It's pretty simple to straighten a tweaked oprod... Free if yer smart enough to put 2 paralell bars on it and bend it straight. Dead simple in fact.
If you told your coworker that it will cost as much as his rifle to fix well you sir shouldn't be giving free advice to anyone about these rifles.
Rather have a 500 rifle I can simply tweak and make better than an overpriced $2000+ lemon from sproingfield.
The REALITY is, hundreds of cgn'ers enjoy the norinco rifles just fine, most with nothing but the simplest of upgrades.
Too bad every m305 you touch is a lemon, my experience (and I actually have it) has been vastly different.
As for yay or nay to a 2007 ... I prefer them over everything imported since then.
Op rod is over $200 US now,
If its just the piston its $25
If its the gas tube you need to replace the whole system as USGI gas stuff doesn't fit with the Norc very well... so another $130
And you might have to destroy the flash suppressor to break the spot welds, you might get lucky and they crack off, or they might need a grinder, I've seen them go both ways. $80 US if its buggered.
So he picked it up for $400 on a fire sale (I wonder why), and i'm counting over $400 US in parts realistically
His op rod was so bad I couldn't even get the op rod to move forward more then 1/2 inch past the point it locks into the reciever, I had to fight it to get to lock into the receiver.
You want to bend a 7-10 degree angle out of an op rod? be my guest, forged parts tend not to like being bent, likely you would have to do some grinding as well to fix it so it cleared everything it needed to clear. You want to trust an oprod that's been royally ####ed with, fine; but I don't, and I'm not going to pawn half ass jerry rigged work off to my buddies. I would rather break his heart by telling him to throw it in the safe for now and fix it right, then see him go out and have a catastrophic failure.
A real one isn't a springfield to me... LRB, smith, troy. M1A's built by skilled gunsmiths, proper parts and backed by bullet proof warranties. all with models starting around $2000. but even springfield, if you get a lemon you get a new one... or it gets fixed. You get a nightmare norinco your on your own. That last one had me in over $2200 to get it working right.
As for hundreds enjoying their m305's sure.... because they plink 200 rounds in a couple years, and when the problems arise at that point kinda start saying " well its been good to me for a few years, guns need fixing right?"
How many users never even put that many rounds down range, or that never clue in that the stove piping, jams, ballooned cases are all because of critical failures? All requiring work to be done to the rifle, parts replaced, some worth a few bucks some costing the user thousands to fix.
I can only imagine how many m305's piked up as a "cool fun gun" by someone who knows nothing about the platform; go out to the range once a year to fire a box or two, with a jam every couple of rounds but the user just writes it off as "normal" not realizing their rifle needs to be fixed
for me dropping 150-300 rounds in a day is par.... so when a gun can't even make a day of shooting without an issue, I have a problem with that, And so far I have yet to see a factory m305 make one of my range days without something ####ing up. weather it be, the sites falling apart, the gun start to rattle apart, failure to feed/eject, headspacing move over 15 thousands of an inch in less then 200 rounds....
Meanwhile the LRB's my friends own will drop that many rounds and never have a failure to feed, failure to eject, or catastrophic failure. They just go out, shoot and enjoy.
