Hey, it's been a while since I've been on here. Took a long hiatus due to employment and whatnot.
Anyways I've hit a wall and would if possible, looking for help on a subject that I keep on hitting dead ends with. I've come up with 8 new designs for firearms (mainly action, but other items too) and have made drawings, CAD model simulations of operation and a working prototype of one. I've contacted a few firearm manufacturing firms, such as Colt, Remington, Spike's Tactical, etc. and it's like I came to them offering a free bout of ebola or small pox. While I can understand apprehension towards some Joe Schmoe throwing an e-mail at them claiming such things, it has really put me into a bind.
I want these ideas to come to life sometime or another, as I have two that have really excited me and I believe (after several hours of refinement, computer analysis and troubleshooting) all of them would be serious advancements in the firearms world. Of course I would be tempted to start my own firm, find a partner, etc. however my checkbook disagrees with this due to recent events. Can anyone give me some ideas or somewhere to turn with this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and have a great day.

Take a look at crowd funding, and since it's firearms related be prepared to duck.

You are running into the lawyer problem.

If they look at your design and sometime later one of their guys designs something similar they could be facing a lawsuit.

Also, did you patent your ideas complete with working samples? Many manufacturers want to see it work before they look at paper.

Metalsmith I am pretty qualified to talk to you about your designs and how to move forward.

1. You need a letter of confidentiality and non-disclosure for anyone that helps you or sees your designs. This protects your work.

One of the problems you will always run into with any company that designs its own products is the NIH syndrome - not invented here.

To get around that you need complete and I mean complete engineering design drawings with surface textures, finishes, heat treatment, raw materials, and bills of materials.
If you do that I can critique your work, that is I mark up all your work with a red pen where it needs improvement. I do that for a living.
Or I could create the engineering package.

Then you get a few actions/prototypes made. You may have to get a license to manufacture or manufacture certain features yourself.

Once the protos are working well get a complete gun or 3 to 5 put together for testing.

Test the hell out of them.

In the mean time I can tell you what they will cost to have manufactured in quantity at an advanced shop that produces high quality work both here in the states and in China.

There will also be some manufacturing strategies developed where you sub out barrel blanks, stocks, fasteners, bluing, heat treat.

With all that ground work done you get the funding or a partner ship agreement with the manufacturer and launch production.
Tooling has to be designed and CNC programs written. All the tooling and programs have to be proofed. The out put of the shop's work has to be inspected early on.

During all of that previous work some marketing and sales has to occur to get your product to customers with cash.

I can discuss an example of similar a project that some guys in Australia tried. It was a huge flop so you might learn all of the things they did right and a few they did wrong.
I will leave you my phone number if you want to call.