Customer Service

Remember this?

I called Bushmaster for an update.

Andrew was much better informed this time. They can be taught, I guess.

This time he told me that they really DON'T stock the post-ban barrels and that they are, and always have been, special order items. They don't change over the production machinery until a minimum number of orders accumulate. He said he didn't know what that minimum was, but the 22 on back-order now was not enough.

I changed my order to the pre-ban version because those are in constant production.

What this means is that the barrel will now have threads on the section that's being thrown away and the front sight base will have a bayonet lug that will have to be cut off and the front sight base will have to be reparked.

Progress of sorts.

EDIT

Tim's comment brought out the following reply, which I decided really deserved to be part of the main post.

Bushmaster makes just about the best barrel on the market. They know it, we know it, we suck it up if we want that quality.

I have refrained from posting a long diatribe about their attitude on the AR 15 forums because I know they have someone who reads there.

The barrel they make at all times is the 16" M4 profile. They make large quantities of the 20" Heavy, 20" A2 Gov't profile, and 16" heavy. They reliably make enough of the heavy profile short barrels and the pre-ban 16" lightweight that the waits are short. Anything else on this page; Link rendered 404 by Bushmaster being bought by The Freedom Group and their reorganizing the web page. is really a special order now.

Before the Obama Panic™ they'd make a run of 100 or so of the low volume barrels and that would last a year or two. Now demand is "what do you have?" and the machines are normally set up to make M4 profile...

I can accept that. It's capitalism, and I am fine with capitalism. What I am sick of is them not admitting what was going on!

Five months of being told, "end of the month". One call that gets close to the issue, that the service people don't have the information to answer the question. Then finally, admission that they are ignoring the orders that they are not already tooled up for because they really don't need them to keep the doors open with people buying all they can make of the stuff I didn't order.

Like Colt, they are going to discover that the people keeping the doors open when the demand was normal was people like me. And we remember shit like this. Colt has done chapter 11 twice because they keep telling people like me to "piss off! we have Government orders!" then when those contracts expired...

The Comment

8th-May-2009 12:19 pm (local)



anglave

And did they offer you a discount or something? I mean, you've been waiting for that barrel for months, and just today they admit they haven't even made it yet? And then they expect to keep you as a customer?