Zayin Tactical: Priced to be the First Suppressor You Buy; Engineered to be the Last

Zayin Tactical makes quality suppressors. You can buy one today for $299. How can they do this? There must be a catch. That is the hook in the story. Owner Zack Cross is an Army veteran, a Machinist, a Patriot, and a Constitutionalist. He and his family make cans in America for Americans and they run a very efficient operation.

In a retrospective glance back along the time-line of certain great ideas, some have a clear genesis. Denzel Dockery invented the ‘Diver Down’ flag (red diagonal stripe on white) to avoid being chopped to bits by propeller blades as he tried out his homemade SCUBA gear, the plans for which he’d taken from an issue of Popular Mechanics.

Levi Strauss was a busy merchant who sold pair after pair of pants to the rugged miners during the San Francisco gold rush, to replace those literally torn apart at the seams by the sharp rocks in the tunnels and the heavy gold in their pockets. It occurred to him that they needed much sturdier gear, and he was in possession of hundreds of yards of heavy cloth – and Levi’s Jeans (after a couple iterations) was born.

Regarding the start of Zayin Tactical, Zack Cross’s small arms and suppressor business, it would be harder to trace the nascent beginning to a particular event. As a child back in the early seventies in Southeast Alaska, his familiarity with guns was just a normal part of daily life. Some afternoons his parents would station him at an upstairs window with instructions to stabilize the rodent population in the surrounding junkyard. Many mornings he would leave with his .22 and a box of shells and spend the day plinking in the woods, enjoying what was essentially a deep affection for shooting, and admiration for the gun itself. The deer he shot one day at only seven years old (having come upon it by complete surprise) was just a collateral blessing and a bit of a problem – he had to go get his mother to come and help him haul it home.

At seventeen he enlisted in the Army and gained a new understanding of and appreciation for arms and munitions of all types- their construction, strengths and weaknesses, their care and maintenance and different capabilities, memorizing many, many ballistics tables along the way. Despite his ETS from the Army, he never lost his love for firearms.

Fast-forward through the years and careers and we find him working overseas as a government contractor, responsible for in-theater maintenance and repair of Remote Weapon Systems installed on variants of the Stryker platform. During that assignment, he learned more about large caliber weapons – specifically M2’s and Mark19’s; their tolerances – temperature and stress fatigue, and the incredible decibel levels they can generate.

Though it was hard working long hours in an inhospitable place away from his wife and children, the pay was more than adequate, and he was determined to put in his time now in order to get out of debt and finance their dream of buying a piece of property somewhere where they could become independent and self-sustaining- chickens, goats, a garden- the whole nine yards. It was right about this time, on a trip stateside for the birth of his first grandchild, that the trajectory he had been on ran right up against a blast barrier and stopped cold. In his first week back in the states, he was admitted to the ER two times in such excruciating pain that he could barely walk and couldn’t drive at all.

The doctors’ eventual findings: congenitally deformed hips exacerbated by decades of running for physical fitness and finished off by years of deployment. In an instant everything changed, and he found himself not only at a financial disadvantage, but struggling to figure out what he could possibly do to be productive with a functional diagnosis of “permanently disabled”.

What now? After considering many possibilities and adjusting direction a few times, he enrolled in a machining course at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington where his daughter was getting her Technical Arts Degree. He obtained his Precision Machinist certification in 2014 (repairing an old Navy lathe for his instructor along the way), and moved back to Alaska in 2015, still looking for a viable way to get back on the path to being independent and able to provide for his family.

An active reader and contributor to several websites and boards that other weapons specialists frequent, he began to see a need for high quality suppressors in a affordable price range. After some research, he concluded that launching a start-up business on the strength of his ideals as a patriot and defender of the second amendment, his skills as a machinist, and his love for guns was a worthy gambit.

Once he had the target in his sights, it remained for him to figure out all the details that make up a business – name, logo, mission statement, advertising methods, business cards, and the million details that make up a “simple” website. He spent a lot of time wondering how much to share with the world, how transparent to be, how vulnerable? Following the same leading as before, he put all of it out there- why he chose the name Zayin, why he believes small manufacturing is crucial, why he chose suppressors as a business.

He spent hundreds and hundreds of hours staring at laptop trying to make pictures and text stay where they were supposed to, and on the phone arguing with credit card companies, most of whom flat-out wouldn’t do business with him at all because suppressors are still classified as a ‘destructive device’ and regulated by the NFA much in the same way as machine guns and explosives.

Finally he got everything daisy-chained together and plugged it in. Beyond excited, he began to get feedback that there had been a spike of views to the site, interested searchers clicking around, and then… it slowed to a crawl. After a little investigation, it was discovered that the main company he was depending on for advertising canceled his ad, though they had previously approved it. Again, the reason according to Facebook: his site was associated with weapons.

Undeterred, knowing he had a great idea, product and pricing; he pressed on. These days you can either find him still staring at his CNC or a computer screen, watching for any problems, answering every single email right away, with great care and focus. Despite Facebook refusing to allow advertisement, with hopes of word-of-mouth, he’s looking to attract enough of a share of the vast market to simply get up every morning and do what he has long pictured doing- feeding the goats and then on to the shop and to make beautiful, lasting, worthwhile things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aurora Matthews – Quality Control

ALL zTac – Gen1 SUPPRESSORS are $299*

Priced to be the first suppressor you buy; engineered to be the last.