Took a FWB Sport out last weekend to give it an airing and was impressed as per with its mild manners and sweet shooting characteristics.
Anyhow bearing that in mind and the fact that the squirrels did their best Lord Lucan impressions my mind started wandering back to the halcyon days of springer tuning. We all know the the big names of those days and I am not sure if I read this or imagined it, but didn't some (or all) of those tuning houses test and select the best of their gun stock in order to pick out those with particular or exceptional accuracy characteristics? Maybe putting the best aside and the others in the rack for general sale.
Clearly in this respect the barrel quality and lock up (on break barrels) have a particular bearing, but I'm guessing that just like anything mechanical (e.g cars) you can, for reasons perhaps unknown, have better examples of the same make n model?
I can't imagine any manufacturers pandering to the requests of any sector of the shooting fraternity to produce a gun taking particular care on this or that aspect of manufacture as they would likely argue that their QC process should result in guns of a known minimum quality.
But anyhow. Did I imagine that some companies did some sort of selection process in obtaining the best examples of a model to base their tuned and custom guns on or does anyone know if this actually happened with any of them?
Cheers
Dave