Let me preface this statement by, well, stating that I carried a Colt M4 in Iraq for a year and it only jammed one time, it was brand new with no lube and I fired 800 rounds through it, after that I put a few thousand more rounds through it without a hiccup. Okay.

So I'm at the gun show today, trying to sell my Noveske, and this guy shows me a Colt upper he just bought. 16" 1/9 HBAR, M4 upper receiver, barrel markings looked like Colt and the upper had the M4 mark on the front. I look at the chamber and go the feed ramp cuts in the barrel did not match up with the cuts in the upper. This is not a little 1/64" of an inch discrepancy, they were off by about half the width of the cuts, if that makes sense. I do not have pictures but I showed the guys at American Spirit Arms, don't know if they come on this board, so they can back me up if they do.

Now this did not exactly sell me on Colt stuff. I had just spent six hours telling various people that the rifle I built, with a Noveske upper and a Sun Devil lower, was as good in sme areas and better in most areas than a Colt. I know for damn sure that my feed ramps match up. Maybe somehow someone took it apart and put it back together wrong, though that doesn't seem possible to me, but I'd like to give Colt the benefit of the doubt. Still, for the price of Colt stuff, they'd better live up to that golden reputation. In my opinion. Maybe its not a big deal and I'm blowing it out of proportions. But in my experience, if you take care of the details the big stuff will fall in place.

Something sounds strange.  The upper you are describing is a Colt 6721.  I own a few of them and while the feedramp alignments are far from perfect, they are certainly within functional limits; nothing like what you witnessed.  Here is an example of the feedramp alignment from one of my 6721s.








For comparison, here's a pic of the feedramps from a Noveske Recon barrel I installed on a Colt M4 upper receiver.

I would say that the cuts in the barrel were canted about 5 degrees to the left of the cuts in the first picture. I agree, something didn't look right, but all the markings were correct and such. My M4's cuts were absolutely perfect.