‘Sons of Guns’ star talks about his journey to TV fame - Entertainment, TV, Television - Navy Times

‘Sons of Guns’ star talks about his journey to TV fame

Will Hayden started making his own guns at age 12.

The former Marine and Discovery Channel star’s first homemade firearm was a crude, bolt-action .22-caliber rifle he fashioned out of scraps from construction sites around his hometown of Baton Rouge, La., and odd parts from the local hardware store. The barrel, Hayden recalled, was a piece of pipe that a .22 bullet would fit through.

“As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a .22,” Hayden said with a chuckle. “It would fire, and you could hit the side of the barn with it — if you were standing in the barn. ... I had read Sam Colt’s biography, and boy, that just hit me like a two-by-four. I had a name for what my company was going to be and everything. This was going to be what I did.”

Thirty-five years and many challenges later, Hayden is living his childhood dream as the founder of Red Jacket Firearms, a Baton Rouge-based custom gun shop that’s the focus of Discovery Channel’s reality show “Sons of Guns,” the network’s No. 2 show behind “American Chopper” and cable’s top Wednesday-night series among men ages 18-49. It was beating new episodes of History’s “Top Shot” by almost a million viewers as of the most recent ratings available by press time.

Hayden and his seven-member crew transform assault rifles and machine guns into the kind of fantasy weapons that would make Quentin Tarantino drool.

But it didn’t come easy for Hayden, who grew up in an impoverished area of the Deep South.

“You get a little older, and reality kind of sets in, and you realize you are basically just white trash from north Baton Rouge,” he said, recalling his teenage years. “You can’t go into business — you ain’t going to do none of that. My best hope then was physical survival.”

Hayden talked to Military Times about “Sons of Guns” and his life prior to the show.

Q. You opened Red Jacket Firearms in 1999. How did it become a TV show?

A. We were approached about three years ago by Jupiter Entertainment. What they wanted was a mom-and-pop-type gun store with some type of build or manufacturing capability for the History Channel. There were close to 300 outfits that they looked at.

The whole process took about two years. Every six months or so, they would come down or fly me up to them in Knoxville [Tenn.] to shoot a little footage. During that time period, History Channel lost interest. Then somebody at Discovery Channel decided they didn’t have a good gun show. As luck would have it, [a former History employee] just happened to be at that table that day and was able to stand up and say, “I’ve got your show. I’ve got your crew.”

Q. What did Red Jacket have that 299 other shops couldn’t match?

A. We’ve got a pretty unique attitude around here. It’s not just me. It’s the people that are here and the newer people that we are hiring in. We hire based on a certain work ethic. If you are not one of those guys that are born with that “will accomplish the mission regardless of the price”-type attitude, you are going to have a hard time making it past your first week. I came out of the Corps, and they kind of had that Texas Ranger attitude. You get used to accomplishing a great deal with very little.

Q. You spent six years in the Marine Corps in the first half of the 1980s. What did you do in the Corps?

A. Mostly, I washed helicopters. I was a power, transmission and rotor guy on Hueys. Everybody wants to hear that you learned all this great weapon stuff during your time in service. No, not really. We had M16s and miniguns on the birds, but if you did anything beyond load them and lube them, the ordnance guys would just beat your ass.

I joined the Marine Corps at 17 basically to get into a safer living environment than I was in at the time. I had a master gunnery sergeant that I worked under, and he was a hell of a guy. He really became my mentor for life. He took it as his personal mission in life, I feel, to teach me what it was to be a Marine Corps NCO. If there is anything that I got out of the Marine Corps, it was what it was to be a leader, to be a man.

There is nothing more important than the men who it is your privilege to command. They are everything. It’s not your duty to make sure they are taken care of — it is your privilege. That was the lesson: You take care of your people. Period.

Q. What’s the project you’re most proud of?

A. On the technical side, the integrally suppressed AK rifle and integrally suppressed AK shotgun. I took a lot of personal pride in that just because it was one of those “no, it couldn’t be done, and even if someone had managed to cobble something together, it probably wouldn’t work.” Well, we did it, and it worked superbly. It was a hell of a technical achievement, and we managed to do it and still keep a clean, elegant look to it.

On the personal side, I did some black powder stuff, a 1740s-pattern French .62-caliber smoothbore. It was probably the most elegant gun ever built on this Earth. You are talking days upon days with a piece of obsidian doing the final finish on the wood. Obsidian is volcanic glass. It’s razor sharp, but it gives you a smoothness of finish like nothing else. When you come out of it six months later, you’ve got a work of art. It doesn’t look like anything that would hang in a museum; it looks like something a trapper or an Indian chief would carry. That, to me, was a great personal achievement.

Q. Do you make any weapon systems that could be useful to the military?

A. We are working on projects for the military. I never would have imagined having a shop with the engineering capability that would involve that. Five years ago, all we were doing was putting together AKs and M16s. Now we are moving forward with rapid in-house designs.

In one of our earlier episodes, we did a remotely operated firing system designed to mount on top of a vehicle. It was what we were able to put together in two weeks, and I think it was about 3,000 bucks that we sunk in. We have taken that basic design and gone so far beyond that, it just boggles the mind — 100 percent solid state, water- and vapor-proof components. We are designing it so it’s scalable, and we are looking at keeping it light enough that you can drop it onto a standard hard-top Humvee.

Q. You’ve worked on a lot of weapons. What are your favorites?

A. I haven’t found them yet, but we are working on them. One of the primary reasons I got into this on a commercial basis is because I wasn’t satisfied with absolutely everything that was available. When I hung my manufacturing shingle up, my goal was not to make copies of, or improvements to, existing systems. Now, we have made our living advancing AK-47s and AR-15s, but to me that is just a stepping stone. My goal is to utterly replace the AK-47 and the M16 — that’s where I’m going.

Q. Do you have to dumb down the content of “Sons of Guns”?

A. The show is actually edited and aired for a general audience. At first, I really, really fought this. Then I kind of shut up and realized that they never told me how to build a gun, so maybe I ought to shut up and not tell them how to edit a major TV show. What they want is for the non-gun enthusiast to be able to follow along, and I am in 100 percent agreement.

What you will find when you watch the show is that there are normally two or even three explanations of what we are doing. We want to give the version for the guy who has spent a few years rebuilding 240Bs. We want to give the version for the guy who has a vague idea of what is going on and can kind of follow along. But we also simply must give the version for the guy who doesn’t even own a gun. If you are just speaking Greek to them, then how interesting is that going to be to them?

Q. Is there anything about the show that surprised you?

A. I don’t think you can possibly imagine the amount of work that goes into it. We really do keep cots in the war room. This is just SOP for Red Jacket — when we’ve got stuff to get done, we get it done. But as far as the way we do this and what we do, I love it. I absolutely love it. We thrive on having more work to do than any 10 human beings could be expected to do. This is us. This is what we live for.

Q. Do you have any advice for others who want to get into gunsmithing?

A. It’s a hard field to get into. Find your own niche. Find your spot. Find something that nobody is doing, or not doing well, and do it better. Make it yours. Don’t quit. Believe me, keeping this place alive over the years — it has been a daily fight.

It’s like when you’re running for quals. It’s OK if you puke at the two-mile line as long as you keep running and finish up at the three-mile line. Just ignore everyone that tells you it’s stupid, and keep going.

Matthew Cox is a former Army infantryman and Military Times staff writer.