quote:

Originally posted by monoblok:

quote:

Originally posted by newmexican:
MRC is well known to have terrible quality control and terrible customer service. I’d bet they shut their doors because nobody wanted to roll the dice on their crappy rifles that may or may not meet the expectations of a 1300.00 dollar rifle.

That more or less sums up our experience. They were talking to us about becoming an authorized dealer in western WA. To try them, we ordered a couple of custom bolt rifles for one of our best customers. The QC on one of the guns was okay but not all that impressive for a $2500 rifle. The other in 300 was just abysmal; dangerously incorrect muzzle device was mounted on the gun (wrong caliber! Really? Drunk at the CNC?) All sorts of finish issues with both barrel and receiver. And their lackadaisical customer service response topped it off. We ended up ordering the customer two Coopers instead, selling two Swaros and mounts at cost and apologizing profusely along the way. As you might guess, we did not take MRC on.

-MG

I've built a few custom rifles on the Montana 1999 short action receiver. Most were built on Manners and McMillan stocks, using barrels from Benchmark, Kreiger and Obermeyer.

Some things I remember about those projects:
All of them were trued from the factory, and the work was pretty good. The threads were concentric to the raceways and bolt channel, the receiver faces were square to the raceways, good even lug contact.

But, the steel was butter soft. While turning the bolt handle for threads, I found voids in the steel. The firing pin and hole is huge and it craters primers badly in higher pressure chamberings.

On one of them, the bolt had to be replaced because it split lengthwise while bushing the firing pin hole. I had drilled and counter-bored the hole, and was tapping threads when it split in half. The metal felt soft, and the tap cut easily. Very odd that it split the bolt!

To contrast, when drilling and tapping a FN SPR bolt for a firing pin bushing, I had to use a carbide tap. That shit was surprisingly hard and tough. It ruined a HSS tap. Turning the SPR handle for threads was similar. The steel was very noticeably tougher than Montana, tougher than Remington as well.