Some of you may recall the difficulties I had with my brand-new R9S.
http://www.rohrbaughforum.com/YaBB.cgi?board=R9S;action=display;num=1228350780To summarize, my first two range visits were marred by excessive FTE and FTF. After reporting about it here, and getting the sense from the community that something was definitely wrong, I called Maria up and sent it back. After four weeks of patiently waiting, I finally got her back and went to the range.
The Good:
Despite the fact that the very first round fired was a FTE (with 115gr Silvertips, btw), the pistol has since seen ~120 rounds with nary a hiccup. Ammunition used during this session was: 115gr Silvertips, WWB 115gr FMJ, Federal Hydrashok, Winchester SXZ training (Bass Pro Shop proprietary), and Golden Sabres. All of it fed fine, fired well, and extracted nicely. All except for the first round, of course. Someone somewhere seemed to be having a giggle at my expense on that one. You should have seen my face. I was like, You have GOT to be kidding me!?" Anyway, it appears like my problems have been solved, for the moment anyway. More on this later.
The Bad:
While Maria was very nice both times I called, I had to initiate every conversation. Nobody called me to communicate with me in any way. Not to let me know they had received it, nor that it was being looked at, and certainly not when they had found something and repaired it. Well, that's ok, you say, I'm sure when they sent it back, there was some paperwork with an explanation of what was found and repaired. Negative. When I returned the pistol, I sent a fairly extensive writeup, including pictures, of what was going on. All I got back was a Quickbooks invoice showing "Warranty Repair - $0." When I spoke with Maria, she had to go digging to find out some "brass pieces" were found in the firing pin channel and not allowing the FP to return to it's rest position. Well, that would certainly explain why I was getting light strikes and FTF. It might also explain the FTE, but Maria mentioned they had done something with the extractor as well. She wasn't sure what, so maybe the cleaning of the FP channel did the trick or maybe it was something else. Anyway, no biggie, right? I've got a repaired pistol, so life is good. Except I want to know how brass pieces got into the FP channel. Was this a Quality Control issue, or is it something on my end? I tend to lean towards the former, since there were a lot of metal shavings and filings in the pistol when I first received it. The first cleaning pulled at least 15-20 of these tiny pieces of metal out of the inside of the pistol. If any of those were in the FP channel, that would cause an issue for sure. I don't know if the test firings and the tight tolerances of the pistol produced these shavings or if something else was the cause, but if I were Rohrbaugh, I'd want to get to the bottom of it.
Some more not so perfect aspects to my customer service experience as well... When I called the first time, I had asked for the pistol to be shipped back to my office and not my home. This didn't happen. In addition, when I took the pistol apart, it was dirtier than you can possibly imagine. I never let my pistols get that dirty and it was shipped back to me that way? Wow, I've never had a manufacturer ship me back a pistol without cleaning and lubing it first. What about the recoil spring, you ask? Well, no, that hadn't been replaced either, but they did put a new one in the box. Which is good, since a lot of rounds had apparently been put through it while they had it, because the recoil spring in the gun was basically shot. A good coil and a half of tension was gone. Surely the extra mag, or other type of manufacturer freebie for having to return a brand-new pistol for warranty work that should have been caught before it left the factory more than made up for these inconveniences, right? Negative, again. There was nothing in the box that wasn't in there when I shipped it up to them other than the recoil spring to replace the one that was no longer any good. Thanks, guys.
Anyway, all of this is to say, that it's great that some of you have had Karl, himself, call you up to say he was sorry about your pistol and what they found and repaired, but that is not everyone's experience, so don't expect it. To be honest, I didn't really expect it either. A phone call from anyone at Rohrbaugh letting me know when I could expect my pistol back would have been nice. A note or phone call letting me know what they had found and fixed would have been nice. And some acknowledgement of how sorry they were that this happened would have been really nice. Some manufacturers do this by giving you freebies when they send back your pistol, but I would have settled for a short note or something acknowledging my legitimate disappointment and apologizing for the inconvenience. I got nothing. But hey, my pistol works now, right?
