How much fitting are you willing to do on a new gun?

breakingcontact · November 24, 2012, 01:10 PM

After spending several hours working on a Mossberg 930 SPX, I got to thinking about how frustrating it was, but the run around of sending it in would also be very frustrating and it might come back not fixed.

How much fitting are you willing to do on a new gun? When do you just ship it back to the manufacturer? When do you say to hell with it and sell it?

I could have just bought a Nordic mag extension like most guys are doing, but I wanted to make it work right with the parts it came with. It functions well now, but I have a mag tube that's been ground on and polished, a follower I had to clean up and now a forend that's all cut up to make it all fit right.

Achieved my goal, but wondering if I should have just spent the money and got the Nordic extension, sent it back to Mossberg or just not bought it at all.

alex0535 · November 24, 2012, 02:10 PM

Not sure I know what you mean by "fitting". Parts in a good should generally fit together pretty well without doing anything to them.

I might sand down a wood stock to free float a barrel on a bolt action if it isn't already. I changed a trigger return spring in my Marlin 917v to give it a lighter pull.

I will take all of the internals out of a lever action rifle and polish them to remove machining burrs and other non smooth metal on parts of the gun that are metal to metal contact. Makes things much smoother.

I wouldn't keep a firearm that I could not rely on to not jam, misfire, or inexplicably not work at any given point. If something goes wrong I will take it apart, put it back together, and try again. If i couldn't figure out what was wrong I would try to find someone that could.

johnwilliamson062 · November 25, 2012, 01:21 AM

Dealing with the same problem on a 930. I am not messing with it. I am sending it back to them and they better send it back to me working. Any sort of function testing whatsoever would have found this problem at the factory and mine didn't even come with a front sight installed on the rifled barrel.

Metal god · November 25, 2012, 06:19 AM

My Ruger American rifle has a free floated barrel . The barrel is free floating right out of the box ( did the dollar bill test ) The problem is , the stock is very cheap and the forend flexes when moderate presure is applied ( resting on a bag or bi-pod ).This causes the barrel to make contact with the stock and really hurts the accuracy by about 1 to 1-1/2 MOA. I ended up sanding the heck out of the barrel channel of the stock to give the barrel more room . It seemed to work and all is good now . I don't think you should have to do any work on a new firearm . The gun only cost $360 and I think it's clear were they saved some money . The gun is a sub MOA shooter so a little sanding is not that big a deal . If the gun cost double that like most nice bolt guns do I would have been PO . I would think A 6 or 7 hundred dollar shotgun should be good to go right out of the box . Lets hope you did not void your warranty by working on it .

I bought an AR that came from the factory with a very minor but potentially catastrophic problem with the FGC . All I needed to fix it was a $2 part and 5 min of my time . I chose to send it back for two reasons 1) I wanted them to know that they sent a firearm out with a real problem and 2) I did not want to void my life time warranty by putting in a after market part .

One gun cost almost 1k the other cost just over $300 . One got sent back the other did not . Its up to you to deside what your willing to tolerate and what the potential hazards could be .