45 auto, I’m not real sure what the points of your post were
I was trying to make the point that you bought an $800 consumer product made up of numerous mass-produced machined parts, and the inspection process, documentation, and traceability was appropriate to that price point.
Want to make it less likely that cylinders with mis-matched flutes/chambers get released? Serial number each cylinder, have inspections and buy-offs with traceability at each step in the manufacturing and assembly process. You'll catch a LOT more errors (but still not all of them), but your $800 S&W just turned into a $2000 S&W and nobody will buy them.
I wasn’t selling the medical equipment, I was doing QC. The equipment was pretty darn expensive, though. Anything that’s connected to the medical industry is expensive
Part of the point I was trying to make. The technology, materials or manufacturing processes for medical equipment aren't particularly expensive. The legal liability for any defective item that gets out is what's driving the costs.
That’s right. And you can bet S&W has detailed QC procedures, some of which were not followed in this case
I don't know their QC procedures, so I can't comment on that. You seem to be much more familiar with their QC procedures than I am. I don't know if they have a specific procedure to verify flutes vs chambers (if they don't, they probably will shortly). I don't know if your cylinder is the only one ever mis-machined like that (1 out of how many millions) or if that is a common problem at S&W.
Lots of companies attempt to achieve Six Sigma quality programs (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma), I don't know if S&W does or not.
Even at a six sigma level (99.99966% products manufactured without defects), that still means you're looking at one defect every couple of hundred thousand products.
Your cylinder is definitely a manufacturing anomaly, but it's no where close to being as unusual or unexpected as lots of people seem to think.
One of the most popular threads on many of the machining and manufacturing forums are the "Biggest Mistakes" threads ....