Hoo boy. I worked there when they were in Charlotte, when they first moved down from Canada. Yeah, for sure, long story short, most Para double stacks are a piece of shit. I could go on for days why that is; maybe just hit the highlights. First off the MIM tech was crap. They had an old high-temp oven, surplus from aerospace, which should have been retired long before they moved. It had huge problems maintaining consistency. We would lose half the parts in some batches. Sometimes the whole batch. What was passed was oftentimes barely in spec. And sometimes out of spec.
Next were the castings themselves. There was lots of inconsistencies there. And some times the machining on our end. Again, the CNC machines were old and needed replacement. But they weren't always rejected either.
The work force was brand new and had to be trained from scratch. Huge learning curve here. Because of 1 and 2 above, the old crew in Canada essentially had to hand-build each gun, with extensive file-fitting to get the guns to work. When they moved down here, this was all uncovered, by us, and a big us-vs-them battle ensued.
Turns out Para was using a huge immigrant crew up there, which was just lucky to be there, so nobody was going to rock the boat and tell them the parts didn't fit; they simply broke out the files and Dremels and made it so. So essentially you were getting hand-made guns, of which some were actually pretty good.
When they came down south, we were hired as assembly workers, not gunsmiths, so we bucked at all the re-work necessary to get a gun together, much less make it run. So there was a constant employee turn-over.
You might be asking, where was QC in all this. Ha good question. He was in ca-hoots with the CEO and turned a blind eye to all of this. As my old leadman from Lockheed would say (jokingly?): "Can't see it from my house; nail it".
Then we were sold to Remington. That there is a whole 'nother story, but essentially there were being run by investors looking to squeeze max profit out of all cash cows. So nothing fixed really, just deck chairs re-arranged, as the band played "Nearer my God, to thee".
This was my dream job, straight out of gunsmithing school, which turned into a nightmare.
Turns out the whole charade was nothing but an exercise to set the company up in the US and then sell it off. But by coming down here and having to deal with us Yanks, who didn't need to keep quiet for fear of losing our green cards, it opened a whole can of worms. The CEO was buying the castings from Korea. Instead of rejecting the bad ones, he received kick-backs from the Koreans to just eat them. The CEO also own the MIM machines, as a separate business, but co-located in the same building, which produced crap parts. No matter he had a contract to receive 98 cents for each part produced, whether it was good or not. Pretty sweet deal huh? So he just hires a corrupt QC guy who was in his pocket. We screamed out tits off about the quality of parts but were told it was just our fault. After all, dozens of Pakis in Canada didn't have any issues building them, so what was our problem, eh?
This when on long enough to find some sucker to buy the whole mess. When Remington came in, they were thinking they were getting proprietary knowledge of semi-custom 1911's; what they got was a pile of shit. Even the engineering hadn't been updated for years and nobody could tell you with any certainty what the dims were supposed to be. Since this kept the bad parts from being proven bad, this was just kept out of date. After all it was just the lazy Americans who couldn't build guns, right?
And Remington wasn't much better. They brought in IE's who were enamored in "process" as if this would magically fix everything. To their credit, they tried to update much machinery and standardize builds, but in the end, it was just too much. They tried to bring out a new model, but under pressure from management, I'm sure, they pushed it out before all bugs were worked out, and it was a disaster.
And thus ends the parable of Para USA.
