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What happened to quality control at Winchester

3K views 4 replies 5 participants last post by  Falcon 
#1 ·
I have been very saddened by the lack of quality control on the new Winchester M70 Featherweights I have seen in the last few years. Their bolts are often loose going into battery. There is no excuse for this. On the ones I have looked at about 1 out of 3 is nice and tight. The other two are sloppy locking up and should not have made it out the door. Reasons like this would keep me from buying one online. I would have to cycle it myself and see if it is a good one. I love Winchester M70s but I would only recommend one if it is inspected by the buyer before any money changes hands. If I were to buy one now, I would call ahead to make sure they had two in the model and caliber I wanted. Then look at both hopeing one was good and tight with no other issues in fit and finish.
At over 800.xx dollars this should not be necessary. Ok I feel better now I have vented.......

Karl
 
#2 · (Edited)
I have a 1958 standard model 70 in .243.I paid $400 for it in 1991.I could not be happier.No problems after thousands of rounds and it was fired often before I got it.I took 3 deer with it last year and thats approaching 50.Its so sad they can't duplicate it today.It doesn't make sense with computer controlled machining that they can't.
 
#4 ·
Buying old stuff makes a lot of sense today.
Anyone who's been around this stuff for awhile knows how quality suffers. The rule of law is that you can have 2 of the 3 items in manufacturing (item quality, speed of production, low cost). I've seen this many times, and the perfect example is the Mauser-based actions from Zastava. When they were Interarms Mark.X rifles, they were (and still are revered). When the became Charles Daly, and then Remington rifles, quality dropped slowly to keep costs down. Now that Zastava markets them on their own as Z-98's, the "exact same rifle" suffers in quality. Gone are nice wood stocks (costs), bolt lockups are sloppy (costs, speed), lustrous blue finishes aren't the same (speed, costs). Apparently now that Winchester was sold off a few years ago, the M-70 production is following "the law".
 
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