Charles A. "Mickey" Finn (June 21, 1938 – April 24, 2007) was an American designer who specialized in designing and producing weapons systems for the U.S. military. He retired from defense work and began designing sporting equipment, including the Mickey Finn T-Bar

Putter A putter is a club used in the sport of golf to make relatively short and low-speed strokes with the intention of rolling the ball into the hole from a short distance away. It is differentiated from the other clubs (typically, irons and woods) ...

, a golf putter.

Background

For thirty years Finn designed weapons systems for the

U.S. military The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is the ...

and other government agencies. In the industry he was referred to as "Q", after the special weapons supplier Q in

James Bond The ''James Bond'' series focuses on a fictional British Secret Service agent created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short-story collections. Since Fleming's death in 1964, eight other authors have ...

fiction, and the name of Finn's original research company

Qual-A-Tec Charles A. "Mickey" Finn (June 21, 1938 – April 24, 2007) was an American designer who specialized in designing and producing weapons systems for the U.S. military. He retired from defense work and began designing sporting equipment, including th ...

. After extensive research into

black operations A black operation or black op is a covert or clandestine operation by a government agency, a military unit or a paramilitary organization; it can include activities by private companies or groups. Key features of a black operation are that it i ...

, author

Tom Clancy Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947 – October 1, 2013) was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military science, military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of ...

used Finn's name to add an extra measure of realism to ''

The Cardinal of the Kremlin ''The Cardinal of the Kremlin'' is an espionage thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on May 20, 1988. A direct sequel to ''The Hunt for Red October'' (1984), it features CIA analyst Jack Ryan as he extracts CARDINAL, the agency's ...

''. Finn retired from the defense industry after this public mention and started a business selling military and hunting knives.

Qual-A-Tec

Qual-A-Tec was a research and development firm originally based in

Oceanside, California Oceanside is a city on the South Coast (California), South Coast of California, located in San Diego County, California, San Diego County. The city had a population of 167,086 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census. The city is a popular ...

United States. It later moved to

Chino Valley, Arizona Chino Valley is a town in Yavapai County, Arizona, United States. According to the 2010 census, the population of the town is 10,817. Geography Chino Valley is located at (34.758381, -112.449758). The town is located adjacent the southeast ter ...

, United States. It was owned and operated by Finn and specialized in signature suppression and muzzle control devices for firearms. It also provided classified weapons systems to the U.S. government until it was forced to close when author

outed Finn and his company in the novel ''

.'' The

U.S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cl ...

contract to design and build the

M9 bayonet The M9 Bayonet, officially known as the M9 Phrobis III, is a multi-purpose knife and bayonet officially adopted in 1986 by the United States. It has a blade and is issued with a sheath designed to double as a wire cutter. History The M9 bayon ...

for the M16 rifle was awarded to Qual-A-Tec. Out of 49 companies that bid on the contract, theirs was the only one tested that had zero percent rate of failure. Finn and his M9 bayonet design were profiled in the October 30, 1986, issue of the ''

LA Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' and the January 5, 1987, issue of ''

People A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...

'' magazine.

Quotation

:"Everything I design is the best, regardless of cost. In the weapons industry, if what you make has defects it costs lives. I couldn't live with that type of guilt."

Notes

External links

Mickey Finn biography from MickeyFinnGolf.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Finn, Mickey 1938 births 2007 deaths 20th-century American inventors