I just go off the horn with Ron Norton of Inland

[Captain O]

That sounds all very good, but what does that do for all the other (New) Carbines in circulation?

My comment may sound like that of a detractor however, here is where I am coming from.

Not very long ago, I decided I wanted to add a shooting M1 Carbine to my collection, and I had a good number of options. Having a perfect collectible was not important, so the market was wide open.

For a USGI M1 Carbine the market value in Canada is about $500 (=/-$150) but it is a range only gun due to 18" barrel length (National laws)

A USGI M1 Carbine with a retrofit 18.5" barrel is $750-1100 and can be fired anywhere.

For a modern M1 Carbine such as an Auto-Ord or Inland they are priced at $950-$1150.

Naturally I gave the modern guns a good hard look, I had seen them advertised in the Canadian gun publications, and other media outlets. I had considered these carbine to be of the quality of the modern James River Armories Springfields and was ready to plunk down my $1G on one of these guns until I decided to do a bit of homework. That lead me directly to Jim (Sleeplessnashadow) very thorough thread about these rifles.

Canada is a unique firearms market for a lot of reasons, but in this circumstance it has to do with the country of origin of the product. If I were to encounter a warranty issue with my new purchase, it would have to ship back to the vendor, then the distributor, then cross an international border to finally get repaired by the manufacturer. Once it came out of repair, the process would have to repeat. In reality and second hand experience with other firearms, this puts most guns out of the owner's hands for upwards of a year, assuming the repair was adequate on the first try.

Since I am handy enough, I could try to order replacement parts from the US, but I can't do it direct in most cases, and the factory to the importer, to the vendor, to the end user, game plays out again. I had considered sourcing USGI parts, they are pretty common, but they may or may not fit, so that isn't an option.

To further raise my suspicions, I am seeing these modern M1 Carbines come up for sale on the used market with suspiciously low round counts, and attractive prices, in my market this is a red flag, firearms either hold value or appreciate, blowout pricing is a warning sign.

Another way I look at this my other major hobby, automotive performance industry, if a builder turns out a whole production run of substandard engines that break before their due, I would never buy one of these engines to see if the shop has "figured out" how to build an engine. Further if they were out promoting their "fixed" design before recalling and taking care of their former customers that have known parts quality issues I would be not at all pleased. The consumer market should not be the place to Beta test products, it destroys brand confidence, as it has mine in these new production Carbines.

What did I do? Well I bit the bullet and bought a USGI that I can keep running for decades by harvesting parts from the other 6 million parts compatible carbines.

They will replace/repair the problematic parts at no cost to the consumer. Ron Norton told me so himself. He wants his customers to be satisfied with his product. I don't know about our Canadian brothers, but there should be no problem with rectifiying the problems with their products.

You may not have problems obtaining old parts, but the accuracy may not be what you could obtain with a newer barrel. While Inland's receivers and bolts may be cast, but if you have a barrel that will realistically shoot .05 MOA at 100 yards, it is a truly "serviceable" piece. I know of few 1940's USGI barrels that will do this. A Fulton Armory barrel may accomplish this, but it will cost a healthy chunk of change and having Fulton manufacture a custom 20.5" barrel might be an expensive proposition.

It's all in what you want.