While in Georgia a couple of months ago, Guns.com paid a visit to the Trulock Tool Company and found out they were about a lot more than just shotgun chokes.
 
George Trulock, the paterfamilias and founder of the company, was a full-time police officer for the small Grady County town of Cairo – his birthplace – and part-time gunsmith who specialized in large-framed wheelguns, with special attention to big Smith & Wesson N frames. Having to craft his own tools to get the job done, he hit on the idea that other folks may have been having similar issues and started to manufacture specialized pistol-smith tools such as frame wrenches and crane straighteners.
 

 
Soon, George pivoted from wheelguns to making his shotgun chokes of an innovative type that could be retrofitted into the common cylinder-bore shotgun barrels of the time, without the user having access to a machine shop to make it happen. With demand for these new Tru-Choke-style choke tubes being heavy, to say the least, he took the plunge in 1982, hung up his badge, and started clocking in as Employee No. 1 at the newly formed Trulock Firearms, which later morphed into the company that continues his name today.
 
Eventually, the enterprise would grow to produce more than 2,000 different kinds and variants of choke tubes, becoming standard OEM factory-supplied equipment for many shotgun brands. As an aside, they have also been extensively copied and imitated by several aftermarket choke makers.
 
Over the years, Mr. George would grow the business from a hardworking one-man band to employ more than 15, becoming a bedrock institution in the small Grady County town of Whigham, population 428. Speaking of an institution, he would marry, have two sons – Scott and Jerrod – four grandchildren, and serve as town mayor.
 

 
Then, last June, George passed away after his battle with pancreatic cancer, just a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday.

A New Era

With the late George Trulock spending over 45 years working tirelessly to bring the company to the point of success and become a household name, his devastating passing left the operation in the hands of the two men most capable of carrying it forward into a new era, his sons Scott and Jerrod.

In visiting with the brothers, we felt assured the new Trulock Tool will continue to be much like the old Trulock Tool in terms of upholding the past high level of integrity, professionalism, innovation, and quality. With that being said, there is an emphasis on being cutting edge and modern. At work in their 20,000-square-foot facility is a brand-new Fanuc Robodrill long-bed four-axis vertical machining center in addition to seven CNC lathes, running 24 hours a day, five days a week.
 

However, in a salute to the company's roots, one of Trulock's first pieces of production equipment, an old South Bend precision lathe, is still at the shop today and still gets some use from time to time.
 

Trulock Isn't Just Chokes.

For the past several years, the company has been making parts and components that don't have anything to do with shotguns for some larger players in the firearms industry. For instance, with Taurus establishing a new manufacturing plant just 15 miles away in Bainbridge in 2019, Trulock has been working on a lot of subcomponents for its Heritage rimfire single-action revolver subsidiary.
 
In short, while not stamped "Trulock," a lot of the Heritage revolvers on the market in the past few years have had parts that spent time in their production process in Whigham, Georgia.

Trulock is also growing the business and expanding, having recently purchased a new 4,000-square-foot warehouse to store overflow material storage and provide additional space for machinery. There are big plans for that building in terms of something unexpected in the firearms space, but the brothers asked us to keep that under wraps for now.
 
It’s a good thing there are lots of Mr. George's grandkids around. Odds are they will have some work to do in the future.