Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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When the design layout was finally complete, Howie and I were ready to make a presentation to the Browning executives at their beautiful corporate headquarters at Morgan, Utah, in the foothills of the rugged Wasatch mountain range.

We were well received by company president John V. Browning and the owner, Mr. Val A. Browning, a well-known Utah industrialist and son of the great John Moses Browning. Val’s father acquired 126 firearms patents in his lifetime and created a myriad of the world’s most famous commercial and military guns of all types. Needless to say, it was a prestigious moment for me to meet these people. The meeting couldn’t have gone better because they were intrigued by the proposal of adding a quality pump shotgun with a touch of the original Browning heritage in its design. They were well pleased with my design layout.

Val Browning was a Cornell law and engineering graduate and a gun designer in his own right with 48 patents. He pored over my proposed BPS design layout and understood exactly what I was trying to accomplish. Howie and I were more than pleased at their interest, and we all agreed the next step would be to build a prototype for test. Building new model guns from scratch was old hat to us at BJT. We had for years built many first model and experimental guns for Hi-Standard, Winchester, Marlin, Colt, the CIA, and the Springfield Armory. We had a staff of the area’s best tool and die makers. It was agreed that we would make detailed engineering drawings from the layout and actually fabricate and preliminary test the gun. This was right up our alley as we had done this successfully many times before. For this phase, Browning agreed to our building the prototype at their expense. We also agreed on a royalty to be paid on each gun sold in production.