....you are missing the point completely.
You are well know and an accomplished competition shooter and you would have no trouble getting a good product!
You would have used a well know and respected gunsmith to get your first barrels . He would have no trouble getting a good barrel or its replacement.
Its the UNKNOWN SHOOTER , THE ORDINARY GUY ON THE STREET that is getting it in the neck from some barrel makers worldwide .
'Morning. I'll probably regret posting this. I know I regret my original post. Threads like this should die a quick death and I've probably only succeeded in prolonging the inevitable.
But now that I've opened my yap, I suppose I better finish what I started. Not that it will make any difference, but here goes:
Just to clarify things a bit, I went down and checked my records on my Lilja barrel purchases. Not one of the 8 Lilja barrels I've used were ordered directly from Lilja by me:
- 4 were ordered by my 'smith. 3 of those 4 were used to 'fill out' an order to get to the next discount level. Lilja Barrels certainly never knew who these 'filler' barrels were going to.
- 2 were purchased by me from pals that happened to have one or two left over from their '5 or more' orders. Lilja Barrels certainly never knew who the end user of these was going to be.
- 2 were ordered directly from Lilja on a one-at-a-time basis by my 'smith for me. On the first of these, it was the first time my 'smith had ever ordered a barrel from Lilja. At that time, my 'smith was unknown among BR shooters....hardly a candidate for getting a 'hand picked' barrel.
But my real point here isn't the defense of a company that I feel makes a quality product, as it is a cautionary message about being too quick to judge a company based on a few isolated instances and then to post these 'findings' on the Internet as 'fact'.
Interestingly, I don't have a Lilja on any of my BR guns at this time, so it's not like I have some sort of vested interest here. I just think that posting these sorts of inflamatory things about situations that we don't know all the facts about has the potential to cause great harm to a company. We don't know all the facts. Yet we sit back and judge and pontificate about a company (any company) based on heresay and the classic 'he said/she said' scenario? Doesn't seem quite kosher to me.
In defense of this, I'm going to point out the case of one poster on BRC that used to badmouth one of the biggest barrelmakers over barrels that were, in his opinion, junk. He would lament long and loudly over this..all the while assuring everyone that tried to help him that eveything else was fine with his setup...it was the barrels that were junk. Well, lo and behold..it turned out that the freebore diameter in his chamber was too small. It was a reamer problem. Not a barrel problem. But it was the barrelmaker that took the slamming. And did some people make purchase decisions based off his erroneous postings? Probably.
Some people seem to have issues with every component they buy: actions, barrels, stocks, triggers, rests, scopes...you name it, they have problems with it. The common demominator seems to be the person, not the product, in some of these cases. None of this is directed at any individual here. Just an observation.
I haven't been in the sport a real long time, but long enough to see people have issues with almost every brand of barrel out there. And I agree that customer service after a problem crops up is where a company can really shine for the customer. And I also know that at times the customer service of all companies (not just in this sport) falls short of what the customer needs to have done to satisfy him or here. It happens...I've let it happen to me in my 'day job', just like most of us have done.
Good shootin'.
-Al
