Sierra began in 1947 in the California Quonset hut building. At the time, World War II had just ended, shooting popularity was rising to unprecedented levels and the supply of high quality ammunition was limited. Shooters were discovering that to satisfy their own demand, reloading was the answer. Frank Snow, Jim Spivey and Loren Harbor recognized this and created Sierra Bullets to help fill the void. A few years later, an accomplished competitive shooter named Martin Hull joined Sierra. Martin brought with him an understanding of the market and the ability to translate ideas into a finished product. He was the manager of our ballistics laboratory for nearly 20 years. In 1969, Bob Hayden joined Sierra as Manager of Operations for The Leisure Group, who at the time was Sierra's parent company. An engineer by trade and an avid hunter, Bob led Sierra through years of tremendous growth while greatly expanding Sierra's product offering before his retirement in 2012.
Some of the most important quality control standards used are:
- Weight Control of +/- 0.3 grain.
- Jacket concentricity of .0000" to .0003" on target bullets and .0000" to .0006" on hunting bullets.
- 100% final visual inspection for external defects.
- Roving quality control inspectors perform other dimensional checks at the cupping, draw, trim and bullet assembly operations.
In order to accomplish accuracy firing tests, Sierra utilizes our 300- meter underground testing range daily. 200-yard accuracy evaluations are conducted on rifle bullets using a precision unrestricted machine rest. We also conduct daily 50-yard accuracy evaluations on our pistol bullets using a specially designed machine rest. If a group does not meet our high expectations, the production run is rejected. This rarely happens due to the quality control procedures that go into the manufacturing process itself. However, accuracy firing tests are still important to ensure that every bullet we ship is one we can be proud of.
