100,000 You Say?

I'm sure Nate is going to love this post, on so many levels.

My primary carry gun for the last 5 years or so has been a Kimber 45 ACP. My reasons for this choice had a lot to do with the number of features for the amount of money. I was buying a top of the line gun and wanted to get the most for the least amount of time and money reinvested in having a gunsmith do custom work. Kimber seemed to fit the bill.

I bought the model I wanted. All has been fine since. I'm a believer in shooting what you carry. Practicing with what you might actually have to use seems wise to me. My normal annual numbers of rounds down the barrel is around 2,500 to 3,000, at least in this gun. I figure I shot more the first couple of years than I did last year and the year before. Lets call the total number of bullets used 10,000 to be conservative. Recently I started having some bad shots. What had been a 2in at 25 yard gun was shooting some real odd and low flyers. I bagged it and even had other good shooters bag it. Everyone had the same problem. So, what to do?

I called Kimber in Yonkers New York. "Hey guys what would it take to get you to send me a new barrel". Them, "you don't need a new barrel". I went back and forth for a couple of minutes with the smug little prick. In desperation I tried a sometimes useful tactic of letting the customer service rep "handle" me. After all with more than 25 years shooting experience and the gun in my hands what could I possibly know? So I asked, "how many rounds should I get out of one of your barrels". Conservatively sir, 100,000. "Really?" I guess he could tell from the tone of my voice I wasn't buying it. "Well we've never really tested that figure, it would be a waste of ammo."

Uh huh. If made guns for a living and I thought I had a 100,000 round handgun barrel, I'd sure as heck test it and have solid proof of the fact. If not, I wouldn't let my customer service reps tell people that we did.

I never got my new barrel ordered.