[stagpanther]

OK--I'm faced with a dilemma and made a choice--though I'm not sure it was the right one--interested in what the groupthink has to say.

Last year a customer brought me a model 70 in 270 Weatherby magnum to work on, it was pretty beat up and the stock was a mess when I first got my hands on it. After a lot of work on it I got lucky and made and exceptional shooter out of it, in fact his extended family uses the gun frequently since everyone that uses it has been getting nice one-shot kills out to respectable distances. Something that makes me kinda proud when they report their successes.

Well, perhaps it's a case of "victim of success" but the customer bought another old 270 Weatherby magnum--this one a vanguard classic, which after talking to the folks at Weatherby I found out they (aka howa) only made it one year; in 1990. It's turned out to be quite a bit more work than I anticipated, right now I'm trying to smooth over some of the bore corrosion pitting to see if I can possibly "rescue" the barrel and maybe extend it's life.

Luckily, I kept some of the spent cases from the model 70 I worked on to use to make some bore-polishing cartridges with tubb's finishing kits. I also have a few cases of factory ammo that had already been fired through the vanguard.

When I checked the cases that had been fired through the Model 70, they would not chamber in the vanguard. At first I thought it was just a matter of adjusting the dies, but no matter what I did the case that had been fired through the model 70 could not be resized to fit in the vanguard. I don't have any gauges for any of the Weatherby magnums--but I do have a case gauge for a 300 win mag--and sure enough the case would not fit properly.

Bottom line, I suspect that there is a real possibility that the model 70 may have a headspace issue, although I won't know until I get it back in my hands. This rifle has already dropped several deer and a moose in the past few weeks and it's not going to go over well if I ask to "pull it out of circulation."

Short story long, I basically told the owner today that I felt there was a real potential danger of the rifle having a failure and that if it were my family I would not let my kids use it. He wasn't happy, but he said he would take it "off line."

I'm not even sure what the potential liability issues might be having done this--any thoughts?

PS--when I first got the model 70 I wasn't asked to check the headspace, only to clean the rifle up and zero the scope. In retrospect--even though it's a factory production rifle, is this something I should have "automatically" done even if not asked to?