I found a significant defect in the first WSM I bought. It was a Winchester M70 SS with crf in 7mm WSM. The chamber was way out of round!
Winchester overtightened the barrels into the actions on some and that made the chamber sag into the extractor cut they say.
I sold mine as the out of round chamber bothered me and it was not worth the bother. Also the rifle was not that accurate.
The Kimbers are much better actions. Their safeties work well and smooth. Not like those M70's.
That's was a one time mistake with the early WSM CRF model 70's. All the short fats have chambering issues until the manufacturers figured out what was going on, even Kimber. Once winchester figured it out it was fixed pretty quickly and everyone who sent it to winchester got it fixed. But just because you got one bad apple doesn't mean the whole model 70's suck. Look at all the bad kimbers, most are Russian roulettes, the chances of getting a shooter to lemon is slim. They had a bad problem with 7mm bore barrels for awhile and couldn't find out what was wrong and there was no 7mm-08 made for 3-4 years. Now the model 70 safety being not working well and smooth, I seriously don't know where you got that from because most rifle looney don't complain of that. I've owned a kimber in .223, is it a great gun? Yes. Better than a model 70? I think most wouldn't agree.
