For years the Army said a reciprocating barrel .30 caliber low recoil rifle was impossible, Mike said BS and here is his Olympus Arms Vulcan .308.
What started as a necessity for manufacturing firearms has evolved into a full-blown innovation hub. Blue Sky Inventors specializes in developing groundbreaking solutions across various industries, driven by the motto “innovation on demand.” Blue Sky Inventors is a one-stop shop for all innovation, research and development, and machining needs. They are a fast-paced R&D prototype facility, have their own product line of tools for CNC machine shops, and are the manufacturer for Olympus Arms Vulcan rifle. Blue Sky’s team of skilled employees are constantly brainstorming and prototyping new ideas, often inspired by real-world problems. The company’s success can be attributed to its ability to quickly turn ideas into tangible products, and its commitment to customer satisfaction. Located in Helena, Montana Blue Sky Inventors is where creativity meets practicality.
Captain Michael Merino, a 23-year US Army vet and CEO of Blue Sky Inventors founded the company in July 2023. Partnered with the “voice of reason” and a “total genius” Dave Lake, “Blue Sky Thinking” challenges the industry’s common notions of what’s possible.” “Dave is a genius of a dude and a firearms encyclopedia,” tells Michael. “I have the clipboard, and he has the calipers. Every time I think I’ve invented something new, he says, oh, you mean like the 1902 Turkish pistol, or there’s a guy who tried that out in the salt flats and his car blew up, so yeah, probably don’t go in that direction. He is our voice of reason, making us the perfect team. You can literally walk into our shop with a broken part, or a mechanical problem, and say “this is bad, make it better” and we will take our purple dry erase marker to one of our gazillion white boards and write out 5 possible solutions, pick one prototype and say, if you want to engage with us, we’ll make this in a few weeks and give you a proof of concept.”
Some people do Sudoku or a crossword puzzle to relax but give Mike or Dave a physics problem or mechanical issue, and watch the magic happen. And it’s not just them. “We like to take credit for a lot of the invention around here,” touts Michael. “It’s called Blue Sky Inventors, because my employees are just like us. We all have some sort of disorder that makes working here fun and challenging.” Their methodology is rooted in collaboration and creativity, offering a unique approach to intellectual property (IP) that sets them apart. “My employees are given the freedom to develop their own IP,” explains Michael. “If it wasn’t created on company time or directly related to their work projects, they are allowed to retain the rights, or in a lot of cases we will partner with them to get things rolling. This fosters a culture of creativity and ownership among the team, further driving innovation.” “One of the best things about working together at Blue Sky is having a purpose,” adds Dave Lake, Senior R&D Engineer. “If you isolate a person from the end product, they are just a worker. Our people really appreciate that they gain the understanding, the why, and the what we are trying to do.” “So, when I say stand here for 8 hours and make this part for the next three weeks it doesn’t just get dumped in a bin and never seen again,” continues Michael. “We go over this is where it goes on the rifle, this is the assembly it is part of this is what it does, and hey let’s go out and shoot it. They are part of the system, and that translates to pride across the board.”
Blue Sky Inventors has ramped up production and precision. Being able to run lights out has become a must, and every machine tool they purchase going forward will have some sort of advanced automation. Currently they DMG Mori NLX 2500/700 Dual Spindle y-axis live tooling lathe with bar feeder and a similar, but larger NLX2500/1250 also with a bar feeder. They also have a DMG Mori NHX 5000 horizontal with a pallet pool.
Mike’s childhood in Montana was anything but ordinary, and those life lessons set him on the path he walks today. By the time Mike joined the Army he had all the attributes to make him a model soldier, but his quest for answers never let him completely be all that he could be. “I grew up on a ranch in Melrose, Montana, a little town in the middle of southwest nowhere,” tells Mike. “I didn’t go to school a lot, something that I feel actually helped me out later in life. I worked the ranch growing up and learned a lot of important things. I learned how to work with my hands, to be self-sufficient, what it meant to have a work ethic. I learned how things worked, and more importantly how to fix things that were broken. I liked finding out how things worked, even if it meant taking apart the plumbing without turning off the water and flooding the house. At 19 I joined the Army with a GED and limited social skills, not really knowing my place in the world.”
The towers got hit when Mike was in basic training, and he celebrated his 21st birthday somewhere inhospitable in Afghanistan. He’s spent the last 23 years in service to this country and is currently in the National Guard trying to phase himself into full time civilian life. “I was a paratrooper with 82 Airborne, and a “designated marksman” for the 4th Infantry Division,” recounts Mike. “I had three deployments into combat zones before becoming an Army Engineer. That experience is what drove my decision process, landing us here talking today. I am a career soldier, but mostly I think of myself as an inventor. During marksman training we shot this monster of a gun called the Barrett 50. It’s a big bullet, low recoil type weapon. I spent hours/days/weeks at the range with it and my traditional .30 caliber bolt gun. Like every good soldier I loved my gun, but I didn’t like how my .30 caliber bolt gun had more felt recoil than the much larger .50 caliber Barrett. I thought this is just silly, make these two weapons have a baby. Take away my M4 because it doesn’t do the job and give me a reciprocating barrel .30 caliber low recoil rifle. In 2006 the Army said it was impossible, and I said BS and started tinkering.”
Blue sky Inventors is a research and development machine shop focused on innovation on demand. “We are the company I wanted to have when I started inventing,” tells Mike. “I would go to the typical machine shop, and I say I need this part, one of them, three of them, five of them. And they’re like, yeah, that’ll be two thousand dollars and eight weeks from now. And I would say, well, okay, that’s my only option. So, I’d give them two grand and eight weeks from now I’d get it back. I’d try it for five seconds and I’d say, okay, now I need you to make this change. That’s two thousand dollars and eight weeks from now. I called around and every decent machine shop was booked up just like that. It was easier to bite the bullet and learn how to do it ourselves. When Dave and I began working together we got him some machines and I hired a programmer. We would just prototype what we needed. When it came time to mass produce parts, we struggled to find vendors who could meet the specs and the timeline. So once again we looked internally and now most parts for my Olympus Arms Vulcan rifle are manufactured here in this building.”
Left – Top half of the Olympus Arms Vulcan upper assembly are produced in two operations on the NHX 5000.
Middle – After struggling to find a vendor to accurately produce their bolt Blue Sky brought the manufacturing in-house.
Right – The front trunnion of the Olympus Arms Vulcan .308 are one of the parts that can easily run lights out on the DMGs.
As their capabilities have grown, more and more manufacturing has been brought inhouse. They just began producing their own barrels and have seen accuracy of their rifle improve. “From the outside the Vulcan is similar looking to an AR-10,” details Mike. “But all the magic happens on the inside where we have 6 different patent groups of next gen tech. It’s a big leap forward in a lot of ways. We’ve literally trademarked the term “shooting is believing” because I can’t describe it to you. It’s light weight, has little recoil, no buffer tube, our upper is two parts, and the barrel reciprocates 5.25” as a shock absorber for the entire weapon. We have a few different variations but right out of the box the standard version shoots sub 1.75 M.O.A. thanks to our internal ability to produce quality parts. Blue Sky just started making our own barrels because we couldn’t get the quality we needed reliably done anywhere. When we can’t find anyone to produce a part the way we want, we purchase a machine to do the job in-house. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck a whole bunch of times in a row, or maybe the precision that we need is just not common. So, now barrels run on our DMG Mori NLX 2500/1250. It was the same with our bolt. It’s just a carbon steel cylindrical bolt with a pattern through the middle of it. We sent it to a well-respected company in PA and said please make us these bolts. It isn’t a high-risk part, but it has a lot of holes, and we maximize the use of the material. What’s critical is the perpendicularity and the symmetry of the bolt face. It can’t be drafted from one side to another. If it’s going to be drafted, it’s got to be drafted the same on both sides. In the drawing it says hey, this surface is absolutely critical. After six months we get parts in and my wife, who doesn’t have a CMM type brain takes one look at it with the naked eye and says this isn’t in spec. I’m over it and we started beefing up our CNC machine tool program.”
Blue Sky Inventors has 26 employees running two shifts with 8000 total square footage. Like most fledgling companies they started out with a couple Haas machines. They were cost effective and had great local support from Danny Farr out of Idaho. Since Blue Sky’s needs have grown in volume and advanced in complexity Mike on the advice of his programmer has invested recently in the latest offerings from DMG Mori. “On the Haas side of things we have a VF2, VM3 with trunnions, and handful of Mini- Mills,” tells Mike. “The mini- mills are awesome and there isn’t really anything we need to make that we can’t do on the VM3 with a trunnion. As we’ve ramped up production being able to run lights out has become a must and so I began purchasing machine tools with advanced automation systems. Right now, we have a DMG Mori NLX 2500/700 Dual Spindle y-axis live tooling lathe with bar feeder and a similar, but larger NLX2500/1250 also with a bar feeder. We also have a DMG Mori NHX 5000 horizontal with a pallet pool, and a decent sized Makino EDM. Everything I buy going forward needs to offer some sort of automation. I love DMG’s engineering, I love the software, I love the hardware, but I really wish there were parts stocked locally. We crashed the spindle on the NHX, and it crippled my lowers production while we waited on parts from Japan. When that machine is running, we can hardly keep up with it. It just delivers part after part after part. That’s true on all the DMGs, they are so fast, so accurate, so wonderful to setup, go home, and come in the next day to finished parts.”
If you ask Mike what his dream job is, this is it. No kidding. Since he was a kid, he always wanted to be an inventor. “I thought that to be an inventor meant you had a patent,” explains Mike. “I thought that meant you were valuable and smart.” It didn’t occur to him until much later that by thinking outside the box and problem solving, he was an inventor all along. “My grandfather was called “The Mayor of Silicon Valley,” chuckles Mike.” I must mention him because I am just so proud. He was a physicist and worked in electronics, you might know him as Bob Noyce, a co-founder of Intel. I got to know him as a child, he got me my first physics and engineering books. He died when I was eight years old, but my mother would tell me, your grandfather’s an inventor, and the way she said it would be like, your dad’s a hero, your grandfather’s a hero. And I said, well, what is an inventor? And so, she would say, “well, it’s someone who makes something new and different and useful to the world.” So, as a kid, I was desperate to be validated as an inventor, and now as an adult I have that. The army didn’t believe me for five years, then ten years, and now they hold the door open and say, welcome, Mr. Merino.”
“In the words of my grandfather “Innovation is everything,” concludes Mike. “It was true in 1961 when he received a patent for the integrated circuit, and it is truer now. There’s a glacial force of innovation that is always moving and we want to saddle up and ride it. I collect geniuses here, honestly, Sean, and I love it. It’s the coolest thing in the world. We’ve all got an ism. We’ve all got a thing. OCD is almost a prerequisite to work here. I tell all my employees you are smarter than you know. You are smarter than you think. You just have never had the chance to turn that supercomputer on. The golden age of the world, the quantum leap for the species happened from 1875 to 1975. We went from horse drawn carriages to landing on the moon in 100 years. Just because that can never be duplicated doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Take AI for example. AI can be a threat, or it can be an asset, and it is up to us which one of those it becomes. My vision of Blue Sky Inventors is every single employee I have has an AI assistant, whether it be digital or physical, a cobot of some kind to make doing whatever it is faster/easier/better. We’re so close now that I expect Sarah Connor to show up here at any minute, but I promised Dave I wouldn’t contribute to anything like Skynet so we will just keep doing what we do best, innovation on demand.
Blue Sky Inventors rely on a handful of Haas mills equipped with trunnions to tackle many of their 4 axis machining needs in two ops or less.