Solid Foundation - Summit Steel supplies manufacturers with a vital component of any firearm.

Just like the strength of any building lies in the quality of its foundation, the reliability and longevity of any firearm begins with the quality of the steel it’s built around. This concept is nothing new to the largest gun manufacturers in the world. And for nearly a decade, many of those manufacturers have turned to Summit Steel for the steel components that make up the foundations of all the firearms they manufacture.

It isn’t just the quality and the workmanship of the steel that has given Summit Steel such a solid reputation in the industry; it’s the quality of the company. And for Summit Steel, that begins and ends with family.

Ross Bushman, CEO of Summit Steel, founded the company in 1985, but that certainly wasn’t his first foray in the steel business.

“My father started in the scrap metal business with his dad,” Bushman says. “My dad took over the company, and I started working with him right out of high school.”

When his father was forced to close the business because of unfavorable economic conditions, Bushman struck out on his own. He took out a second mortgage on his house and founded Summit Steel.

With his knowledge of the steel industry, Bushman slowly began growing his fledgling company. And while he had a very diversified customer portfolio from the beginning, it didn’t include the firearms industry.

“I hadn’t even considered the firearms industry,” he says. “Neither had my dad. I don’t know what we were thinking.”

That all changed 20 years ago when Bushman’s son, Jason, who is now president of Summit Steel, joined the family business. Since then, Summit Steel has grown beyond anything Ross had imagined.

“When I first started the business, we were mostly brokering and bringing in the steel that our customers needed,” Bushman says. “When my son joined me, that’s when things really started to kick into high gear.”

Once they set their sights on the firearms industry, it didn’t take long for manufacturers to recognize the benefits of working with Summit. As an IS 9001-2015 processor and stocking distributor of Special Bar Quality (SBQ) steel, Summit has the ability to produce, stock, and cut steel to suit its customers’ needs. They can provide Gun Barrel Quality steel of all grades and sizes and produce custom blanks. From chamfering, heat-treating, and cold finish steel, Summit has become the one-stop shop for many of the major firearms manufacturers in the country.

The increase in business that resulted from working with the firearms industry also helped shape an expanded business model that allowed Summit Steel to better serve its customers.

“Instead of just brokering, we built a warehouse so we could maintain an inventory of the kind of steel our customers use on a regular basis. That way we have it readily available whenever they needed it,” Bushman says. “That also allowed us to provide for other customers’ needs as well.”

Summit currently has several warehouses and a production saw-cutting facility with plans to build another facility in the near future. This will not only allow them to store more steel, but more types of steel for different uses within the firearms industry as well as across other industries such as oil and gas, military, transportation, and infrastructure.

The warehoused stock also gives Summit the ability to respond rapidly to its customers’ changing needs. So when a manufacturer decides to do a quick run on a popular firearm, Summit Steel can get them the steel they need when they need it instead of having to wait weeks to give customers the steel that meets their exact specifications.

And where that steel comes from is just as important to Bushman as what they do with it once it arrives.

“The stainless steel we stock is from a mill preferred by most manufacturers,” he says. “All our regular alloys and carbon stock we buy from U.S. mills. We buy as much from domestic mills as we can. That’s important to our customers and it’s important to us.”

Being able to get the manufacturers the steel they want, when they want it, is one of the reasons that Summit Steel has such a solid reputation in the industry. But it isn’t the only reason.

“We’re a close-knit family operation and we create our business on relationships,” Bushman says. “We recognize our customers’ needs and we meet those needs. We get the job done, and they appreciate that because that’s how they do business, too.”