A while back I picked up a Century Arms AP5. This is an MP5 clone made in Turkey by MKE on what is supposedly HK tooling. A stamped firearm on licensed German machinery. I was told online that, “how could it go wrong”? That firearm had loads of issues, including a rear sight that was attached so poorly that the firearm couldn’t even be zeroed. Century ended up sending me a replacement firearm and that was great.
Now by my understanding stampings are more complicated than CNC machining, even if an older technology. Even still my guess is the machinists and assemblers at HK learned some things over the decades, which is likely in part why my HK magazines will feed hollowpoints and my MKE magazines won’t. I also had friends that worked on the manufacturing end of SIG Sauer, Inc. doing CNC and I heard plenty of stories of entire batches of parts, thousands at a time, being tossed due to someone screwing up. I think CNC and other automated methods help reduce the possibility of certain problems, but even then experience still matters.
