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This one had a happy ending: they overnighted me a firing pin assembly so we got the rifle zeroed and a few hours later my son shot a deer with it on the last night of the season.

I always drooled over Tom Turpin's collections of Gary Goudy custom rifles. They might not be right for the bottom of the boat going up the Black River or cruising over to Saltery Cove, Kodiak but just swoon.

I worked for a firearm manufacturer for years. No gun went out for testing anywhere or to SHOT or the NRA show that wasn't assembled, fitted, finished and test fired by one of our most experienced people period.

Over the year I was writing I received numerous rifles, and even more offers, and they all wanted me to use the rifles while I was guiding.
Which was always a problem because when I was guiding I needed something I had faith in and testing new concepts , calibers and designs was not something I wanted when tracking wounded bears through the pucker brush.
Like most staff writers I always attempted to find the good to emphasize and glossed over the less attractive features but I was always honest to the rifle owners about my use. I also always felt my first obligations were to my readers, which was not always the same as those of the editor 🙄

I bought 5 Grit's Gresham's gun's......they all had firing pin's

Well, good!

He didn't have any without firing pins. Hope you got some good ones.

That is as it should be. Too bad it’s not universally applied by all firearms manufacturers.

As highly as I like to think of myself, I still don’t actually believe that I was of sufficient worthiness to be the intended beneficiary of the superior level of skill and artistry the two guns I described earlier had lavished upon them. Something else was at work there, and I simply lucked into guns actually intended for far more important personages, you know, like gun writers.

Old defunct almost-but-not-quite-gone-out-of-business
Remington damn sure didn't have any QC for the
Marlin/H&R part of their business.
Friend bought a Remlin lever, and you'd have thought
that they had brought in some Ugandan straight out
of the mud hut to assemble it.
Poorly fitted furniture, barrel clocked wrong, sharper
than supposed to be corners, etc.
Mr. Marlin dug a new canyon he was spinning
so hard in his grave.
There's numerous videos about this on yoofloob.
One I recall is " Death of the Marlin lever gun" IIRC

I had bought a couple of Rem built H&R's, and
they were a mess. When I got one home, I was
running a cleaning rod with a dry patch to get
whatever out of the barrel before I took it out
to shoot. It stuck somewhat a couple of times,
and I held it up to the light and saw that the
rifling was totally screwed up. It would twist
to the right for a couple of inches, then back
to the left for a couple of inches. Zig zag
like that from breech to muzzle.
They did fit a new barrel and smooth it
out, but there was absolutely no QC inspection
on that, and there's no way that any inspector
test fired it.
My other one would misfire every other shot.
It commuted between here and the "service
center " a couple of times. Work order says
replace this, fit that, readjust so-and-so.
They'd scarred it up so much I never sent
it back for a third try. I put my own Wolff
extra power spring in it and bent one
of the transfer bar pieces back straight
and put it back together. I fired some
primed cases, and they all popped off,
I've yet to give it a proper test.
When Remington padlocked everything, I
wasn't surprised at all

Again, there is no such thing as QC. Inspecting completed product does not prevent recurrence. It was idiotic which is why it is extinct.

A Quality Management System is incorporated throughout an organization and is required to be owned by management and third party audited for compliance to a recognized Quality Standard, usually ISO 9001.

If bad product reaches a customer, the QMS has failed and the management has failed to identify the root cause, apply correcrive action and follow up with internal and external audits to validate changes made and improvement records.

Management is the root cause of bad product in any company which is why the Quality Manager role was eliminated from the Standards to prevent using him as the scape goat.

Management either supports the QMS or they don't. Mostly, they don't. They look at a QA Dept as a cost and not the income generator it is when managed correctly.