History of Score High Gunsmithing.
My goal for as long as I can remember was to be a gunsmith and own my own shop. While I was still in High School, I started working at Charlie’s Sporting Goods in Albuquerque in 1978 repairing fishing rods and reels. That opportunity allowed me to spend a lot of time around gunsmithing and I did get to do a few things like cleaning parts, grunt work type chores. As soon as I graduated from High School I enrolled into the Colorado school of Trades for Gunsmithing. I was fortunate enough to complete all of the school requirements about six moths early so I got my diploma in September of 1980. So it was back to work at Chralie’s Sporting Goods. The Owner and my boss Charlie Domenici really helped me a lot and and I owe him many thanks. The first thing he did was ask me if I wanted to put a lathe in my garage. He purchased a $5000.00 lathe and had it set up in my garage I was in heaven. I immediately bought a Bridgeport mill and had a complete machine shop in my garage so at 20 years old, I wasn’t old enough to buy a pistol but I was building customs. It was a fast and furious pace working there, repairs and minor modifications all day long and very involved custom work at home every night till one or two in the morning. It was great. Five years later in 1985, I decided it was time to go out on my own and I opened Score High Gunsmith on June 1st. I did anything to any kind of gun I could to keep the doors open. In 1987 we started our first product the Score High Benchrest Follower since then we’ve sold a bunch of those. In 1994 or so I set up my web site. If you are wondering why the web address is spelled the way it is (scorehi) it’s because at that time file names were limited to seven characters and scorehi was all I could get and I’ve stuck with it. It’s hard to imagine now but I remember the major search engines boasting of having more than five thousand registered web sites in their data base, wow have things changed.
My real passion was building rifles so in 1997 I made a big decision, no more repair work, restoration work, handgun work or shot gun work. Score High was to focus only on Bolt Action Rifle work. Since then we’ve built, accurized or rebarreled thousands of rifles and to this day it is still our passion.
Probably one of the most fun and challenging endeavors was the development of our various products, most particularly Pro-Bed 2000 stock bedding epoxy. It was a tough road and it took up all of my time for about 4 years but when I called it done it was something I was very proud of. You find out more about that at www.probed2000.com
So today we are still accurizing and building rifles as well as growing our product line. I can honestly say that it is as much fun today as it was in the beginning and I still have to make myself go home at the end of each day.
Opening Day June 1st 1985. My sister Trish Painted my new sign