Windham Weaponry Is Building Rifles Again

by Zac K

Published: April 30th, 2024

Windham Weaponry’s website now lists photos and MSRPs for completed rifles, with shipments to dealers reportedly underway. [Windham Weaponry]

Windham Weaponry is back in business, with new, completed rifles now for sale as it reboots its production line in Maine.

As we told you last September, Windham Weaponry went out of business in 2023, and for a while, it looked like it was really the end of the company—a company with a long history in the AR business.

The resurrection of Windham is even more interesting when you consider that the company really started this way, as a way to pick up the pieces when Bushmaster folded its plant in Maine almost 20 years ago:

Windham arose from the ashes of what was once Bushmaster. According to a company history posted on their website, Bushmaster was acquired in 2006. The company moved out of Maine and left behind its workforce. In 2011 the former owner of Bushmaster, Richard Dyke, started Windham Weaponry and began hiring back the former employees.

A careful road back to production

Windham Weaponry actually announced its return to business back in December with a Facebook post, but in the first few months, it was selling AR components but not fully assembled rifles. Now, its website lists MSRPs for completed rifles, and reportedly Windham is also shipping completed rifles to other retailers. The page for the webshop seems to be glitching, but perhaps that will change shortly as more product to sell comes online.

Along with your standard-pattern ARs in .223/5.56, the Windham site lists variants in 7.6239 and 450 Bushmaster. [Windham Weaponry]

In its initial announcement of its return, Windham said they were committed to honoring the warranty of rifles sold by the company’s previous owners, and that they were bringing back qualified staff to work at the plant:

We have also hired back some of the best gun people in the industry with many having 20-30 years of experience.
We will be upholding the 100% limited lifetime warranty on all firearms manufactured by Windham Weaponry Inc. past or present. Our customers are important to us.

With Hydra Weaponry in the next town over, in Gorham, there will be plenty of opportunity for Mainers to work in the AR manufacturing business in the south of the state. For more info, keep an eye on WindhamWeaponry.com.

#WindhamWeaponry

Zac K

Professional hoser with fudd-ish leanings.

More by Zac K

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3 of 19 comments

J. M. on May 07, 2024

I would very much like to see Windham thrive in the market, but they have to start finding new things to make. Innovate and thrive or stagnate and die. So hopefully they have some new ideas to bring to market soon.

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01000110 01000101 on May 10, 2024

how come the USA has the second amendment yet small arms companies go bankrupt left and right? USA has massive sales of small arms to civilians but the companies can't survive?

Like Reply
- Nasty! on May 13, 2024
  
  @01000110 01000101 Windham makes slightly nicer AR15s, and when the market absolutely boomed for AR15s in the recent years, they had a difficult time to compete with the really low cost ones, because there's ultimately nothing too special which sets them apart except quality. The previous owner dying also threw a wrench in the works.
  That's a market, sometimes people make good business decisions, sometimes they make bad ones. Sometimes they make good ones, but someone else makes much better ones, or the circumstances change quicker than you can act.
  Some companies go out of business, but that also just happens in a market. On the US weapons market, companies go out of business all the time, but new companies are also created all the time, because it's an easy field to get into.
  You really can just set up some machines in your garage, and together with a Federal Firearms License (for manufacture and retail) and an engineering education, you can make and sell guns as a small one man company out of your house.
  
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Windham Weaponry Is Building Rifles Again

A careful road back to production

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