After several months R&D work I'm changing over the way I'm doing a few tunes. Most notably the AA ProElite. There has been many times I was about ready to just drop it from the line up of rifles I work on because of the really bad tolerances on the Receivers. I can fix them now but the receiver ID has to be increased quit a bit to get the tube ID the same for it's entire length. New bearing for the piston have to be fabricated, the end plug milled and buttoned and a over sized Kevlar piston crown has to be fitted. The piston crown uses a oring for the sealing edge. I stayed as far away from orings in the past as I could because they never worked with all the out of round and tapered tubes out there. It's actually quit rare to find a tube that isn't. Once the tube is corrected with the proper surface finish the results have been great though. Bad thing is correcting tubes takes a long time and uses a lot of consumables if they are really bad out of spec. It's because of this some of the prices have just been adjusted. The two worst offenders are the R9 and the ProElite. Eventually, all my tunes will go this route though. The good news is I can take new rifles and make them far far better than anything that has ever come out from the factory. The bad side is the time it takes to do the work. It just about doubled the amount of time I put into each tune. I tried to keep the prices within reason but over the last six months I've spent about ten grand to be able to keep the doors open and continue to keep the quality of work to a standard that is above and beyond anything else available today. I'm really pretty excited about how it's all coming together. To those that have been patient with long waits on work being done, I'd like to say that you!!! The time to be able to sit down and work all this out will pay big dividends to spring gun community

Many Many Thanks!

Paul Watts

http://www.springgunning.com/

No one has the experience that you do. No one has made the investment in the equipment that you have. The tuners of the week can make their silly claims on the forums, but the performance of their rifles won't last because they don't fix the underlying problem - the receiver tube! Hell, I don't think anybody else even makes their own parts - just drop JM's parts in with some new lube and call it the latest, greatest, best-ever tune.

In any case, not to suck up too much, but your dedication, innovation and craftsmanship are appreciated!

Mike

I appreciate the encouragement. I wasn't trying to run anyone down. There is a solid market for kit installs. It's the way to go if your wanting a fast turn around and low prices. It's just when I raise my prices, I feel the need to explain why. When I offered basic tunes and even now offer kit installs it's extremely rare that anyone takes me up on it. That's why I went the direction I'm going now.

A lot of rifles were coming through here shooting 150-200fps under spec and would have parts failures within 1000 rounds. I had to either tool up or get out of the biz. The only real variable I have to deal with now is barrel quality. For the most part that has been fine in recent years. It's actually older rifles that have issues in that area. Most of my work is on newer rifles so for the most part things are looking up.

Many Thanks,

Paul

How about HW breech blocks milled to accept interchangeable barrels? Shouldn't take too much machine work ;-)

Sure.... Probably would ad a few months to the turn around though. I'm trying to discourage that right now Things are moving right now but a lot slower than I'd like.

Paul