The Bushmaster Rifle Is Coming Back
The Bushmaster rifle is coming back, but you can almost certainly expect it to be wearing a new name when that happens. According to a company insider—the ultimate insider—Hydra Weaponry will be reviving the classic piston-driven AR-style rifle design later this year.
Hydra Weaponry @ TFB:
Straight from the show floor
This bit of gossip comes straight from Mack Gwinn III, the big boss at Hydra Weaponry, who gave us this tidbit when we saw him at the SHOT Show earlier this winter.
Gwinn’s father, Mack Gwinn Jr., was the designer of the original Bushmaster rifle and founder of that company. While the Bushmaster brand is now doing other things, as part of the fallout of the Remington bankruptcy (Remington owned the brand, and sold it off), Gwinn and his crew are still hard at work in their new factory in Maine, not far from where the original Bushmaster rifles were built.
They’ve revived some of his other clever designs, including the multi-caliber rifle system as well as an oddball .223 survival pistol. If they’re going to continue exploring and developing the original designs, why not the Bushmaster, even if they have to change its name?
The Bushmaster design
The Bushmaster is somewhat similar to an AR-18 or AR-180B in that it’s generally quite similar to an AR-15, but comes with a piston-driven operating system. It was never adopted by any military organization.
If you’re curious about it, you can see a strip-down video we did on TFBTV about eight years back:
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For another angle on the rifle and its history, Forgotten Weapons has an excellent in-depth look at the first-generation Bushmaster here:
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While the original rifles may have had some issues as noted above, perhaps we’ll see the rifle’s latest generation running more smoothly after production starts in Hydra’s new manufacturing facility. It is almost certain that the new rifle will have some tweaks and improvements—expect optic and accessory mounting rails, since that’s pretty standard these days. Gwinn did not give us any hints about such changes, though.
We don’t have a specific timeline for the rifle’s release, but based on our conversation last month, we expect to see it around the middle of 2025.
