Repairs & Troubleshooting

Diagnose before you spend

Every repair starts the same way: field strip, look, function-check, and test-fire with your ammunition and your magazines if you brought them. That $40 bench fee is where most problems are found — the failure-to-feed that turns out to be one bad magazine out of three, the double that's a shotgun firing pin, the stuck bolt that's forty years of dried grease. When the answer is a part, we quote the part and the labor before ordering it; when the answer is "it's fine, shoot better ammunition," you get told that and the bench fee is the bill.

The bench sees a lot of the same faults, and they're recorded on the ticket so you know what was found: a bent AK gas piston straightened; a Winchester 94 lever that wouldn't seat, shimmed; a 1911 that wouldn't feed, feed ramp polished and the extractor tensioned; a Remington 1100 with a stuck lever, disassembled and rebuilt. Sometimes the fix is fifty dollars and sometimes it's a firing pin and two hundred and fifty, and you'll know which before the work happens.

What we fix, and what we say no to

Feeding, extraction, and ejection faults; misfires and light strikes; springs, pins, extractors, ejectors, and firing pins; stuck bolts, slides, levers, and chokes; bent or damaged parts that can be straightened or replaced; headspace checks on surplus and kit-built rifles; the safety that doesn't, and the one the customer would like to delete on a competition shotgun. Handguns, rifles, shotguns, rimfires, revolvers, surplus — the odd and the old are welcome, with the honest caveat that obsolete parts sometimes have to be found or made.

We don't work on air guns, privately-made firearms, or anything illegal, and we won't touch forced-reset triggers, so-called super safeties, or other conversion devices. A warranty repair on something you bought here is free; say so at drop-off.

How a repair runs here