stuff in there. Well, it's a one-way ticket. Um, generally most of the modern guns, the form factor is very nearly one inch. Now for all of the um, the, the rubber only pads, which pretty much um, they all, they've all grown to accept uh, the, the inch form factor. We're not that much like the full penalty for all of the increase in muzzle rise reduction.
Speaker 3:I've had an 83 year old fella that called me and he says Martin, I gotta quit shooting. Bill Winchester. He says I gotta quit shooting. He says I wore myself out on the trap circuit. He says I'm done. He says I went from a 12 to a 20. It went from a 20 to a 28. I had to quit. He says let me try to focus straight. Within three weeks he had run 700 rounds through his 12 gauge. He was just like a puppy again, he rejuvenated. Another fellow I was talking to a few months ago said he had a 400 shot weekend. An 85-year-old man. He says I had a 400 shot weekend. I was ready to go on Monday morning. Give it to me.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Because the energy that's transmitted to the shooter is reduced hydraulically in the pad. The bag of jello that's tied to the end of the stick is getting a lot of the energy, so the bowl of jello gets less, and that's the shock absorber that's in this thing that does that job yeah, and the rock back.
Speaker 2:You know we're talking about that, just the recoil, how it saves, or how it changes the way you shoot. I shoot a one and eight 1250. Yep, okay, winchester, and with the pad. Without the pad, what is the difference in what my body will do with and without a falcon strike?
Speaker 3:we measured, we met we a. Took a standard size guy, give him a six and a quarter pound single shot, break action shotgun. Member. The old grocery gutters, yeah, you bought a flat at 12 gauge shells and they gave you the gun. I swear to God.
Speaker 2:I don't remember that, but I've I've heard those stories.
Speaker 3:I've got one in my gun safe and there was a metal butt plate on this thing. And the fellow I got it from, he says Grandpa, that was Grandpa's gun. He says Dad shot it a couple of times and he says I won't go near it. They gave me the gun. Well, that was the first one that got the fog of strike. I put that gun in the hands of a meaty fellow, a guy that could handle a gun, and after we were measuring before and after with high-speed cameras. We were measuring muzzle rise, we were measuring the distance that his nose got moved backwards, we were measuring the distance that the gun was moving backwards and we were measuring the distance that his shoulder was moving backwards. In other words, between the two, between the gun, that his shoulder was moving backwards, in other words, between the two, between the gun and the shoulder. We were able to calculate the deceleration of one as it came into the other, all with high speed cameras. And, um, just just funny anecdote, we could actually see the shock wave running up the guy's arm all the way to his trigger finger, and the last thing that would happen would be his trigger finger would wiggle at exactly the same time as his earlobe would wiggle, because distance wise, both are the same distance and so, if you can imagine a, a pebble in a pond and the rings running out, well, there's your bowl of jello right there. And so what we did is we did an extensive series of high-speed video analyses to measure the muzzle rise, the recoil velocity, the rock back of the shooter, and that was the basis of one of our claims. And then we did a whole bunch of science where we duplicated, because after about three hours the guys Bob's shoulder was good and red he says, martin, I can't do this anymore, I quit, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. So anyway, we came back.
Speaker 3:We built a laboratory specifically to duplicate the science of a man standing up. The pivot is four feet, because that's the distance between the kneecap and the center of gravity where you push the gun. For a normal man standing up, the weight of the pendulum is 69 pounds, because that is the average weight of the thorax of a man standing up shooting a gun. The face of the pendulum has a load cell so we can measure how hard the gun pushes and we have a tracing repeater that measures how far back the pendulum gets thrown. With this scientific equipment. We can not only measure the peak force, which is what a lot of the rubber-only recoil pad people measure. We're able to measure how much energy is transmitted to the shooter by observing how far the pendulum gets moved backwards, which is identical to standing it on its head, putting the pivot at the bottom and having the man go bobblehead. So with this instrument we're able to duplicate and not hurt anybody while we're doing it. We can shoot thousands and thousands of rounds. In fact we have and we've compared everything from .22 rimfire all the way to 375 H&H, 338
Speaker 3:Lapua. We did not try to 50 BMG, we didn't want to blow the back end out of the test cell
Speaker 3:Now. We tried every load combination, every action combination, every muzzle combination, muzzle brakes, ported
Speaker 3:barrels. We tried every choke combination with shotguns and rifles. All of that to say that when the gun goes, bang your 12 gauge inch or 1, 1⁄8 ounce of 1250, that's standard field load with a shotgun that weighs seven and a half pounds. We measured, transmitted 12 foot pounds of energy to the analogy to the test rig without a energy reducing recoil system, also known as a rubber only recoil pad, and we consistently measured between eight and5 and 9 foot-pounds of energy transmitted to the analogy with the Falkenstripe. In other words, we're able to reduce the energy transmitted to the analogy by 30% or 35% easily, and I've seen it go as high as 46%, 50% being the theoretical maximum, depending on how we tune things. There are concessions to be made for the form factor, there's a lot of stuff that you've got to get right to make it right for all the conditions, but we're happy to claim that we've reduced the energy by 30 or 35% easily, which, because your bobblehead is getting shoved over. 35% less equals 35% less. Meserize it's intuitive, it's plain, it's simple, it's elegant.
Speaker 2:I kind of want to talk about you for a minute. I want to know how you got to the point that you're at now. Tell me about where you grew up. Tell me about how you got into doing what you do. Did you used to hunt? Did you used to fish? Were you outdoors guy?
Speaker 3:All of the above, there's nothing. There's nothing that we didn't try. I'm not going to say I went to the drugstore to buy potassium nitrate as a kid to make rockets. I'm not going to say that. And I'm not going to say that instead of making rockets because they intended to blow up the launch pad, we made firecrackers. I'm not going to say that. You know, I was in the military. I shot a whole bunch of .308s and the first time I pulled the trigger I said this isn't a good scene. Laying prone the gas off. They would crank the gas pressure all the way up so the things wouldn't foul Just like kicking you in the head. I know about recoil. You asked me about where I'm from. I'm a farm kid. I grew up in the mud, under a rock, in a swamp, started with nothing Sounds like a good place.
Speaker 3:I love it, man. Yeah, yeah, you know, we spent our time in the bush. There wasn't a square inch of my father's farm and the two farms one on either side that I didn't know every square inch of. You could take me in the bush and spin me around three times and I knew exactly my, you know, I knew exactly which way. Uh, uh, you know, growing up, growing up with uh, with a whole lot of of um, fruitful things to explore mechanically and uh and um. Yeah, I mean, it gave us, gave us a lot of uh, me and my brothers I I was the third brother, the oldest one you couldn't beat, and the second one was a little bit cranky because he couldn't beat the oldest one, so the second one would turn around and pick on me. So I just had to get Wiley in the head and think things through.
Speaker 3:One of my brothers has a bunch of patents for things that go into nuclear reactors. And one day we were having a family gathering and he says and he was kind of still, he was midlife, you know and he said we're a little bit older now, so we've gotten over that, but the competition was still there. And he says, yeah, I just got my third patent you don't tell me all about it and I said, well, I've only got one yet. Yeah, anyway, so with the shock absorber. And then a few years later, I said I'm up to three now. And he says, yeah, me too. And then after a while he said you know, mike says to me, he says I got to hand it to you. He says the government paid to do the R&D on my patents. He says, but you did it, bootstraps, and you figured it out and you paid for the whole thing yourself. And he shook my hand and he thanked me for for for being. You know what I mean. Yeah, but really that's the downrange, uh, uh, result of being a third brother.
Speaker 3:I can't beat anybody, so I just got to get at it right, right, um. I I learned an awful lot from my older brothers, uh, in machining and welding and mechanics and all of that and um, and just just, you know I was hardwired.
Speaker 3:I started playing with clocks when I was six years old. You know, give me a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. I was taking everything apart my mother's sewing machine, you name it. And so there's a lot of innate ability mechanically. I have a lot of spatial relations aptitude and to me, to observe the clean, simplest physics explanation for what I'm looking at is a game. It's a joyful thing to figure out all of the variables and understand the ratios of why things happen, you know. And so, applying that innate characteristic to me to the next design project or the next thing, there's always a flash of inspiration that comes by looking to see where you can apply this new understanding. And then you look around and you run through all of the you know cognitive, contextual links that you can make and you say, well, that might fit into this.
Speaker 3:So as soon as we had the first shock absorber it's a little thing about this big and I put it on the anvil and I've wailed on it with a sledgehammer and it's just a little round thing that's three inches round and an inch and a half high, and the shock absorber that's in it is about oh I don't know three-eighths and an inch and a half high and there's a the shock absorber that's in. It is about, oh I don't know, three eighths of an inch thick and two inches around, which is probably smaller than the shock absorber in the falcon strike. The purpose of this prototype was to understand or to explore the physics of the idea that I had had standing in front of that test machine for the landing gear in the big city there, and when I hit it with a sledgehammer it just went splat. It's like throwing a brick in mud. It just whooped and stopped dead in its tracks and I said, oh boy, this is going to be fun.
Speaker 3:Patents, patents, patents run all the way. I can't believe, honestly. I mean, they've been shooting guns probably since the year 1300, and they've been shooting shoulder-fired guns reliably since about the year 1500. And I cannot fathom in my mind how it's possible that nobody in the last 1500 years or 1200 years hasn't put the two ideas together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you would think so.
Speaker 3:That. That freaks my mind, that that, that, just that. That I find that. I find that a bit of a fairy tale myself, personally.
Speaker 3:But to, to, to circle back to your question where does this come? Well, let me ask you, where do any elegant, simple, adaptable, self-compensating machines come from? Where, where, where do we have? Where did we get an airplane? Where did we get a genogen? Where did we get you know? Where did we get, uh, uh, the high voltage? Did we get you know? Where did we get the high voltage DC light bulb with you know and downrange? Why is this still called the Edison Electric Company, right, for example? Where do these things come from? That's, I've had wonderful adventures and I'm privileged to think that this is an event. That is an aha moment. It's just this is cool, this is cool. And to take everything out of the box that doesn't belong there and all you got is a bag full of juice with a shock absorber floating around that has all these attributes that add up to removing 30 or 35% of the energy and reducing the felt recoil by a whole bunch, because the mechanical coupling between the stick and the bowl of jello removes the energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of people that'll listen to this will definitely be more interested in Falcon strikes products after this. But for sure, now let me ask you this Falcon strike started as a company when? What year was that?
Speaker 3:2012. And how?
Speaker 2:and tell me where it's grown to now? Uh, 2012,. We did fundamental science.
Speaker 3:We did, uh, you know a whole lot of boring stuff that nobody really uh cares to listen to, um, but truly is required to get to where we are. We did fundamental science, we did. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. Get to where we are. We did. Fundamental science, we did. I've got a mathematical formula that can take and configure a shock absorber to produce any result I need, industrially or otherwise, and that takes time and costs a lot of engineering and money and whatever doesn't matter. And so, starting with that, by 2014, we had a clear mandate to develop products that incorporated this shock absorber. So 10 years ago, the first Falcon Strike got made. It's still on my 12 gauge. It's still on that six and a quarter pound single shot break action, shotgun in my gun safe. Single shot break action, shotgun in my gun safe. Um, by 2015, we already had six mold sets uh, an 870, non-express uh, the, the, the, the 870, remington 870, the one with the supercell. We had one for that. We had the browning, uh, the browning, uh, what you'd what you'd call a 725 satori, that sort of thing. There were probably three or four. Oh, the Mossberg 500 was on the first round of molds. Then we developed relationships with a few stores in our area so that we could observe the behavior of the object and start to get the consumer feedback for the performance. We, in 2016, got into a two-tier distribution in the province of Quebec in Canada specifically so that we would shelter the and I'd probably the corporate strategy is probably transparent. Anyway, we had a regional distribution arrangement with 200 stores to begin to gather the product behavior on the long term and basically to test the mechanical engineering, the dynamics, the service life, the response from the customer and to learn how to commercialize this in a logical way.
Speaker 3:You know, at one point and many times, I felt to myself I'm holding the great pearl like a, a fellow that wrote the great giraffe, wrote the book the Great Pearl, or the fellow standing on the shore and he's got nothing, but he's got the great pearl in his hand. And in the end, everybody else loses, and he does too, because you can't capitalize on the great pearl. I know, and I still have, a trajectory of industrial growth past lifetimes of me and and the people around me, uh, for all of the industrial applications, but with the Falcon Strike, with the branding exercise and all the work that goes into that. We didn't want to clumsily lose the great pearl, if that makes sense. And so I'm all for organic growth and I'm all for reasoned growth within my means, reasoned growth within my means, specifically to have a good, solid company and not lose the great pearl. And so, um five years ago now, we launched in the states, based on the market, the longitudinal market study in a region, you know and uh, with rebranding, more online presence, all of that stuff takes a tremendous amount of. There's not just one bulldozer pushing on the mountain, there's a hundred bulldozers pushing on the mountain to move it even a little bit, to get all of the bricks in the wall that build a successful new technology. And so now, since five years, we have a presence in online sales in the USA.
Speaker 3:We have 18 different model sizes of the custom fit the custom fit is directly measured. Sizes of the custom fit the custom fit is directly measured to fit the stock exactly. Okay, we've got 18 preordained sizes for the Browning, the Benelli, the Beretta, the CZ, mossberg, remington, marlin, parker, hale. Yeah, all right, we got this figured out. Yeah, all right, we got this figured out. We got into a mold development program that measured all the guns in the public domain and arrived at an averaged shape and size to suit the best arrangement, the best spread of them. Yeah, the custom fit comes in a pre-fit size that will fit your Browning 725 without any modifications. No cutting, no grinding. Yeah, your Mossberg 500, your grandpa's Mossberg 500, we've got a direct bolt on All the old Remington 870s with the excuse me, with the Remington Supercell. We got one that bolts exactly for that. We have a lot of them, supercell, we got one that bolts exactly for that. We have a lot of them. You know the Benelli Super Black with the Comfort Tech, the one that pops out. We were able to develop a mounting system to go and click into and we've got a direct match for all of those, for example. That's all in your custom fit sizes.
Speaker 3:We also, to make up the small differences or the people that don't want to put as much effort into measuring, we make a multi-fit. The multi-fit is exactly the same as a small, a medium and a large custom fit, except we added a skirt. The skirt is 3-8ths of an inch wide and when you peel the skirt back, put it on the gun and then snap the skirt over the stock. The blending of the stock to the pad becomes automatic by that 3-8ths wide skirt. It's not a slip-on. It still requires screwing the mounting plate. The only thing is the skirt does the blending of the stock to the pad automatically. So we make two principal kinds the custom fit and the multi fit. Now the multi fit is useful for black guns. It's useful for camo guns because the skirt hides the glint of the mounting plate.
Speaker 3:If you're shooting at critters that are blinking at you, a lot of them don't like the thing blinking back. So the multi-fit is a good choice for all the hunting situations. The multi-fit is a good choice for stocks that are either outside of what is common in the normal, or people that cut their stock, or people that your son getting into shooting and appreciating focus. Right, because now he's not thinking about the recoil, he's thinking about his game, right? That component, the recoil component, is removed from the equation. Therefore, now he's an animal and he's hunting that little orange thing to outgrow the junior 20 gauge that they got, or they're going to grow into a series of spacers while their frame is getting bigger until they get to the point where they're going to go and get a krieg off k80 or some other fancy fancy machine, the silver sights or whatever, right, um, uh, major proxy, yeah, anyway. So the point is this that the multi-fit has a good use for accommodating different size stocks if the situation is going to change. Those are all good uses for the multi-fit, the one with the skirt.
Speaker 3:Now we also developed grind-to-fit plates because there are still other conditions where somebody cuts their stock, somebody refinishes their stock, somebody takes a draw knife and a piece of walnut and makes their own. You know, somebody has a particular aesthetic in mind and they come up with something that is their creation. I'm all for that. The Grind2Fit plates have 1, 8 inch extra material all around so that when you mount the Grind2Fit plate to the stock you have an eighth of an inch extra material on the grind to fit plate. Each of the grind to fit plates. It matches the custom fit model that it's meant for a 5103. The one I talked about for the for the 725 or a browning, for example, is going to take a 5103.
Speaker 3:Usually, if you have a situation where the stock's a little bit bigger and it's hanging over by a 32nd of an inch, quite frankly it's a sin of astronomical proportion to stand the stock your nice shot going up in the rack to go into the clubhouse to take a whiz and you hook the corner of the varnish and you pop the varnish off the end.
Speaker 3:That's a sin of astronomical proportion. So for coffee table furniture, quality match between the mounting plate and the varnish. We make the grind-to-fit plates. In this case, if it's a 5103 custom fit, it would take a 5103G grind-to-fit plate which you can then make masterfully to the wood, protect and polish. A lot of the gunsmiths what they'll do is because this is high grade, aircraft grade aluminum the plates are made with. They'll take a bright, clean, polish. They'll take a nice mirror polish. And a lot of the high end installers and gunsmiths will take the time for their customers' sake to bring them to a high luster. And now you have not just a perfect match of a Falkenstreich on a high-end gun, you've got a showpiece as well. And all of these things are possible with the grind-to-fit plates, which is another way of accommodating every size under the sun.
Speaker 2:Can you take A custom stock that a lot of these pro shooters use and make the pad fit their stock perfectly?
Speaker 3:The way to accomplish that specifically is to measure the shape that you want to mount it to. Go to our website. There are charts, there are tools, there are printable templates. You're able to print the template true to scale. They are engineered drawings, not pictures. You reproduce them correctly. Then you can trust that the sheet of paper that has the profile on it is exactly what we're going to ship you.
Speaker 3:You stand the gun up on the coffee table and say yes, no, some people cut it out with a pair of scissors. It's probably the best course I took in kindergarten was how to run a pair of scissors. Stand it up on the end of the gun. I since moved on to drill holes in steel. Anyway, the point is this the templates that are available on our custom fit selection page permit you to have a true to scale representation delivered right to you at the internet to verify if there is a direct fit in the custom fit line, if you would prefer on the website to explore the multi fit and not bust your head over it.
Speaker 3:The multi fit skirt is discreet. It's not universally chosen for somebody that's going to spend $10,000 or $20,000 on a shotgun that has a platinum pheasant on one side and a 24-karat gold dog on the other side. But quite frankly, in answer to your question, how do I fit any gun with focus right? The first thing you do is go on our website, find the size chart, take the pad off of the back of your gun, measure the wood exactly, go in the chart. The chart has three columns the height of the stock, the width of the stock and the model number. Click on the model number. The template will open in a new window. Hit the printer button. Go down to your coffee table with your kindergarten scissors, cut it out, try it. You're off in the races if we don't have in our 18 sizes a fit order for the closest custom fit size that is contained entirely within the stock and the grind to fit plate that goes with it.
Speaker 2:I've really learned a whole lot more than I thought I did. I mean, I've read about Falcon Strike and watched, I've seen your online presence as far as social media and all that's concerned, and I even have them as far as social media and all that's concerned, and I even have them. But talking to you really clarified a lot of the questions that I had. Listen, I like your analogies. I like the amount of work and time and effort that you've put into something. I can tell that you're really passionate about this product.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Justin. I really appreciate your interest and it's great talking with you as well. I really do appreciate it. I've got hundreds upon hundreds of stories directly from people that went out and tried it.
Speaker 3:I had a fellow bring me his grandfather's 270 a short barrel, short stock, little rifle, and uh kick like a mule and uh couldn't do it, couldn't do it, and so all of the emotional attachment to that gun couldn't do it, couldn't do it, and so all of the emotional attachment to that gun couldn't do it. I put a focus strike on. We went down by the railroad tracks and I said, all right, go do it. And he shot the gun the first time and he didn't say a word, he just slumped his shoulders and he got quiet for about 20 seconds and he choked up. He says what did you do to my grandfather's gun? Give me another bullet. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang bang. That's amazing to think that the emotional attachment we have to such an elegantly crafted mechanical object, it's universal. There aren't the works of art. We talked a little bit about art before we started. Well, guns are a work of art and if we can remove the one objection that what goes that way is coming this way too right.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:If we can remove that one objection or bring it below the point where your animal starts to react, well, then you can start thinking about what you're trying to accomplish and just be natural and do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, rejuvenated 85 years. Last year, two, three years ago I had a 74-year-old granny, shirley Shirley calls me. We got a focus strike on her 50 Cal BMG. She's in the 1,000-yard club. She shot, I don't know, second or third in the weekend average average. She got 8, 7, 8's in 50, 8, 7, 8's average in at a thousand yards with a 50 cal BMG in 53 shots. I think. Yeah, I think that was the story. So here's a 74 year old granny laying on a mat with a 50 cal BMG plugging a thousand yards and she got an 8, 7, 8's diameter average.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Uh, I, there was another fella. Uh, the the gun, the gun range officer, the, the, the fire control officer, the gun range comes in. There was a, there was a. It was a store that that uh went under and uh, a store that went under and they had a. They had a closeout sale and he comes in with an 1895 Marlin and he didn't bring back a new gun. He says I shot this thing three times. He didn't come in with his new gun and put it on my gun counter. He came in and threw it down. He says this thing kicks too hard. He says put a focus, strike on it. He took that 1895 Marlin 1870. That's sorry. Uh 45 70 and 1895 45 70. His name is bruce, he's the fire like.
Speaker 3:I said, the fire control officer at the range, past president. In fact, I'm going to go shooting again next week, doesn't matter. He went home with his 45 70 and he says I ran 37 rounds plinking with a 45-70 in a t-shirt. I ran out of bullets. He says I'm going to have to reload some more. They got an offload target at 500 yards and he was plinking. Him and his buddy Dale were plinking with a 45-70. Bang, bang, bang.
Speaker 3:I heard that story more than once. I heard a fella in BC, in the West Coast it might have been Washington State, maybe Him and his son ran 100 rounds between the two of them in a 45-70. Playing Bang, bang, bang, bang. Okay, my turn. They were playing in a 45-70 with a focus train. And the reason that these things continue, you know. The fellow I told you about ran 450 shots in the weekend, an older gentleman that would have been black and blue from his earlobe to his belly button.
Speaker 3:In any other case, by reducing the energy transmitted to the shooter to a comfortable amount because of the hydraulic shock absorber that's in this thing, it extends the range, the comfort, it allows you to get into the behavior of what you're trying to do, rather than the behavior what you're trying to do is doing to you. Right, yeah, yeah, and, and, and, and, on, and, on, and on and on. I've heard yeah, anyway, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's, it's a privilege, man it it really is, justin to participate in such an elegantly simple realization. Hey, let's put a bunch of these thin films together in a bag full of juice that has the same density as the flesh of a human. So now we're not hitting the bowl of Jell-O with a stick. We're hitting the bowl of Jell-O with a bag, tied on the end of the stick. Yep, and the Jell-O in the stick, the Jell-O in the bag and the Jell-O in the bowl get to know each other intimately and it makes the load coupling transparent. You don't get bruising, you don't? You know, it doesn't hurt. We reduce the muzzle, rise. Guess what We've just? We've just made a significant advancement in the firing of shoulder fired guns.
Speaker 3:Mark Leary, where did the name Falcon Strike come from? You know, there's an interesting thing that happens. Where does the name branding come from? Well, it was the result of a branding exercise from a very talented man, our first marketing director, and the crux of what we ended up with was in my mind's eye. I'm the falcon and I see the target at 185 yards and that's that one little point in all of the space, that's the one little point that the bullet has to get. And I'm the falcon and I've taken my speed dive and I'm going, going. The target's getting bigger, the target's getting bigger and zip, pop, bullseye, gotcha. And so you know where did the, where the name come from?
Speaker 3:We did, you know, we, we, we sat around the room drinking coffee and comfortable couches, and you know, you know, are we going to call it an animal, are we going to call it a machine, are we going to call it a, an emotion, you know? Uh, okay, let's talk about emotions. Okay, let's talk about emotions. Uh, the super pink pillow, uh, the, the big woods, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, the, the mama's boy, uh, right, Okay, well all right, write those down.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about animals. Well, we got a cobra and we got a bear, and we want strength and we want aggression and we want precision, we want elegance. Okay, let's talk about that, let's talk. What do we want to accomplish? What do we want to say? Okay, let's talk about that, let's talk. What do we want to accomplish? What do we want to say you know, um, the, the, um, yeah, that's, that's, it's a process, uh, and and that is just one example of the effort that was put into arrive at an elegant, simple, high-performance solution.
Speaker 2:All right For the people listening. Where do they go to buy this?
Speaker 3:Falconstrikeusacom an elegant, simple, high-performance solution. All right For the people listening. Where do they go to buy this Falconstrikeusacom?
Speaker 2:Falconstrikeusacom and everything's on there. You ship it right to them.
Speaker 3:Ship it right to them. Our distribution center is online. Everything's in stock. It has been since the beginning, made on our chunk of ground with our steel and our aluminum and our rubber and our screws. I'm a firm believer in that. There's a hole. There's a hole.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know what I'm going to shut up now, but I'll tell you one thing. Let me put it to you this way 40 years ago, when I dreamt of having good hand tools, snap-on Fuller, you took apart all the mills. They took apart all the machine shops. They took apart they built satellites everywhere else. You know what I'm talking about and to the point where it cut the ability to do it here. Now, part of being born in the mud, under a rock, in the swamp was going to get every single example of machine tool that I could and gather them and clutch them like mother hen under my wings and learn how to use them and how to be creative and apply them for exactly what they were meant for them, and how to be creative and apply them for exactly what they were meant for. My entire life has been a grand adventure of learning, and I didn't start with a machine shop because I wanted to make money. And I didn't start with a machine shop because I wanted to wear out a bunch of humans and trade four quarters for a buck, plus the 21 cents profit, the blue chip profit. Yeah, I didn't want that. What I wanted was the privilege of making anything I wanted whenever I wanted, and to keep that art alive. All of the old dinosaurs. I made it a fervent, passioned exercise to go and talk to all the old dinosaurs, impassioned exercise to go and talk to all the old dinosaurs, beginning from forging steel, to understand the art, the craft and to resolve to a scientific reason why things happen.
Speaker 3:I've got a full-on manual machine shop. I've got a full-on CNC machine shop. I've got mold-making capability. I've got rubber molding machines, plastic ejection mold machines. I've got mold making capability. I've got rubber molding machines, plastic ejection machines. I got punch presses. I've got cranes. I can, I can, I can. Cnc plasma cutting table. I got all the welding processes I gotta, I can. I got a lot of toys. I can make castings. I can make forgings right here. Um, yeah, all that stuff. I can melt down an oil engine block and cast a mold block, machine it out and make. I wouldn't because the quality of the mold wouldn't be there. But I can make the blank to make the mold block, to make a falcon stripe, and all of that is an example of being the candle holder, the flame holder right Of right here, right now. Now I'll tell you. People say, martin, how come you're not a millionaire yet? Well, I'll tell you, because I've been holding the flame here.
Speaker 3:I didn't do it for the money. I did it for the joy of understanding the science. I did it for the privilege of doing what I want when I have the inspiration to do it. I did it for the adventure of spending 15 years inspiring young men and being the nurturing, the one that would just click that switch and get them to see the elegance of it. I got to sit in the mahogany boardrooms. This freaks me out.
Speaker 3:Man, sit in the mahogany boardrooms and here I come with my crafted little bag of experiences and, across the table, phd, phd, engineer, engineer, phd, phd. They got the bean counter, they got the top purchasing guy. There's about 10 of them there. They all got their arms crossed and they know what machine they want and they know they want to take a chunk out of my hide to get what they want right. They're aggressive, I'll grant you that. And on my side there's a PhD engineer that I taught with a really crafty dynamics engineer. He did him and I did tag team, all kinds of business Myself. There's a salesman and there's the owner of the business, that's it. And we would have an hour and a half meeting in the mahogany boardroom of the aircraft manufacturing place and after an hour of talk and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they would all lean in and say, okay, martin, what are we going to build? What a privilege. And I'll tell you, we made quarter million, half a million dollar turnkey machines to 50 ton, hydraulic presses to squish landing gear. We made all kinds of stuff to try to break the rotor parts on helicopters and had a lot of interesting adventures.
Speaker 3:Now, that doesn't come from nothing and I hope you don't think I'm being rude or proud. Please understand that. It's the description of the passion to hold the knowledge and the ability to do so as the product Does. That make sense. Ability to do so as the product Does. That make sense. And included in all of that are the machines. And I'm not going to make the best aluminum casting there is, but I'll make you one and all of the rest of it, how to forge, how to make the forging does, how to make production. All of that stuff is all sitting in reserve the hard way while everybody went to China to get a boatload of junk. I'll tell you where that junk is it's all in the landfill and they're hauling another boatload and finally somebody said wait a minute. Anyway, that's a whole other story.
Speaker 3:Now, when the COVID hit, everybody started climbing back on board, made in USA, because they were screwed. I had a smile a foot and a half wide, and I'll tell you why Because everything that was required was sitting in a pile waiting to be turned on, click. I didn't go to China for anything, not a bit of it, or anywhere else. It's all made here with our steel, with our people, with our hands, with our grit, and there was no shortage. I don't think I had a back order for more than 10 parts, 10 recoil pads, in all of the last five years in the USA. Why? Because I make it here. I hire my neighbors, they work, they're happy. We make it with our steel and our aluminum. What's the problem? There is no problem and I take great delight in well anyway, you're passionate about it.
Speaker 3:There's different ways of doing things, there's different ways of going about it, but I tell you, I sleep at night because I've got everything I need. I'm richly blessed by a good bunch of folks, a round of happy people. Richly blessed by a good bunch of folks, a round of happy people. And, yeah, that goes a long way to soften the blow of having done it the hard way. And there's never any problem, there's just no, there's just everything's up from here. And so that same organic growth track of biding my time to make sure I didn't drop the great pearl in the mud, losing it right. Now we're set and a whole lot of people are enjoying the fruits of that disciplined slow burn. Because I don't intend to get a flash in the pan. Get on the boatload of junk, get in, get out, make my money and yeah, that's no justice there in my scale of ethics.
Speaker 2:Thank you for coming on. I appreciate you and we look forward to talking to you again. For sure, Absolutely Call the 800 number, press 2. We look forward to talking to you again.
Speaker 3:For sure, absolutely Call the 800 number, press two. It comes to me.
Speaker 2:Does that come straight to you? Now? I'm tech support. Yeah, your tech support.
Speaker 3:For now, anyway, yeah, uh, tech support, because I know it so well, and so right now we're in a phase of, of, uh, of growth that that is making Falcon Strike, the corporate, the whole thing scalable, sustainable and profitable those are the three words that I repeat to myself. It has to be scalable, sustainable and profitable, which requires a whole different skill set than making an elegant, shiny object.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, but that's where we're at right now.
Speaker 2:I appreciate your time. Appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 3:I really appreciate the time we had together. It's a privilege to have the opportunity to describe the passion that I have and the process of participating in such an elegant thing called Falkenstrike. It certainly is a grand adventure. It's a lifelong grand adventure. The whole process has been wonderful and I really enjoyed our afternoon together. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
