How many other all-metal 9mm +P hammer-fired guns run only ~360$ (which I understand is the going rate for these at the moment)? The gun's actually priced pretty low, considering, always has been. It's both the reason the first batch (and the second to a lesser extent ) were so poor, and likely why the gun won't last long, being an obvious loss-leader.
It really wasn't them cheaping out so much as management incompetence, I'd say. Fact is, the MIM bolt & internals were among the more consistently-made portions of the gun, the slide interior and chamber being the most common weak areas (people would show pictures of gouges on the inside where the wrong-size endmill had been used to rough out the interior). I suspect a higher price point gun would have machined everything to similarly poor specs at the east coast plant. The real issue was that plant was closing immediately after the first run of R51's, a new project with lots of moving parts & visibility was being left in the hands of a skeleton crew with no capital investment that were all about to be laid off (and I highly doubt it was a surprise to anyone). My bet is morale was poor from janitor to plant manager in that place, and they made do with worn out or improper tooling while completely neglecting QC in order to meet quotas before the lights were turned off.
