I could be convinced otherwise
But, for me, a firearm 'break-in period' where you shoot it a bunch to round over any sharp corners and condition it or 'shoot it loose' is bushwa. If a gun left the factory 'too tight' and they expect YOU to make it a functioning piece through use? That's not right.
That said, pobodys nerfect. Sometime a gun fails, when new, and that does not necessarily mean it is a lemon. It might need a adjustment that the factory failed to make. The gun assembler isn't as expert as they used to be.
Example: My Hudson. Glad I didn't send it back. All it needed was an adjustment to the extractor and it runs fine now, and I was lucky enough to have the expertise to toubleshoot that myself. If you mailed yours back and the company went bankrupt? Well, sucks to be you.
What a 'break in period' does do, for me, is determine a baseline reliability of your new firearm. I have learned, through my gunsmith training, it is a good idea to see if your new gun can do 250 rounds of the ammo you intend to shoot through it without failure.
If it fails on round 240 for your Federal HST, well, make you adjustment, and start this expensive test over. If you buy a custom gun you should expect this sort of test to be done for you before they slap on a $5000 price tag.
If you believed you had to do the break in period to loosen up you custom gun, well, YOU are doing the build testing, not the reliability testing. A gunsmith worth anything (or lucky) should aim to make a gun that WORKS when it leaves the assembly bench and heads to the range.
(I was the lucky kind, I must admit. Twice.)
Now let me read that Shooting Illustrated article past the headline....
Yup, condition your new pistol is a scam and a cover for non-existent QC.
And since you can count on a LOT of $600 or less guns to work through 250 rounds flawlessly right out of the box, you'd think the $6000 one would work AND be pretty.
Well, yes. The final QC for most gun manufacturers is left to the consumer. You can read about the introduction of almost any new gun and the issues that shooters have. Think of the firing pin breakage of K6s, for example. A lot of the early GP-100.44s had to go back for a number of reasons.
ReplyDeleteThey just assemble the parts and hope that they function. For a lot of the people who buy them, their guns won't hit 500 rounds in a decade.
I know that there are one or two custom 1911 makers who feel that there should be a number of rounds to break the gun in. It always seemed to me that it was just a gimmick that the builder was claiming that they built their guns so tightly that they needed that number of rounds to break them in. I figure that the builder has a choice of just how tightly they are going to build the gun, and building it so tight that you can hardly pull the slide back when first receiving the gun is simply unacceptable.
ReplyDeleteLike you say, why should I have to use ammo to do what the gunsmith should be doing during the fitting of the slide to the frame? For that matter, who would accept it if you paid 4000$ for a custom 1911, only to have to break the trigger in, or take it to a different gunsmith to do a trigger job?
I am not saying that a custom pistol should rattle like a snake, when you shake it, but it should not be nearly impossible to rack the slide, until you fire 300-400 rounds through it either.
It is my opinion that those custom 1911 makers are wrong, and they should build their guns tight, but also function, before the sale.
ReplyDelete