I have received poorly functioning locks from 5 star and 3 star makers. Equally poorly functioning. It's best to take it up with them. Would your favorite lock maker appreciate it if I posted about a lock of his with problems? I wouldn't do it, but there is no maker who produces a lot of locks that is immune from a lemon or two. Take it to the maker and request a swap or fix.
Its endemic with some suppliers. Worse they have modified the locks over the years to make them WORSE in some ways.
This tells me someone is clueless, actually both the maker and the users.
I love the L&R 1700. But they are a kit as they arrive. The last one needed the tumbler hole welded shut, redrilled in the right place, reamed to fit the trued tumbler shaft. The cock needed to have their "change" (I used them year ago too) removed and the springs had to be rearched. But its still worth it because at its heart is a great design.
Last year we, being our guild, bought about 12 locks from Chambers, most were small Siler flint with several others, with the 2 I have, one in use and one in the safe, this makes 14 or 15 locks. While I did not check everyone in detail they ALL looked just like they should and were good to go out of the box. But Chambers does not make designs that fit everything I want so I buy from other places.
Buying castings? Chambers stuff is pretty darn good as is L&R but the Rifle Shoppe stuff needs some improvement. As a friend said 3-4 years back. "You bought a casting and did not buy a welder to go with it?"
By and large the parts available for making MLs are so poor in quality compared to what modern gunsmiths will tolerate its almost laughable. The difference being that people buying a custom bolt gun will pay the price,
while the average ML buyer is so cheap its nearly impossible to get paid a living wage. If a decent relief carved Kentucky man hours were computed to match the manhours/price ratio of a "tactical" bolt action they would sell for 20 grand and up. So the parts have to be cheap so the time to make them is shortened and the quality suffers. Then people too cheap to pay for better parts complain the quality is low. So its a self inflicted wound. Many will whine about prices that pay minimum wage for shop time (covering the electricity tool wear etc) much less what the gunsmith alone is worth. And its obvious that some suppliers of locks and other parts don't much care. Maybe they are fed up". I dunno.
Its FAR easier for me to fix something than spend time on the phone then shipping stuff back getting it back and finding out its as bad as before. So I just do the fix and let it go at that. By the time the parts get shipped back and forth I have them fixed and the lock installed in the stock.
So as long as people will accept or even demand crappy parts we will get crappy parts.
My hat is off to those who try to do it right. But some of these have dropped out of the market. I just learned of barrel maker has given up on making ML barrels since people will pay his price for a CF barrel but the ML barrel buyers act offended, its like trying to sell cufflinks or a tie to Jack Benny on his old radio show. Its crazy but that's how it is. Same to some extent in the BPCR field though the quality is generally much better, people still will pay more for bolt gun with 1/2 to 1/3 the man hours in it and a cast plastic stock.
Dan
