Witness 10mm: usual EAA quality control

Gents,

I grabbed a 10mm Witness recently off Gunbroker. I have had a couple before and they needed tweaking. Let them go a while back, but wanted to revisit the gun now that 15 rounders are out there. Just for those of you talking about Witnesses lately, I thought I would post my experience on first trip to the range. It is the plain blue full size model, non-ported, current revision with wider cocking serations. Nice looking, terrible double action, good single action. I ran around 200 rounds of mixed UMC, Hornady, and Federal. The following problems appeared off the bat:

1. Trigger fails to reset about once in 20-30 rounds. I have seen this on a Witness before, albeit many years ago in a first gen 9mm.

2. Rear sight drifted while shooting almost completely off to the left. Happened rather suddenly, and I caught it before it cleared the dovetail. Lucky I noticed as I was focused on the front sight. I stopped shooting at that point.

3. Failures to feed perhaps 10-15 times. Not terrible for a Witness. One mag was worse than the others, accounting for perhaps half the malfunctions. I only used new 15 round magazines, fully loaded. Failures were in no particular pattern.

If you are considering a Witness, be aware this is the pattern I have seen after owning quite a few. Most needed some attention to work. EAA won't fix them (been there, done that) so this one is off to my smith. Should be no biggie to get it working. It was very accurate, and a joy to shoot. I really hope I can get it working 100%. I won't be buying a second any time soon, though, CDNN specials not withstanding.



GR

Brand new model with the new slide cuts. Nice looking really. My smith will handle it as EAA argued every time I had to deal with them before. I was going to have a trigger job anyway so might as well do the works. Perhaps a different rear sight too.

I got to thinking back over past Tanfoglio products I had owned, and came up with this list (if memory serves as all but two of these guns are long gone):

1. TZ-75 9mm: needed throating/polishing to feed anything, never fed hollow points.
2. Witness 9mm: frame cracked at around 500 rounds. Replaced by EAA after much complaining. Sold replacement gun.
3. Witness 9mm compact: no problems.
4. Witness 40: no problems.
5. Witness 38 Super special edition: won't feed past 15 rounds in mags. Needs polish, just have not gotten to it in 10 years.
6. Witness 45 Carry Comp: no problems.
7. Witness 9mm full size: trigger would not reset reliably, EAA refused to fix it, returned to dealer for refund.
8. Witness 10mm Target Ported: needed feed ramp polish.
9. Witness 10mm Target Ported: needed feed ramp polish.
10. Witness 10mm full-size: noted above.

Interestingly three baby eagles all were 100% out of the box. IMI definately has better quality control.

GR

That or CZ will come out with a 97 in 10mm.

GR

Changing importers might help if the importer held Tanfoglio to a higher standard, but that is a good point Southpaw. The IMI stuff works well out of the box despite its Tanfoglio origins, likely due to the final fit & finish being done in Israel. Springfield Armory got better results from Tanfoglio than EAA did when they sold the P9/40 series. I suspect EAA just tells Tanfoglio to ship them as cheap as possible and not to worry about quality control. Makes for more room for profit by EAA. It will be interesting to see what the Turkish, Tanfoglio based pistols are like when Interordnance gets them here. No large frame models though.

I got this gun expecting problems that would be fairly easy to handle. No shock after shooting it. My smith will ID what the trigger is hanging on, replace the rear sight with a better one I picked out, and give it a good feed/function job. Should make a nice final product that will suit my purposes. It boils down to the fact that the CZ pattern frame fits my hand like a glove and it holds 15 rounds of my favorite cartridge. It is a shame that it did not work out of the box as I would have it in the rotation sooner.

GR