View Full Version : So is Hudson dead?
Zundfolge
01-22-2019, 21:27
Hate to reference reddit here but:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hudsonmfg/comments/aip4mf/hudson_missing_from_shot_show/
And I looked at their social media, hasn't been a post on anything since December 11th.
Doesn't look good
Here's their booth at SHOT show:
https://i.imgur.com/Wkh6IKl.jpg
What's wrong with Reddit?
What did Hudson make?
They make that striker fired 1911 kind of thing
SideShow Bob
01-22-2019, 22:26
The H9
https://www.hudsonmfg.com/product/
If you bought one, hang on to it for a few years and you'll be able to sell it for Mateba-levels of cash.
Just enough Glock to piss off the 1911 guys and just enough 1911 to piss off the Glock guys.
I can?t be the only one who would be surprised if they were flying off the shelves.
Weren’t they the biggest thing at SHOT last year?
Hudson's big problem is that they were trying to sell a new gun for a high price in a market where most of the money is to be had in selling injection-molded tactical tupperware, so they're likely to never be more than a niche company pitching to the cool-gun hipster crowd.
Couple the niche market for their product with the difficulty of bringing an entirely new gun design to market, and it's pretty clear the odds were always going to be against them, even with all of the good will generated for them in the press and online.
Well, it looked cool.
Was watching vids about the H9 last night when I saw this brought up elsewhere. Realized there is a reason why every long gun and hand gun I own (model/pattern) was trialed by a first world mil.
H9/H9a looked futuristic.
I wanted to check out the H9, but I only ever saw one place selling it at Tanner, and they were never at their table when I went by.
I wanted to check out the H9, but I only ever saw one place selling it at Tanner, and they were never at their table when I went by.
Kids these days.
Why would you go to a Tanner show to look at guns?
For what it?s worth, I handled a couple of them at a couple of local shops. They were kind of neat but that 1911 grip angle was just all wrong for me.
Kids these days.
Why would you go to a Tanner show to look at guns?
For what it?s worth, I handled a couple of them at a couple of local shops. They were kind of neat but that 1911 grip angle was just all wrong for me.
I'm sure as hell not going there to buy [ROFL1]
Why pay to browse in a crowd?
Great-Kazoo
01-23-2019, 19:27
Why pay to browse in a crowd?
Maybe he was speed dating, using the show as an excuse
crashdown
01-23-2019, 19:50
After seeing this thread I did some digging....
Seems like the real world reviews (not the YouTube idiots that got a free gun) were pretty terrible.
300 round break in, unreliable during and after the 300 rounds. Non-existent customer service. Pistols not returned that were sent in. Even the good reviews mentioned the gun not being reliable.
I’m pretty dumb with my money when it comes to new fancy firearms, but even I wouldn’t buy one.
Yeah in the Reddit thread a guy mentions his gun being in for warranty work since September, and he's unable to get ahold of anyone there.
SideShow Bob
01-23-2019, 20:18
Kids these days. Why would you go to a Tanner show to look at guns?
I would go to Tanner to fondle & finger bang Firearms I was interested in but NOT buy there. Then I would order from our favorite LGS?s Esspecially when most of the LGS?s don?t have what I am interested in in stock.
Yeah in the Reddit thread a guy mentions his gun being in for warranty work since September, and he's unable to get ahold of anyone there.
Good thing they aren’t HQ’d here or we’d have some new members.
That’s such a shitty thing to do to people.
I thought they only grew grass in Hudson. Maybe they were smoking it too.
Rucker61
01-24-2019, 07:17
Game over, man, game over.
Great-Kazoo
01-24-2019, 07:26
Good thing they aren’t HQ’d here or we’d have some new members.
That’s such a shitty thing to do to people.
GROUP BUY !
Scanker19
01-24-2019, 07:37
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/23/hudson-manufacturing-shot-no-show/
Just to stay on topic...
Hudson pretty much went out of business in the late 1950?s. That?s when their last cars were rolling off the assembly line.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/23/hudson-manufacturing-shot-no-show/
A class action suit against a failing company in debt. Good luck with that. The only winners will be the lawyers.
Damn shame. The H9 was a cool pistol
Martinjmpr
01-24-2019, 09:19
Game over, man, game over.
My first thought too!
77137
Sounds like a classic failure of a business trying to grow way faster than their skill set or budget. Going from building stuff in your garage to selling stuff nationally is a gigantic step that most small businesses are not capable of executing. They would have been better off with selling the patent or gun design to an established firearms manufacture. Or at least outsourcing the manufacturing to one of those companies.
APEXgunparts
01-24-2019, 11:40
There is talk on the "HIGH Road" forum about the defective parts in HUDSON handguns and the lengths the customers have gone thru to get warranty service.
The last page is where you see what is being discovered.
https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/avoid-hudson-mfg-at-all-costs.844847/
It sounds like the company was under capitalized and then didn't get the orders needed to cover costs.
Richard
Sounds like a classic failure of a business trying to grow way faster than their skill set or budget. Going from building stuff in your garage to selling stuff nationally is a gigantic step that most small businesses are not capable of executing. They would have been better off with selling the patent or gun design to an established firearms manufacture. Or at least outsourcing the manufacturing to one of those companies.
Yeah, just look at well that worked out for the ACR
Hudson will be now known for Fuk and Run.
Fuk their consumers and Run away with money.
kidicarus13
01-24-2019, 13:21
Should have presented his idea on Shark Tank.
Zundfolge
01-24-2019, 21:51
TFB finally posted something about the fiasco.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/23/hudson-manufacturing-shot-no-show
And an H9 owner has started this site https://h9owners.com/ (which he needs to update his SSL cert on).
Here's what it says there:
Update 1/23/2019 - Here's a timeline of what I do know to have transpired:
June 2018 - HR-D slide announced. Hudson, Mfg. intended for it to be manufactured at Hudson's facilities, not outsourced. The supplier of the original slides thought they were going to also make the HR-D slides. When the supplier found for the H9 found out that they were not going to be making the new HR-D or H9A slides they cut ties with Hudson Mfg. and began focusing on tooling up for other projects from other customers. This left Hudson Mfg. with no new slides coming in to meet production. Around roughly the same time grip modules were being made by another supplier and due to tolerance stacking the firearms were not functional. Several from this batch made it out to distributors and into customer hands, which resulted in warranty repair claims. After it was discovered that there were issues, units stopped shipping. Hudson Mfg. continued to place orders for grips with no design revisions. Warranty repairs were coming in as more inoperable grip modules were being delivered from the parts supplier.
September 2018 - By this time there are no parts left to do repairs. Warranty repairs were cannibalized from any source they could acquire parts from, including personal firearms of employees. Slide producer was no longer delivering slides for new firearms. Grip maker was producing grips with tolerance stacking issues. Over $1M in PO's sat unfulfilled due to supply issues. Hudson Mfg. started looking for a buyer or investors based on outstanding PO's but no one would assist due to it being a firearms related business.
Hudson Mfg. had considered licensing the H9 design to resolve cash flow issues with someone else handling the manufacturing processes but up until last known of the situation, has not been successful in this endeavor. Everyone in manufacturing was laid off back in September. The person that answered the emails and the voicemails has long since been released.
At the end Hudson went for several months unable to fulfill their PO's in hand, no inventory, no one left in manufacturing, a pile of warranty returns and no parts with which to fix them and also no one to do the work. The facility has been empty for some time. Their booth at SHOT Show 2019 was paid for in advance and they didn't appear in that booth this week.
Roughly 8-9000 H9's were ever made. Hudson operated on a no-inventory model (on hand), so there's nothing left of production guns at the factory. 300 threaded barrels were made. These have all sold. 100 HR-D slides were made and as of the end of September roughly 1/3rd of them had sold. There are only 4 prototypes of the H9A in existence. The HR-D slide is a modified H9A slide design.
1/23/2019: Posthumous RIP for Hudson, Mfg. You will be missed.
Zundfolge
01-24-2019, 21:58
Sounds like a classic failure of a business trying to grow way faster than their skill set or budget. Going from building stuff in your garage to selling stuff nationally is a gigantic step that most small businesses are not capable of executing. They would have been better off with selling the patent or gun design to an established firearms manufacture. Or at least outsourcing the manufacturing to one of those companies.
People need to keep this in mind when they complain that KelTec won't go into debt to meet the high demand for some of their more interesting products (like the KSG when it first came out, or the RDB and RFB).
Zundfolge
01-24-2019, 22:01
Apparently Hudson has responded to Recoil Magazine/blog.
https://www.recoilweb.com/recoil-exclusive-hudson-responds-to-shot-no-show-145454.html
Who knows.
They get a licensing deal with a whale. It would be great if licensed company can produce higher quality+mass supply+lower price.
It would be all win win.
Vitesse304
01-24-2019, 22:54
525 available through a distributor.
Who wants to gamble on one?
If Hudson is truly dead and gone, $525 for a safe queen that will appreciate in value/bragging rights might not be a bad deal.
In thinking about small gun startups with founders from outside of the industry that actually made it, the only one I can think of off of the top of my head is Boberg, and they ended up selling out to American Derringer.
The list of "revolutionary" handgun designs that didn't make it is way longer than the list of ones that did.
I am all for innovation and building a better mouse trap. But to think that anything within the Hudson pistol design hasn't already been R&Ded and proven not to work better in the long run by established gun manufactures is very short sighted. If the unique features of the Hudson pistol were in fact superior don't you think it would already be patented and on the market? Just because someone dreams up a different way to assemble a mouse trap doesn't automatically make it better. Different? Absolutely. Better? I highly doubt it.
Zundfolge
01-25-2019, 19:14
In thinking about small gun startups with founders from outside of the industry that actually made it, the only one I can think of off of the top of my head is Boberg, and they ended up selling out to American Derringer..
Bond Arms ... not the fat old lady that thinks she's a boudoir model.
I had the chance to put one of the H9 pistols in my hand. It felt amazing, sights were on point and the trigger was exceptional. That being said, I didn't get to shoot it. The price point was what steered me away from it, and now I'm REALLY glad I didn't buy one. I truly hope they get their debts and legal issues settled. It would be nice to see them stay in business. Regardless, not sure if I'd still buy one at $500. None of my firearms are "safe queens". What's the point if you can't enjoy shooting them?
Grant H.
01-31-2019, 11:10
I am all for innovation and building a better mouse trap. But to think that anything within the Hudson pistol design hasn't already been R&Ded and proven not to work better in the long run by established gun manufactures is very short sighted. If the unique features of the Hudson pistol were in fact superior don't you think it would already be patented and on the market? Just because someone dreams up a different way to assemble a mouse trap doesn't automatically make it better. Different? Absolutely. Better? I highly doubt it.
While I get your point, your comments sound very short sighted in relation to how new ideas come about...
Massive corporations don't generally create the new idea. They generally BUY the new idea from the inventor and patent/license/etc such ideas.
ETA: In this particular case, the concepts that Hudson based their H9 weren't necessarily new, but that doesn't stop them from having a new tweak, a new layout, etc to make it work where others have failed.
Its easy to make a "New" gun configuration idea last for 100,1000, or even 10,000 rounds before it fails. Its a vastly different proposition to make a configuration last 100K+ rounds before a catastrophic failure. There is a lot of information out there on how the Hudson barrel locking lugs were shearing off after only a few thousand rounds of use. Like I said before if their unique configuration design, such as the barrel lockup, was in fact superior to what is already on the market then other companies would already be doing it.
Maybe I am jaded to this kind of "New" stuff because I am not a gun collector with a safe full of guns I don't shoot. I shoot all of my guns on a regular basis and they all get used HARD. To me guns are nothing more than a tool to get the job done. Long term reliability is far higher on my priority list than looking cool or cool new features. I also understand that once a tool has been used to its service life it gets pitched in the trash and replaced. Since I started shooting competition I have used up and thrown away at least 4 pistols and all of them had major replacement components fed to them or repaired during their service life at (Barrels, Slides, Frames, etc). The majority of those major component failures was primarily due to lightening parts excessively or using really light springs so the parts get beat up faster than they should. My oldest 2011 Limited gun that I still use regularly has over 100K on it and its still chugging along as it should.
I would like to see a Hudson customer that has put over 25k through it without a catastrophic failure. I don't think it exists due to it failing before that point or most people simply don't shoot that much. If that is true, then how can anyone claim that the unique features on the Hudson pistols are on par with much less better than existing designs.
Grant H.
01-31-2019, 12:25
I'm not necessarily saying that Hudson, in particular, had a good idea or implemented it appropriately. The fact that they folded would suggest that one of those two was not true. My point was that new innovation doesn't always come from "Big Name X". In fact, very often it comes from "Big Name X" buying an idea from "small name y".
I expect you and I share many of the same ideals for our firearms and their reliability, and as such the brands/models that we have are similar or the same. I also am not a gun collector, and all of mine see use frequently. The only one that I can think of that doesn't is a revolver that came from my wife's Grandfather. She has a sentimental attachment, and I don't like revolvers, so it sits in its case in the safe.
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