Although it’s something of a trope, Magpul is one of those quintessential American success stories that started in somebody’s basement. 

Richard Fitzpatrick, a Marine veteran started out with an idea to provide soldiers with a product to replace the 550 cord and duct tape loops soldiers were adding to their magazines, in order to make getting them out of ammo pouches a bit easier. 

He contracted a neighbor to set up an injection molding machine in his garage, and while the neighbor operated the press, Fitzpatrick and his wife boxed up products in their basement and shipped them out to customers. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Drake Clark fell in love with the AR-15 through his job on the patrol rifle team in the Oakland, California, Police Department and wound up using the original Magpul on the job, before moving to Colorado, where he was hired to head up sales efforts. We caught up with him at his ranch and range complex near Gillette, Wyoming.

RECOIL: What made you leave law enforcement?

DC: It was really the opportunity offered by Magpul’s founder, Richard Fitzpatrick, who I met in Colorado while at the sheriff's office. I was already familiar with the first original Magpul product, the actual Magpul brought out in 2000 after the company was formed in 1999. I did some part-time work with him on the sales side of things, then when things took off I moved over full time with a few of the people who built what Magpul is today.

What was the first product you were involved with on the development side?

DC: I think that was back in my part-time days, and it was the enhanced follower. Richard was trying to come up with a solution for the performance of the green and black GI followers in the 30-round magazines, and he and I had extensive conversations about it. And while I wasn’t directly involved in its design, I did a lot of testing and feedback during product development.

And that led directly to the PMAG?

DC: Not directly, as there were a few products before that. The MIAD grip came out, then the CTR stock in the 2005 to 2006 time frame during the time we were working on the PMAG. We launched that publicly in 2007, if I’m not mistake at the Orlando SHOT Show, back when we didn’t just have it in Vegas, and then sales just exploded from there.

Magpul has had a lot of additions to the catalog since it was formed. What’s been the most memorable one for you?

DC: It’s hard not to default to the PMAG, as that’s been my business card for going on 20 years now, but maybe the most memorable was working on the Masada project. That was when I had way less gray hair in my beard and all of us were quite a bit younger. 

Mike Mayberry and Brian Nakayama were the brains behind it, and it was an exciting time as really there were no modular firearms around then. While I love the AR-15, we came up with something that could change calibers, swap lower receivers out, and build it mission specific so you could have a DMR or CQB gun or a suppressed upper.

At the time, there were some big competitions going on with the army and some foreign companies had a foot in the door, and we were like, hey, we want to see American troops carrying an American weapon, built by Americans and designed by Americans. 

So, go over the story after the initial design.

DC: I think we had six prototypes that we built and all of them ran pretty good. Building six of something easy. Building 6,000 in a month is a different story, and we wanted to stay in our lane in the accessory world and let the guys that had that tenure in the firearms space carry that torch, while we could complement what they’re doing with really high-end furniture. 

So, we licensed the manufacturing rights to Bushmaster initially, then of course when they got bought up by Freedom Group the design went with them. Their goal was to produce a commercial version of this thing, which took a lot longer than we would’ve liked. Along the way, the modularity was lacking — we didn’t see the caliber changes initially, and the vision we had didn't actually come to fruition. 

Then, Remington Defense got involved, and they did some cool things like a magnesium lower receiver and different charging handle, and both the Bushmaster ACR and Remington did very well in the military trials. I think a lot of its success came down to the design of the bolt carrier group, where you had it riding on those steel rails. 

The whole thing was very robust and reliable.

I think the general public wanted to see a better price on the gun. It cost a lot of money to build this thing and get tooled up for a production environment and one the things that harmed the ACR initially was that this was the start of the era of the price point rifle. There was a lot of demand for AR-15s, and manufacturers were filling that demand with $500 rifles, and why would you buy the $2,400 rifle instead? 

I know a lot of people are interested in our positioning on the ACR tooling packages and especially the stock. 

There’s been a lot of guns that weren't designed around it that wind up with ACR stocks through adapter kits. Magpul is adhering to our standards when it comes to new designs, and the ACR furniture; these are very old molds with a lot of shots through them, so we decided to not jump back into that business. The cost of making new molds wouldn’t be justified for the demand.

The firearms industry is quite unusual in that it’s filled with very passionate consumers. You get people who say, “I love this design! You should make it.” And then you crunch the numbers and find out that you’d sell at least a hundred of them to people who are just as passionate.

DC: Absolutely. At Magpul we have some very bright and driven people who are always coming up with new ideas for products. There’s a lot of times where we love them, but we can’t bite on a new product without running the numbers to find out what it would cost to put it in production versus the projected demand. 

An example of that is the new DAKA Grid Organizers. We kicked that idea around for years until we could come up with a way to make them so that people could spend their hard-earned money on them and feel like they were getting their money’s worth. And we could still make a profit. 

How does Magpul see itself, as an injection molding company that solves problems in the gun space or as a gun company that just happens to do injection molding?

DC: I think it’s probably the latter. We’re gun guys, but we don’t just do injection molding. We all have this passion for making things work better and look better, and if they do that and it’s a reasonable price, that’s what we’re attacking here. 

We try to keep our product development separate from production, because as you know, demand is very cyclical, so no matter what the market is doing, we’re on the gas the entire time. 

We’ve gotten a lot better at launching products. In the past six months, if we’re talking about it publicly, then you’re able to go buy the product. We’re not doing the “talk about it and then two years later maybe get the product.” The lever gun stock and forend, we announced that at NRA [show] and that Friday you could actually go buy it. I’ve been around long enough, to catch a lot of flack over the years.

OK, so what’s happening with the foldy Glock?

DC: [Laughs] OK, that’s a good one. This is partnership with ZEV that started a few years ago and it’s exciting because it’s been around for as long as I have — it’s a design that Mike Mayberry came up with years ago, and we touted it as demonstration of our talents and what we were capable of doing. 

Again, we’re not a gun company so we looked for a partner to bring it to production while we handled the polymer components associated with it. We’re really excited for it to come to market at a price we think is going to be appealing to people. You can say it’s gimmicky for sure, but I think there’s a good use case for this thing in many situations. 

And I suspect that the countless requests I’ve gotten over the years from government agencies and foreign governments interested in buying it mean it’s not just for the U.S. commercial market.

So, when?

DC: We’re pretty close. We’re hoping to see something this year, and I would really like to see it shipping before the holidays.

You’re bringing out new products all the time and the catalog can’t expand infinitely, so of the products you’ve discontinued, which are the most memorable and which ones would you like to bring back?

DC: That’s a great question, and I don’t want to disappoint you with my answer but we’ve actually stopped shipment on very few SKUs over the years. 

I remember working on the catalog before SHOT Show every year and you keep adding a couple of pages, or in some cases 20 pages, and all of a sudden you’ve got like this coffee table book. And when you include all colors, we’re at thousands and thousands of SKUs now. But to get back to the question, of the things that have been discontinued that I wish could be brought back, there’s something we called the speed plate, which was a floorplate for 9mm Glocks. 

You’d remove the factory floorplate and replace it with this, and it looked similar to a ranger plate with a loop and that thing made it really easy to pull mags out of your duty belt when I was a cop, and you could also retain the magazine between your knuckles.

Let’s talk about the process of making stuff via injection molding, because from the outside looking in, it seems like polymer goes in, product comes out, and what happens in the middle is a black art.

DC: OK, sure, but bear in mind I’m a caveman and I’m only an engineer by osmosis — I hang out with some very intelligent guys and I listen to every word and try to learn from it. 

The short of it is, your base polymer arrives in huge boxes on pallets in pellet or chip form, and there’s a little bit of a drying process that happens with the material, then it’s vacuumed up into a hopper. Then, it’s pressed into a really hot mold tool and as the material is pressed into the tool it’s melting and becoming viscous and filling all the voids inside. 

At the point the tool is filled, it holds for a moment, which is all part of the cycle time, then the mold opens up and the part drops falls out. The black magic is getting that part to fall out the same every time and to have it be not warped or change shape when it cools down. 

So how do tools wear out?

DC: Heat cycling can wear a tool. Sometimes the material you’re working with can be abrasive if it’s got fiberglass as a reinforcing agent so as it’s being pushed into the tool it’ll erode the tool, just like you’d see erosion on a gas port. It’s a combination of heat and friction that over time will even erode steel.

One question we’ve got ask: When will you bring back straight 20s and EMAGs?

DC: [Laughs] Man, that’s so funny. Somebody told me about this meme about a year ago. Straight 20s? Put them on your wall and look at them, because those are not the best-functioning PMAG we’ve ever made. 

We realized pretty quickly that reliability is all about that constant curve so do get your InstaBook pics going with some beauty shots of your OD green straight 20s, because they’re not coming back.

You know the EMAGs were a damn good magazine, and we sold over a million of them to the British MOD, but their development came as a result of trying to get PMAGs for the HK416 for the guys in DEVGRU. If you get excited about EMAGs, well this story is why you should get excited.

David Kramer walked me into a meeting with some of the guys at Dam Neck, and they were like, ounces equal pounds, pounds equal pain; these steel HK mags are heavy and we need a lighter solution. 

The Gen 1 PMAG with its constant curve geometry couldn’t seat into the 416 magwell as the front edge is too long, so I went back to the shop, sat down with the boys, and tried to justify changing a brand-new tool and spending the kind of money we’re talking about for a new magazine, just after we launched the first one. 

So myself and a couple of the guys stayed late for a few nights and used a manual milling machine to mill down the front edge of that magazine so it would seat in a 416. We built these guys a couple hundred mags and shipped them out, and they’d go on missions and when they came back they’d say, “Hey man, we need some more of those mags.” 

And we’d be amazed because we just sent some, but then learned that they throw them away after each mission and start out with brand-new kit. So, we said, “Sure, if you’re buying them again, we’ll make them again.” But really we needed a long-term solution.

So, I started looking for other guns in service that had a similar magwell to the 416 and asked why the HK magwell was this shape in the first place. When I looked into it, I found that there’s a place in the 416 magwell that’s hogged out, and that’s to fit a specific blank firing magazine, which has a live round inhibitor. 

So I started asking why is HK doing this and where did that come from? Well, it turns out, it came from the SA80 and when HK was doing the refit, they made a steel magwell for that gun and then used the dimensions on the 416.

So, we got the Brits to commit to a million-plus mags, and that was our big customer, which allowed us to build the tool to make the mags for the Dam Neck boys, and ultimately Bin Laden met a few dudes who had EMAGs sticking out of their 416s. So if there’s a reason someone should want an EMAG, it should be that. 

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