What the??!?!?!?The Annoyed Man wrote: I have had no malfunctions myself related to these things. I did have one MAJOR failure in my rifle early on. In the Springfield rifles, many of the parts are MIM, which I did not know when I bought mine. MIM is not necessarily a bad thing if properly done. (Kimber 1911s use MIM parts, and I've never experienced a part failure in my own Kimber due to MIM, or seen one in anyone else's Kimber.) In any case, at some point during the first 100 rounds of various commercial match loads, one of the two hammer feet in the fire control group snapped off. SA had me send them the fire-control group, and I received it back from them 11 days later, repaired, and with a forged hammer installed at my request in place of the OEM MIM hammer. SA will not volunteer to use forged parts in their repairs, but they will use them if you ask for them and they have them on hand. At the time, they had forged fire-control group parts on hand. There have been no more issues since then.
S.A. refused to replace my sheared off hammer with a forged part. I was basically told (at least twice) that I'd get whatever they decided to put in there and that was that. At that point I was getting quite irked with them. After several more phone calls up the support line they eventually relented and gave me my money back rather than replace the part. Good riddance. Though the M1A drips coolness and the sights are the best on the go, I personally won't even drop another dime on a S.A product because of this experience with S.A.