My story begins as a boy, shooting .22s with my family in the surrounding desert of Mesa, Arizona and loving every second of it. I continued to love firearms and when I joined the United States Marine Corps, and I knew that my life and rifles where now entwined. I owned several rifles before I knew anything substantial about them or how to build them. The spark was ignited when I bought my first “serious” bolt gun, the glorious, marvel of engineering, a Savage Axis chambered in 308 with a Vortex Crossfire on top. I saw some ads on Facebook about a local long range match and I thought “yeah that sounds like fun; I can do that&rdquo. I wrote the match director and asked if I could come shoot, and told him what kind of gear I had (literally just a rifle and a few boxes of deer ammo) and he said “sure, come on down.”

So there I was, taking my Prius to the dragstrip. I was in for a VERY rude awakening.

The very first stage I found myself on a rooftop shooting weakside (lefty) at a 12in steel plate at 680 yards with a rifle zeroed for 50 yards. Long story short, there was an entire world of precision rifles I had never even known existed. I had an absolute blast at that match, placed dead last and the spark had landed in the tinder. That Axis was sold within a month and I had a new rifle, new glass and a very angry soon to be mother of my son. Since then, my rifles have grown almost as fast as my son. Countless parts were tried, tinkered with, then discarded. I FINALLY found the winning combination of components, techniques and knowledge to give birth to an actual precision rifle system: the IPR.