Kent Lomont Died

[BarryinIN]

From John Ross (author of Unintended Consequences):

The shooting community lost one of its titans last night at about 6:30 Mountain Time when Kent Lomont died at the age of 66. Kent was in a facility in Missoula, Montana where he died of bone cancer, which had been diagnosed about 6 months ago.

Kent, originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, moved to Salmon, Idaho in the 1990s to be where he and his father had spent summer vacations and visited with Elmer Keith starting in 1960.

In recent years, Kent was recognized as this country's most knowledgeable hands-on authority on machine guns and cannons, with more experience at rebuilding and making functional every type of full auto weapon ever made than any other living person. At machine gun shoots such as Knob Creek, Kentucky, it was a common sight to see Kent behind a Browning .30 or .50 cal., a Belgian MAG-58, or an FN Type D BAR, the barrel glowing cherry red as the gun poured round after round downrange without a stoppage.

Prior to his involvement with full auto arms, Kent was instrumental in providing development work for the late Harry Sanford, inventor of the original Auto Mag handgun, and Kent won the Townsend Whelen award for writing by the Gun Digest for an article he penned for that publication, describing his efforts in this area.

Before that, Kent held the distinction of sending more guns back to the Smith & Wesson factory for rebuild than any other customer in the company's history, and was the Indiana distributor for Lakeville Arms (Jim Harvey) products at the age of twelve while he was in the eighth grade.

Kent is survived by his four children, Lane, Jill, Chris, and Molly, stepdaughters Candy and Sherry, and ex-wives Kathy, Shirley, and Mary Lou.

We are diminished.

Kent was a fixture of gun shows around here until he moved to Idaho several years ago. The shows haven't been the same since. In the book "Unintended Consequences", the hero Henry Bowman goes on an annual prairie dog hunt out west where he meets a gun show buddy in his Kaiser military truck. I also thought that character had to be at least partially based on Kent.

The Gun Digest articles he refers to above was a two-part series on the Auto Mag, that was in the 1973 and 1974 editions as I recall. They are still the best source I know for technical info of the Auto Mag. Kent worked together with Lee Jurras, the founder of Super Vel ammunition, who lived a couple hundred miles south of him. These two were the Auto Mag experts.

Kent got into machine guns, big bore revolvers, and was shooting .50 caliber (and larger) rifles before anyone I ever heard of. He was one of the first attendees of the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot- long before it was an organized event.

He was a chemist by trade, and according to others, he was good at it and did very well for himself. Still, it was amusing to see his effect on people. He looked like a bum that walked into the gun show to keep warm, with a scruffy beard and holey jeans with the pockets hanging by a thread- yet he would be standing by 20 tables filled with a half million dollars of machineguns he owned.

Kent will be missed, that's for sure. He will also be remembered often, and with a smile.

[Pablo]

That sucks. Bone cancer. Wow. Was he ever an active chemist - or organic chemist?

Guys like like him are getting scarcer.

Fort Wayne? I worked there for a summer. Inland Specialty Chemical.

[BarryinIN]

That sucks. Bone cancer. Wow. Was he ever an active chemist - or organic chemist?

I don't know, nor do I know the difference. All I know is people said "He's a chemist" when people would ask. The guy owned things that would rival many military museums while walking around in ragged jeans looking like he couldn't afford gun show admission, so the question "What does he do for a living?" was asked a lot. People would be shocked to learned he was the owner of the guns and gear spread across 20 tables, including a 20mm Solothurn and brass fitted Gatling.

I want to say that I heard something about him working in the oil business somehow. That could have been one small job 40 years ago for all I know.

His website:

http://www.kentlomont.com/

[BarryinIN]

Pictures from John Ross posted elsewhere:

Kent Lomont is on the right, Kent's father is on the left, and in the middle is Elmer Keith

That picture was probably taken in the mid-70s. Kent looked exactly like that the last time I saw him around 2000.

Kent Lomont, John Ross, and unidentified, rigging dynamite at an MG shoot. That's a lot of dynamite.

[Pablo]

WOW.

Amazing photos.

An inordinate amount of former organic chemists get some form of cancer is the only reason I brought that up.

[BarryinIN]

The only thing I can add is that I heard this afternoon he graduated with a Chemical Engineering degree from Notre Dame. I still don't know ho he worked or consulted for.

I wish I could find the picture I want online. It was from the Gun Digest articles, I think. He was shooting one AutoMag, had another in a holster, one stuck in his belt, and maybe another somewhere in there.

The stories are pouring in. It seems everybody who ever met him has one. I don't, other than seeing him at gun shows and the Knob Creek MG shoot and having more stuff than anyone, and especially knowing more about his stuff than anyone. The most I talked to him was at the gun show where I bought my second AutoMag. He asked to see it as I walked by his tables, and he congratulated me on the caliber choice. It was the .357 AMP, which he thought was better than the .44 for long range work.

The man had knowledge of guns, especially MGs and cannon, that I can't even come up with words to describe. He was pretty much a legend at being able to fix any of those big old hunks of iron.

Supposedly, he got an M2 .50 caliber Browning so well tuned up that he laid out a belt 100 yards long at Knob Creek one year, and the gun fed it with little to no assistance. That's hard to swallow, even for him. I keep hearing it, so maybe it happened.

For comparison, HK used to do a demo with their HK21 7.62x51 MG where they mounted one on an elevated platform, loaded a belt that hung to the ground, and fired it off. It amazed everyone by pulling that heavy belt in unassisted. That belt would be about seven feet long. Yes, the M2 Browning is a bigger gun, but 100 yards of .50 cal dragged along the ground is a LOT more weight too.

But if anyone could do it, I'd bet on Kent.

He was...different, but he sure was one smart man.

I have no guess as to how much stuff he took to Knob Creek every time. I know he had at least one deuce-and-a-half on the firing line with twin FN MAG58s (precursor to the M240) and another full of other stuff. He was famous for burning up barrels. He'd almost have to take a truck down just to carry MG barrels.

And the ammo?

I heard today that he had a bank of Star reloading machines. Star has been gone for a while, but their machines are still considered the Rolls Royce by many. They ran easily over a $1k 30 years ago, but they were the only high volume reloading tools then. Dillon Precision was created mostly to provide an affordable alternative.

He had a row of them, and had a staff of HS age kids that he paid to keep those Stars working, cranking out ammunition for him.

He learned to do machine work, so he could make his own MG parts and things like bullet moulds for cannon.

The man was simply on a different plane of gun-ness from most of us.

He knew obscure old MGs like a top gunsmith knows 1911s, and more common ones like he knew himself. Even if you set out to learn that much about this sort of thing...how would you do it? You don't pick it up by reading a book. You can't get there without learning it firsthand, and spending hours using and working with them. And few have the means, or the time, or the dedication.

I don't see how anybody could do it now, even if they wanted to.

[wheelgunner]

If any of you out there wish to know more about Kent Lomont...."the early years"....I'm your man. I had the great good luck of meeting Kent in 1958. He was 13 and I was 12. I was one of the kids in his neighborhood on the south side of Ft. Wayne ,IN who "worked", if you can call it that, for him casting wheel weights into alloyed bullets for sale as far away as Africa. He "paid" us in ammo, which we loaded ourselves. So many rounds of our choice for each hour's work. He supplied the powder & primers, we cast or swaged the bullets and he let us shoot any guns he or his dad ,Al, owned.

I spent nearly every hour I wasn't in school in his garage or basement or at the range with Kent until 1963/1964. We also logged countless hours hiking, camping, canoeing and other things which should probably be left unsaid.

Yes, he was a degreed chemist. He started at Indiana Institute Of Technology in Ft, Wayne but graduated from Purdue's main campus in West Lafayette,IN. He worked for maybe 10 years at Kitgo in ,I believe, Bluffton,IN as an organic chemist. I followed a similar path, 4 years at IU and 2 years at Purdue and was also a chemist . I spent 36 years working for Uncle Sam ( DOD) doing classified research on weapons systems. I worked and went to school full time with my employer picking up the tab and I stayed with them all 36 years. We put some remarkable things in SE Asia and I worked for them from 10 Jan 66 to 10 April, 2002.

Kent's full name was Kent Allen Clement Lomont. Kent went to St. John the Baptist Catholic elementary school and Bishop Luers HS and chose St. Clement as his Patron Saint for Confirmation.

I have about a thousand unbelievable stories about him.....maybe I should pass them on to John Ross who could turn them into a [censored]-of-a book.

I really can't believe he is gone. I guess I just don't want to.

Jim R.

[Pablo]

Thank you for posting that. Very, very informative.

I was a chemist working in Fort Wayne for Inland. Small world, I guess.

[BarryinIN]

I only knew him from seeing him at gun shows in Indiana. Like many around here, I knew him but didn't really know him if you know what I mean.

So yes, I liked reading what you had to say about him.

He is certainly someone who should have done some more writing. The MG knowledge he must have had filed away in his head...

I read a couple days after he died that he went to Notre Dame, and now I learn he went to two places, neither of which was ND! It goes to show what I said about a lot us knowing who he was, but not that much about him.

As an AutoMag owner, I would like to know more of his time involved with them. I've heard that he didn't care to talk much about them (maybe people bugged him about them a lot after he wrote the Gun Digest articles) but the most I ever talked to him was over AutoMags.

Come to think of it, there is an AutoMag section here: http://www.amtguns.info/forum_topics.asp?FID=1&title=message-board

...and the members there might like to hear anything you have to say.

If it's too hard yet, I understand. I hardly knew him more than being able to recognize him and it shocked me for a few days.