Supporting Cast
With its roots in alpinism and aerospace, Spartan Precision aims to give hunters and shooters simple, versatile bipods, tripods, and more.
By Andrew McKean
As a ghillie in southern England’s roebuck belt, Rob Gearing experienced the full dichotomy of fixed rifle bipods as he guided clients to twitchy woodland deer. “Some 90 percent of the time, my bipod was in the way, but I always figured that was a fair trade for the 10 percent of the time when I really needed it,” says Gearing, whose transactional relationship with retractable bipods reached a climax one evening as he guided a wealthy Scandinavian client to a trophy Sussex buck. “I didn’t have a bipod on the gun, and we decided to let that deer go rather than making a low-odds shot without it,” he says.
Soon afterward he started tinkering around with alternatives to the indispensable Harris bipod that he mounted to the front sling stud of his rifle when he needed to make a dead-certain shot. At the time, Gearing was moonlighting as a ghillie. His main occupation was in the British aerospace industry. But his passion was mountaineering, summiting peaks around the world with only the gear he could carry, rather than relying on an entourage of Sherpas and replenishing base camps.
“My DNA is to find elegant solutions to problems,” says Gearing, a bullet-headed, animated, straight-talking Brit who founded Spartan Precision Equipment in 2013 and is now managing director. “When you’re wired that way, and you’re an alpinist, then you are thinking about how to shave bits of weight where you can without sacrificing performance.”
Gearing’s day job provided the inspiration for the company that has pioneered alternatives to the fixed tripod, among other shooting aids. He traces the lineage of Spartan’s flagship product, the five-ounce Javelin Bipod, back to an unlikely source: the iconic Concorde, the world’s first supersonic commercial aircraft and a joint effort by British and French aerospace firms. The Concorde experiment ended abruptly in 2000 when a Paris-to-New York plane crashed spectacularly shortly after takeoff.
“After the fleet was grounded, I purchased the nose cone from an old Concorde and decided to make it into a piece of art, a sculpture,” says Gearing. “We mounted it on an old engine bearing so it could turn, but that bearing was ugly as anything, so we decided to cover it with a clamshell apparatus that used two tiny rare-earth magnets to hold the halves together. It was brilliant, a clever solution, and I asked the guy who came up with that solution to build me a bipod, one that could attach to a rifle with those super-strong, super-small magnets.”
After a few iterations, the Javelin Bipod was born, a lightweight bipod that can easily be popped on and off a gun without fiddling with attachments. The idea was—and is—that the bipod could be stowed in a pocket or backpack sleeve until needed, then quickly and quietly deployed by engaging its male prong with a female receptacle fixed to the gun. The bond is assured with those rare-earth magnets. The Javelin Bipod remains the company’s most recognized product, accounting for about 80 percent of Spartan Precisions’ sales.
“The little bipod was a very simple little Walter Mitty thing, a couple of moving legs and the magnet, but I shot quite a lot of deer off that thing,” says Gearing. “I figured this thing has legs—excuse the pun. I can’t be the only person who gets frustrated with keeping a bipod on a rifle full-time.”
Indeed, he isn’t. Now some 20 years on the Javelin Bipod has various iterations with retractable legs, canting capabilities to shoot off uneven surfaces, and modular carbon-fiber legs. It also has a growing cult of adherents who swear by its light weight, durability, and easy deployment. Spartan Precision has expanded its product line to tripods, optics heads, and a whole range of adapters that are designed to be simple and durable solutions to attaching supports to guns and optics.
Among the most useful and elegant products in Spartan’s line is a universal tripod head that uses the company’s patented magnetic attachment system to support a rifle, an optic, or any other attachment with the company’s trademark magnets. Called the Davros head, it has opened a new line of possibilities for the company, including proprietary adapters and even a tripod.
Going Mainstream
If some of Spartan’s appeal is that its talents were passed around like a closely kept secret among hard-core hunters, that sort of insider trading also kept the company small and extremely niche. That’s about to change. Spartan Precision is on the verge of becoming familiar to a whole new population of American hunters, thanks to a deal with Primos that was announced at this year’s SHOT Show. Starting this fall, Primos’ signature Trigger Stick Apex tripods will be available with Spartan’s patented magnetic attachment system. A new Primos gun-mounted bipod that features the same Spartan technology will also be available this fall.
The partnership with Primos was struck at the SHOT Show a couple years ago thanks to a chance meeting, says Gearing. “I had a little Davros head in my pocket, and as I passed the Primos booth, I put that head on a Trigger Stick. I was honestly just seeing how it mated up, but a Primos employee noticed me and checked out the combination. He asked me if we had a patent on that head, and I told him that we do. Three years later, they contacted us out of the blue and told us they’d like to work together.”
Gearing admits Spartan Precision is not going to get rich on the Primos deal. “But it will put us on the map,” he says, noting that having a high-profile American brand as a partner may influence manufacturing and distribution decisions. “I’d wager 90 percent of hunters don’t know anything about Spartan, unless they’re really into mountain hunting. We sold something like 18,000 bipods last year. That’s pathetic. We should be selling 180,000 bipods.”
Gearing says the American market, with its millions of new gun owners every year, plus educated and selective customers, has the scale that Spartan has missed by being a quiet favorite of a handful of serious hunters. In fact, Spartan has a vanishingly small advertising budget, relying instead on a whisper campaign in which one evangelist for the brand tells a friend. Those word-of-mouth testimonials have worked, but Gearing says he’s ready to scale up to the new market.
“I’m hopeful that people will experience our product and will be naturally drawn to us and the rest of our product line,” says Gearing. “It’s a wonderful marriage, our relationship with Primos. We’re not treading on their market turf, and they’re not treading on ours. We occupy two different quality brackets, with Primos selling thousands of units and us selling hundreds. But I’d like to think that a lot of people who drive Fords might aspire to drive around in an Audi, and I think in a couple years Spartan will come into its own in the American market as a stylish and functional Audi.”
Special Forces Gear
This wouldn’t be the first time Spartan has designed products for a specific market. Not long after the Javelin bipod caught fire with mountain hunters, Gearing was approached by European special forces with a request to build rifle supports for elite sniper squads.
“We’ve only just dipped our toes in the defense market,” he says. Gearing acknowledges that the defense market is only about 10 percent of Spartan’s business, but enough that Spartan recently spun off a subsidiary that deals with military and defense customers. “We have just designed a tripod that you will not see on the civilian market, and we think there’s enough appetite for innovation in the defense space that we can support two branches of the company,” he says.
The military tripod is built around modularity, with legs that can be detached to be used as stretcher handles and additional legs that can convert the tripod into a multi-support shooting bench. That notion of multiple “Legos” that can be mixed and matched to build custom solutions is likely to be the next wave of Spartan innovation.
“If we have this conversation in a couple years’ time, I’d like to say that people won’t buy bipods or tripods,” says Gearing. “They’ll buy modules. They might buy one of four tripod head modules, or one of six bipod modules, and then pick their legs to complete their kits. The Davros head is the gateway drug to that modularity. You don’t need to buy our tripods if you have our head; it will pretty much stick on anything. I’d expect you’ll see more of that sort of cross-over product going forward.”
For customers who don’t care to invest in the entire Spartan system, the company sells a number of adapters that allow paced adoption of various pieces of the product line. One of the most useful is an Arca-Swiss tripod plate with the rare-earth magnet connection. Attach the plate to a standard tripod, and as long as you have Spartan’s female receiver on a rifle or optic, you can turn your tripod into a shooting stick or glassing platform for about $20.
It’s the perfect Spartan Precision product, says Gearing, marrying simplicity with versatility. “I am constantly looking at ways to provide tools that do more than one thing,” he says. “I don’t like gimmicks. I like functionality.” (javelinbipod.com)
