As I mentioned to Sinbad in a PM when asked, the spring was a major improvement for my TNW ASR in 9mm, but I also made other changes which may have helped to various degrees. Briefly:
- With 400 grit sandpaper then a buffing wheel and green compound, polished bolt and buffer weight until they felt much smoother, the factory finish being chalky feeling and somewhat uneven.
- Removed and polished extractor ramp which was gritty and left significant scratches on rim brass, sometimes not successfully jumping over a case rim when dropping the bolt too slowly.
- Polished the chamber which was similarly rough, using 400 grit sandpaper taped around a dowel and chucked in a hand drill, then following with 0000 fine steel wool also wrapped around the dowel such that it was a snug fit into the smoother chamber. Polished until shiny and aluminum dummy rounds were no longer jamming.
- Very lightly polished the interior of the main tube with 0000 steel wool on a large dowel, just enough to simulate a break-in period, not enough to remove any anodizing colour.
- Polished the two-step feed ramp which was rough from the factory with very sharp edges, which had showed slight damage to copper jackets on FMJ rounds manually extracted for inspection. Used a rubber abrasive bit then a small buffing wheel on a Dremel to do this, rounding over sharp edges and polishing mirror-bright.
As I bought the carbine for what was at the time (spring of 2019) the normal price for these things, $825, it seemed to me that considering American labour costs plus materials costs and advertising/distribution costs, the price explained all the above rough finish. They simply can't put in a lot of gunsmithing after the machine work and still make a profit sufficient to stay in business. Competing with offshore factories with cheaper labour costs, and USA-based factories supplying more cheaply designed plastic-shell sorts of things is challenging. I'm not apologizing for TNW or making excuses, just seeing that even with retail at $1050 as they generally sell for now, and considering retail mark-up, TNW isn't making a lot of money building these things.
So I expected to do a lot of stuff like I've listed above before buying it. I'd read up on the specific problems of this model and figured out what what modifications were likely to provide viable solutions. I chose the Aero because it takes down into a very compact form for backpacking, and I liked the very long two-point contact between barrel and action which seemed likely to ensure consistent return to zero on every assembly, compared to very short barrel overlap in a number of other takedown PCC models.
For me, some time spent 'finishing' the carbine made sense. I understand that for a lot of people this is unacceptable - they expect to just take something out of the box and start using it. That hasn't been my experience with very many products of any kind over the decades. In fact I had a girlfriend leave me once declaring as one of her main reasons that I had to "fix everything" which she found frustrating - "Why can't you just leave things the way they are?" Well... she did need a lot of fixing, and thankfully she seemed to find ways to get that dealt with over some years, though it seems she came pretty close to death and went through a lot of other trauma along the way... But that's not the point relevant here. I did then, as I do now, expect most manufactured goods to be basically inadequate in fairly fundamental ways. It's just the nature of modern manufacturing. They cheap out somewhere or other, and my job as a consumer is to weigh the specific ways they've cut corners to increase profitability against my ability to improve the product sufficiently that I don't mind using it. Same applies whether it's kitchen appliances or workshop tools or whatever. I guess my tendency has always been this way - hence my deciding in my mid-20's to be a violin maker and restorer, kind of obvious really, for someone who likes complex repair work.
But of course not everybody wants to tinker with machines, and that's fine. I'm just spelling out some things I did to make my Aero work nicely, which it certainly does. I've done a lot of mods on a bunch of airguns too, improving efficiency, improving precision, because most aren't optimal as supplied. My most recent firearm purchase was a GSG-16, very slightly used, bought cheap from a local, with full expectations of spending a bunch of hours making it reliable and nicer to handle. That thing is so different from what it was a few weeks ago it may as well be a different gun. No surprises there. I only bought one after researching it enough to know I could 'hack' it sufficiently that I'd end up liking the finished product. Seems most people buying the GSG-16 just depend on luck for them not to be 'jam-o-matic' type junk, and a lot of buyers end up putting them away after a couple of range sessions, giving up on all the misfeeds caused by inadequate finishing by the manufacturer in the gun and in the magazines. Mine takes apart for cleaning in a few seconds without tools and runs flawlessly, but only because I don't depend on luck for such things, I expect manufacturers to sell unfinished products. I wish things were different... but pride is in short supply these days, most makers seemingly interested more in fast profits than making refined things.
- With 400 grit sandpaper then a buffing wheel and green compound, polished bolt and buffer weight until they felt much smoother, the factory finish being chalky feeling and somewhat uneven.
- Removed and polished extractor ramp which was gritty and left significant scratches on rim brass, sometimes not successfully jumping over a case rim when dropping the bolt too slowly.
- Polished the chamber which was similarly rough, using 400 grit sandpaper taped around a dowel and chucked in a hand drill, then following with 0000 fine steel wool also wrapped around the dowel such that it was a snug fit into the smoother chamber. Polished until shiny and aluminum dummy rounds were no longer jamming.
- Very lightly polished the interior of the main tube with 0000 steel wool on a large dowel, just enough to simulate a break-in period, not enough to remove any anodizing colour.
- Polished the two-step feed ramp which was rough from the factory with very sharp edges, which had showed slight damage to copper jackets on FMJ rounds manually extracted for inspection. Used a rubber abrasive bit then a small buffing wheel on a Dremel to do this, rounding over sharp edges and polishing mirror-bright.
As I bought the carbine for what was at the time (spring of 2019) the normal price for these things, $825, it seemed to me that considering American labour costs plus materials costs and advertising/distribution costs, the price explained all the above rough finish. They simply can't put in a lot of gunsmithing after the machine work and still make a profit sufficient to stay in business. Competing with offshore factories with cheaper labour costs, and USA-based factories supplying more cheaply designed plastic-shell sorts of things is challenging. I'm not apologizing for TNW or making excuses, just seeing that even with retail at $1050 as they generally sell for now, and considering retail mark-up, TNW isn't making a lot of money building these things.
So I expected to do a lot of stuff like I've listed above before buying it. I'd read up on the specific problems of this model and figured out what what modifications were likely to provide viable solutions. I chose the Aero because it takes down into a very compact form for backpacking, and I liked the very long two-point contact between barrel and action which seemed likely to ensure consistent return to zero on every assembly, compared to very short barrel overlap in a number of other takedown PCC models.
For me, some time spent 'finishing' the carbine made sense. I understand that for a lot of people this is unacceptable - they expect to just take something out of the box and start using it. That hasn't been my experience with very many products of any kind over the decades. In fact I had a girlfriend leave me once declaring as one of her main reasons that I had to "fix everything" which she found frustrating - "Why can't you just leave things the way they are?" Well... she did need a lot of fixing, and thankfully she seemed to find ways to get that dealt with over some years, though it seems she came pretty close to death and went through a lot of other trauma along the way... But that's not the point relevant here. I did then, as I do now, expect most manufactured goods to be basically inadequate in fairly fundamental ways. It's just the nature of modern manufacturing. They cheap out somewhere or other, and my job as a consumer is to weigh the specific ways they've cut corners to increase profitability against my ability to improve the product sufficiently that I don't mind using it. Same applies whether it's kitchen appliances or workshop tools or whatever. I guess my tendency has always been this way - hence my deciding in my mid-20's to be a violin maker and restorer, kind of obvious really, for someone who likes complex repair work.
But of course not everybody wants to tinker with machines, and that's fine. I'm just spelling out some things I did to make my Aero work nicely, which it certainly does. I've done a lot of mods on a bunch of airguns too, improving efficiency, improving precision, because most aren't optimal as supplied. My most recent firearm purchase was a GSG-16, very slightly used, bought cheap from a local, with full expectations of spending a bunch of hours making it reliable and nicer to handle. That thing is so different from what it was a few weeks ago it may as well be a different gun. No surprises there. I only bought one after researching it enough to know I could 'hack' it sufficiently that I'd end up liking the finished product. Seems most people buying the GSG-16 just depend on luck for them not to be 'jam-o-matic' type junk, and a lot of buyers end up putting them away after a couple of range sessions, giving up on all the misfeeds caused by inadequate finishing by the manufacturer in the gun and in the magazines. Mine takes apart for cleaning in a few seconds without tools and runs flawlessly, but only because I don't depend on luck for such things, I expect manufacturers to sell unfinished products. I wish things were different... but pride is in short supply these days, most makers seemingly interested more in fast profits than making refined things.
