Thread: TIKKA / SAKO FINISHING QUALITY

Dont want to start a tikka bashing thread, and it might be just me , but has the finishing quality gone to shit in recent years.Comparing and new build t3 to one of 10year + vintage, there like chalk and cheese and if you throw my just purchased new in the box 595 of 2002 year build in the mix it makes them seem even worse.but a set of optilocs that arrived today are more telling.compared to some of my older sets the machining marks are more pronounced and it looks like they have tried to hide that by using a coarser grade of garnet in the bead blaster .At first glance ,still in the packet you'd think they were Chinese counterfeit items or something .I dont know if the photo is good enough to high lite it but 5 of the cap screws are a bright almost plated looking color and 3 are a more natural stainless look ?Once again it might be nothing but surely they can get this consistent. the worst part was doing up the cap screws.at first i thought i must have miss matched the caps with the bases as there was a binding condition right from the start of the threads.however when i try and screw them into the bases on there own there still as tight as buggery.on my old optilocks you can spin them in with you fingers.
has anybody else found these problems as of late.if this is on going we need to pull up tikka about this or they will go down the same road as there american counterparts and quality control goes out the window in order to meet a price in the market.