SSK Industries, Inc. is an American designer and manufacturer of

firearm A firearm is any type of gun that uses an explosive charge and is designed to be readily carried and operated by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see legal definitions). The first firearms originate ...

s and accessories in

Wintersville, Ohio Wintersville is a village (United States)#Ohio, village in central Jefferson County, Ohio, United States. The population was 3,609 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It is part of the Weirton–Steubenville metropolitan area. The v ...

. Founded in 1977, the company is known for its custom Contender and Encore barrels. Started by hunter and gun enthusiast

J. D. Jones J. D. Jones (born November 21, 1936) is an American firearms and cartridge designer, firearms writer and founder of SSK Industries. Jones began hunting at an early age, and became interested in bullet casting and handloading firearms cartridge ...

, SSK Industries began by manufacturing and marketing specific products related to hunting handguns and ammunition. It has grown to a company that makes hundreds of different types of rounds. Lehigh Defense acquired SSK Industries in 2019, re-branding it SSK Firearms.

Notable products

SSK produced the largest center-fire

rifle A rifle is a long gun, long-barreled firearm designed for accurate shooting and higher stopping power, with a gun barrel, barrel that has a helical or spiralling pattern of grooves (rifling) cut into the bore wall. In keeping with their focus o ...

in history, the .950 JDJ. It is a .950 caliber which produces recoil equivalent to shooting ten .30-06 rifles at the same time. SSK manufactured three of these rifles, and no longer produces the ammunition. The Whisper family of firearm cartridges were developed in the early 1990s as a line of accurate, multi-purpose cartridges using relatively heavy

bullets A bullet is a Kinetic energy weapon, kinetic projectile, a component of firearm ammunition that is Shooting, shot from a gun barrel. They are made of a variety of materials, such as copper, lead, steel, polymer, rubber and even wax; and are made ...

for a given caliber in subsonic loads. The intention was to create an extremely accurate cartridge family for military, police, competition and specialized hunting markets that could also be easily sound- suppressed. While initially a group of

wildcat cartridge A wildcat cartridge, often shortened to wildcat, is a custom-made cartridge (weaponry), cartridge for which ammunition and/or firearms are not mass-produced. These cartridges are often created as experimental variants to optimize a certain ballis ...

s, many of them now have

SAAMI The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute (SAAMI, pronounced "Sammy") is an association of American manufacturers of firearms, ammunition, and components. SAAMI is an accredited standards developer that publishes several A ...

and C.I.P. specifications.

References

Ammunition designers Firearm manufacturers of the United States {{US-manufacturing-company-stub