Posted: 11/16/2003 11:46:57 PM EDT
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Was shooting my EAA Witness today when the magazine fell out. Re-inserted and out it came again. The magazine catch snapped off where it protrudes into the cut out in the magazine. Well I will report on EAA's Warranty in this post when information is availabe. |
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Just curious, Dave, is it fairly new or have a high round count? I would try to ship just the broken parts back, rather than the whole gun, if thats possible. The Witness seems very robust and I never would have guessed that piece would merely snap off. The extractor on my FEG finally went sour after 5 years of moderate/heavy use. I expected that much sooner from a $199 gun. A BHP extractor dropped right in and it is back to 100% again. At least I had some advanced warning, a few FTEs, not a total failure like a mag catch. |
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I had maybe 100 rnds through it, I am running an extended and threaded barrel with an AAC spider 2 silencer. Perhaps the unit is not up to the difference in the recoil pulse of a silenced gun cycling. I will Email EAA and try to get the part. If they think they want the whole pistol back then I can get the part from an on-line resource for less than the cost of shipping the entire pistol back. |
I'm trying to digest what happened...I would guess the use of a muffler would kinda void any warranty in reality...just trying to see the effect on that part. A dropped mag would make it too quiet. |
100 rounds? I am not a metallurgist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I would say that it would take alot more than 100 rounds for a recoil pulse to harmonically damage a magazine catch. The part was defective from the factory. It just slipped through an inspection process. TRG |
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EAA responded to my email quickly. For any warranty service they require the pistol be sent to them. I can ship post office for maybe $7 and they require I send them $20 for return shipping. The part costs $25 from thier own website, so basically thier warranty policy is smoke and mirrors when it comes to small parts. I will just be buying the part and installing it. |
Bummer. Sounds like those lifetime warranties on $10 watches. "Send the watch and $25 for return shipping to...." I really can't imagine a non-defective mag catch breaking. I've never even seen that on a Glock with steel mags! |
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I've seen a mag catch break on a Glock. Of course, the gun had just blown up in the shooters hand, so the mag catch wasn't the only plastic part broken (frame, trigger parts, etc.) When a .40 lets loose in one of these, its ugly. I've heard this is more common in Glocks than other guns, but only anecdotally. |
| Ok so I got the part from EAA. It was kind of trickey to install and had to have some filing done for it to fit properly, so I guess that is why they want the pistol sent in for factory repair. Either way the magazine catch uses the tiniest piece of metal to actually catch the slot in the magazine. It would not take much of a flaw on this tiny protrusion to weaken it a lot. We will see how the new one goes. |
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Thanks for the update, David. My original Tanfoglio TZ-75 series '88 seemed much better made than the later EAA witnesses. And it handled the .41A&E caliber with no sweat. Glad your witness is healthy again and so far, is the only one that I heard about that failed. |
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Quoted: EAA responded to my email quickly. For any warranty service they require the pistol be sent to them. I can ship post office for maybe $7 and they require I send them $20 for return shipping. Except that the Post Office will not ship any firearms, the last I checked. ==Bob |
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EEA does let some oopsies slip through , that's for sure. I had a 9mm Witness for a little while, which had THE strangest gun quirk/bug I've ever seen. Firing double action, if you would pull the trigger with the tip / first pad of your finger the hammer would go back and fall, but stop just short of firing the gun. If you put your finger in half way, or burried your finger in the trigger, it would fire just fine. I went nuts over this trying to figure it out. I though it was my imagination , and that that tiny difference in finger location couldnt make a difference. I took the gun to a few people including a smith and had them do what I said, trying it the same two ways. ALL of them got the same results. All were baffled and even the gunsmith said to just send it back. (of course Im stupid and love stuff like that, eventually figured it out. Fixed it by "growing" one part in the trigger group. It was a pretty amazing thing though, if the part had been a few hundreths of an inch bigger it would have been fine all the time. A few hundreths smaller it probably wouldnt have worked either way. But right in the middle it would work or not based only on finger position.) Anyhow... what were we talking about? |
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Anyone can ship any firearm except a handgun by the post office. FFL dealers and Manuf. may ship handguns via the post office by filing a Post Office form 1508 everytime they ship a handgun. No one get to mail ammunition. www.titleii.com/pdf/PS1508.pdf |