It has been 1 month since Ilion started working on my frame to fit a 357 Mag barrel to it.
Almost every day I have been checking the link that was in the email that Remington
sent me to confirm that they received my frame. It has had the same message form
the beginning: "Repairman is in the process of servicing the firearm/part." I got to
thinking about that today. You know, I'm not the smartest guy around, but I think
I could probably fit a barrel to a frame in considerably less time than a month, especially
if I did it for a living 5 days a week and had all the special tools to do it. I decided to give
H&R a call today and try and find out just what was going on. I spoke with a nice guy
named Araja. (? spelling) I didn't get nasty with him. I just asked if he could give me any more
info than I was getting from the link on my work order. Well, well well, wouldn't you know it.
It seems 357 Mag barrels are on backorder right about now. I told him " Well, that pretty
much means I'm screwed, blued, and tattooed, because there are several people here who
have been waiting over 6 months to get their barrels in some calibers." He apologized
for this, but assured me that the wait for the backordered barrels "would be more like
weeks, than months." I know that there are a lot of people here on GBO that have
waited way longer to get their Handis back from barrel fitting than 1 month. Right now
it is a bit of a nerve wracking expierence, but I guess that's just the way it goes.
The way I see it, the biggest problem seems to be getting the barrels from the supplier
in a timely matter. In a perfect world, all barrels in all calibers would be in stock on
the shelf ready to be fitted to customer's frames and any stock that was getting low
would be ordered and received before they were completely out. If they could do this
then the turn around times would be greatly improved.
Robert
Robert