My name is Hayden and this is my page

I’m 31 years old and I grew up in rural Queensland on a cane farm that converted into a cattle farm when I was a teenager.

I did my apprenticeship as a fitter machinist with a strong focus on machining and manufacture and I have always been fascinated with how things work and spent many weekends as a kid building electric cars out of pulled apart VCR players and knew from a young age I wanted to build or fix gadgets or at the very least understand how things work.

When the farm took off one calving season we lost 17 out of 18 calf’s to wild dogs and that’s where my affinity for shooting, hunting and conservation came to fruition and sparked what would come to be almost a 20 year passion for shooting and firearms both historical and current and a hobby that has led me to meet some of my dearest friends and made some amazing memories and unbelievable stories.

And so after many years of utilising guns as a tool for hunting sporting and leisure so came a moment where my maintenance and mechanical mind began to ponder the implications of performing gunsmithing activities myself as I hadn’t given it a great deal of thought as the law is quite clear it’s illegal to modify repair or change the appearance of a firearm I dove down the rabbit hole that My ankles are still well and truly hanging out the entrance and my body is being stretched deeper and deeper into the wonder land that is obtaining licensing as an armourer.

The internet wasn’t a great deal of help with most people dismissing the idea of being a backyard armourer because of the cost involved in getting the equipment and security measures but all accounts were mostly hear say or “I had a mate that knew a guy who…..” so I turned up the determination and threw myself into a path of discovery, more so I talked about it and talked about it until my lovely wife setup the abn and designed the logo and came up with the name and since then It has been a steady push forward.

I was lucky enough to be accepted by the shooting community and have been helped along the way by other armourers and people in the industry.

While it’s my end goal to become a fully fledged gunsmith and be able to perform every function possible expected of a gunsmith you gotta start somewhere so here I am somewhere between the race starting and me stumbling out of the starting blocks and a finish line that will likely keep moving away from me so this will be a place for me to show my progress and share what I learn and document it for myself and for anyone else who may find this informative .

In my travels on social media I rarely happen across people doing what I want to do and while I’m certain there are people out the doing it they don’t document it and put it on show like I want to so It’s my objective to utilise every media platform practical to both boost my exposure and therefore put me in contact with others who can educate me and help me grow but also reach people who share an interest in what is a passion of mine and hopefully bring them some joy or some value.

Hayden…..