The Kent, Washington Shop Keeping Retro Alive

There’s a building on East Walnut Street in Kent with a CNC lathe inside it that is doing something almost nobody else in the country is doing, and doing it in what may be the least hospitable state in the union for the work.

I’m a machinist and I spent most of my career doing maintenance and repair work where the part has to be right the first time because the line is down while you make it. I also shoot. Those two facts have coexisted awkwardly for most of my working life, because in the Puget Sound the machining jobs are aerospace and the firearms jobs are somewhere else. Liemohn Manufacturing is the shop where those two things finally sit in the same room.

What Tom Liemohn actually builds

The short version: Liemohn Manufacturing reproduces the Colt R0633, the Department of Energy 9mm submachine gun, along with the family of retro AR parts that surround it.

If you don’t know the 633, it deserves a minute. Colt built the Model 635 in the early ’80s as a 9mm variant of the M16 — closed bolt, straight blowback, Uzi-pattern magazines feeding through a pinned magwell block. It was a clean idea: give somebody who already trained on an M16 a pistol-caliber gun with identical controls. The 633 was the compact version of that gun, chopped to a 7-inch barrel with a hydraulic buffer and a simplified front sight, and it won the Department of Energy contract over the H&K MP5K. Those guns rode with the convoys that move nuclear material around the United States. Colt made very few of them. They were reportedly called the “briefcase gun” inside the factory.

You cannot buy one. A surviving Colt DOE upper, if you find it, runs two to three thousand dollars, and the guns themselves live in a registry that closed in 1986. What Tom Liemohn does is make the upper — forged A1 receiver, no forward assist, correct port door, chrome-lined barrel, DOE-correct handguards cast from original molds — so that a collector with a legal host lower can actually own and shoot the configuration instead of looking at photographs of it. Guns & Ammo ran the build in the 2025 AR-15 annual under the title “Retro Reimagined,” alongside Echo Nine Three’s Joe Elledge. The Colt AR-15 Resource, which is about as unforgiving an audience as exists for clone work, put a Liemohn upper side by side with a genuine R0633 on camera and called it a very nice, well done product. A collector on the forums put it more bluntly: you can’t tell it from the real one without taking it apart.

That’s the part that gets me, as a machinist. Clone work is not easy work. There is no tolerance stack to hide behind, because the customer already owns the original and will put a caliper on yours. Getting a reproduction to that standard means you are reverse-engineering a 40-year-old part from a company that is not going to send you the print.

The work itself

Look past the retro line and what you find is a general precision shop that happens to hold a Type 07 manufacturing license and a Class 2 SOT.

Barrel threading starts at $75 for an AR-15, stripped, threads cut concentric to bore and gauged to 3A. That last clause is the tell. Anybody with a lathe can put threads on a muzzle. Cutting them true to the bore rather than true to the outside of the barrel, and then actually gauging them with ring gauges and thread pitch mics instead of eyeballing a thread protector onto it, is the difference between a suppressor that lasts and a baffle strike. The published thread list runs from 1/2×28 through 3/4×10 on the unified side and 13.5×1 LH through 16×1.5 on the metric side, and if you want something exotic they’ll ask you to send the mating part so they can verify it. That is exactly the right answer.

The rest of the service menu reads like a list of jobs a good shop takes because they’re interesting: a Marlin 1895 in .45-70 threaded 5/8×24 with the magazine tube shortened and a thread cover turned to match; a Beretta 21A mouse gun getting 1/2×28 on a stepped adapter; Ruger Mark IVs and Browning Buckmarks with the front sight moved back and the barrel cut short enough to keep standard-velocity ammo subsonic; MP5 barrel replacement with tooling built specifically for the job. Custom CNC work is $100 an hour plus material, milling, turning, laser engraving, and manual machining all in house.

The in-house parts catalog is the same philosophy in miniature. Flash hiders and three-lug adapters out of heat-treated 4140. A 50-meter rear sight aperture, also 4140, cut because the 9mm trajectory doesn’t match the aperture the A1 receiver came with. A magwell adapter out of 6061, anodized matte black. These are small parts that exist because somebody who shoots the platform noticed a problem and decided to solve it on a mill rather than complain about it on a forum.

Now the hard part

I said this was the least hospitable state in the union for the work. I meant it, and it’s worth laying out honestly rather than as a slogan.

In April 2023, Washington enacted House Bill 1240, which bans the manufacture, importation, distribution, and sale of what the statute calls assault weapons. The exemptions are narrow: sales to the armed forces, sales to law enforcement, and sales or transfers outside the state. The definition catches firearms by name and also by feature, and among the features that trigger it are a flash suppressor, a threaded barrel designed to accept one, and a muzzle brake. Read that again with a shop’s eyes. A Kent business can machine a flash hider and ship it to Idaho, but the customer standing in the parking lot may be in a different legal position than the one in Coeur d’Alene. The site’s own fine print says it plainly: availability varies by configuration and jurisdiction.

The industry fought it. Aero Precision in Tacoma, which employs a couple hundred people and made 174,091 receivers in 2021 alone, joined the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s federal suit the day the bill was signed and stopped shipping lowers into its own home state. The courts have not been kind. A federal judge declined to block the law in June 2023. A Thurston County judge declined twice. In November 2025 that court granted summary judgment for the state, holding that these firearms aren’t protected arms under the Washington constitution at all. The federal case is stayed pending the Ninth Circuit. Meanwhile the state’s 2022 magazine ban survived the Washington Supreme Court 7-2 in May 2025, on the reasoning that a magazine isn’t an “arm,” which is why the steel 32-round Colt-pattern magazines in Liemohn’s catalog are an out-of-state item.

The floor keeps moving. A permit-to-purchase system signed in 2025 comes online May 1, 2027, requiring fingerprints, certified live-fire training, and a five-year state permit before any transfer. An 11 percent state excise tax on firearms, parts, and ammunition has been sitting in House Finance across two sessions. And in March 2026 the governor signed HB 2320, which makes it unlawful to manufacture a frame or receiver with a CNC milling machine unless you hold a federal manufacturing license, restricts distribution of the CAD files that drive the machines, and attaches a rebuttable presumption to possessing them.

That last one lands differently if you run a mill. Washington has now drawn a bright line through my trade, and the line is licensure. On one side is a felony-adjacent hobby. On the other side is a shop with an 07 and an SOT on the wall and an acquisition and disposition book that balances. There aren’t many of those in this state. There’s one on East Walnut Street.

The older statute cuts the same way. RCW 9.41.190 makes manufacturing, assembling, or repairing a machine gun a class C felony in Washington, and the exemption runs to federally licensed manufacturers doing production, repair, or testing for the military, law enforcement, or export. The statute specifically contemplates employees of those licensees, provided they’ve been fingerprinted and background checked. That is a very short list of lawful workbenches in the state of Washington, and it is the list I’d like to be on.

Why I want the job

Some of this is sentimental and I won’t pretend otherwise. Olympic Arms moved to Washington in 1975 and built its first AR here in 1976, and it closed in 2017. Stag Arms runs a plant in Tacoma with headquarters in Cheyenne. The trend line for this industry in this state points east and south.

Liemohn stayed. One man, a lathe, a mill, a license, and a reputation built over more than twenty-five years in the NFA community by getting details right that only a few hundred people in the country would ever notice. Customers wait a year for an upper and then post that it was worth it.

I don’t think the people who wrote these laws are cartoon villains. They’re responding to real grief, and the suicide and homicide numbers they cite are real numbers. I think they’ve written statutes that fall hardest on the small licensed shop that was never the problem, and that Washington is quietly exporting a category of skilled trade work it will not get back. Both of those things can be true.

What I know for certain is narrower. Somewhere in Kent, somebody is single-pointing threads concentric to a bore and gauging them properly, casting handguards out of molds older than I am, and keeping a piece of American manufacturing history in circulation instead of behind museum glass. The sign on the door says American craftsmanship we stand behind, never in front.

I’d like to stand behind it too. I’ve got my own tools and my NRA card, and I’d start Monday.