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MVTCo Warranty
All MVTCo brand guns are covered under our limited lifetime warranty.
This warranty covers the lock against wear, workmanship errors and parts breakage. Since all moving parts are contained in the lock mechanism, the warranty covers the lock only. We cannot and do not warranty the wooden or rammers stocks of guns as they are organic in nature and subject to forces beyond our control. The warranty does cover frizzen wear. The warranty does not cover lost parts.For more info, click here
Typical warranty repairs are things like worn case hardening on frizzens, broken springs, bent sear noses etc. With nearly 20,000 guns sold we have only had a couple of dozen broken springs - ever! Sometimes springs just break. A broken spring is NOT a warranty repair if it has been heated up for whatever reason. This is more common that you'd think as many people artificially age their guns by bluing or browning them, sometimes doing some pretty wired things as well. Certain browning agents require that you heat up the metal part before applying the browning agent. Plum Brown is one of them. To make a piece of carbon steel into a spring, it is first heated, then quenched to harden it, then reheated to a lower temperature to temper it. If you heat it up again and let it cool slowly as people often do when using Plum Brown, that will anneal the spring and it will bend, since it is no longer a spring at that point. If you heat it up and then cool it rapidly by quenching it in water, it will harden and be brittle, almost guaranteed to break the next time you compress it. If you are going to brown your lock parts, be sure to use a rust browning solution like the Laurel Mountain Forge browning agent, NOT a browning agent that requires heat. If you have applied heat to a spring and ruined it's temper or hardened it, it should be obvious to you that it is NOT something that would be covered under warranty as the part was not defective until you took a torch to it.
Using the wrong tool to compress a V-spring will damage it as well. Do not use Vise Grips, do not use a C-clamp. Use a proper spring vise. We carry an excellent, historically correct one here and there are other modern style spring vises on the market elsewhere. Using the wrong sort of tool to compress a spring leave a telltale mark on it. A spring damaged by using an inappropriate tool is NOT a warranty repair.
Hand forged springs are stronger than the flimsy investment cast springs that are found in European import guns. Some people are surprised at this and actually grind the springs to make them thinner and therefore "softer". It should go without saying that doing so voids the warranty on the springs.
The frizzens on these guns are forged steel that is then case hardened. It is not a cast steel alloy part that is hardened and then tempered so it is hard all the way through like many "kit guns" are. The methods used to build these locks are historically correct and use historically correct materials. That means the frizzens are case hardened. In case hardening, only the outer shell of the part has a high enough carbon content to properly harden while the inside core of the part is a lower carbon steel that doesn't get as hard. This allows a degree of flexibility in the part and keeps them from breaking under normal use. The sparks that you see when you snap a flintlock are tiny red-hot shards of metal that are scraped off by the flint. This means that over time, the case hardening can wear through and expose the softer steel underneath. When this happens, the flint digs into the softer steel and tears up the face of the frizzen as well as rapidly wearing flints and giving poor performance. This is often caused by people using the wrong sized flint. In the case of a worn frizzen, we will dress the rough surface down and reharden the frizzen, then test it with a flint. It will be better than new in many cases.
Many times we'll get in a frizzen where the gun's owner or his buddy who fancies himself a gunsmith has attempted to harden the frizzen and botched it. We can tell by the color of the metal that someone has heated it up to the wrong temperature. There is various internet lore out there that says you can harden a frizzen by wrapping it in leather and putting it in the campfire, then fishing it out of the ashes in the morning. It doesn't work that way and if you try that trick it will completely anneal your frizzen. You can't harden a musket sized frizzen with a propane torch and risk melting it if you use an oxy-acetylene torch set. Trust me on this, if you try it and don't know what you are doing, you WILL screw it up. If you or your buddy botch hardening the frizzen, it is not reasonable to expect us to fix it for free, especially since a worn frizzen is normally a warranty repair.
Sears get bent when people, usually a safety inspector at a reenactment, force the trigger in the half cock position either by accident or to somehow "prove" that half cock works. Me, I don't let "safety inspectors" touch my gun as I have seen too many of them break perfectly good guns. Usually if a lock is hanging up at half cock, it has to do with a bent sear.
Other times we'll see a lock that has had it's tumbler and sear horribly mutilated by some wannabe "gunsmith" doing a "trigger job" on it. Obviously if someone has gone at the lock internals with a Dremel tool, it voids the warranty.
A broken wooden rammer is not a warranty issue. If you use a wooden rammer improperly, it will break. Once a rammer leaves here, we have no control over how you use the rammer and cannot be responsible for them if you break it or lose it. Likewise for lost parts. We've had cases where a person has lost the dog catch off of his doglock when the screw loosened up and it fell off somewhere. He felt that the screw shouldn't have gotten loose, but the reality is that it is the responsibility of the person using the gun to be sure it is assembled properly and in good working order. In the case of a doglock, this includes making sure that the screw holding the dog hasn't backed out from use.
We sell flashguards, but do not install them. If you have installed a flashguard improperly on your musket and it has caused the frizzen to bind and therefore damage the case hardening, it is not reasonable to expect us to cover it under warranty. Likewise, people installing flashguards will sometimes remove the frizzen screw to install it without relieving the tension off of the frizzen spring first. This can instantly strip the frizzen screw. There are explicit instructions on how to install a flashguard located here on our website and there is no excuse to damage your lock by doing it wrong. If you cannot competently install a flashguard, please leave the job to someone who can.
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If you are having a problem with your gun, contact Pete at info@middlesexvillagetrading.com. He has been building and repairing muzzleloaders and other unusual guns for three decades and personally designed a good portion of the guns that we offer. Let's face it, the operation of a flintlock is not exactly "common knowledge" these days, so the intelligent thing to do when you are having trouble is to ask a professional. The guy at your local gun shop probably knows exactly nothing about how flintlocks work despite the "Official Glock Armorer" stickers on the front door. Pete will probably ask you to take the lock out of the gun as if you were going to clean it and look for certain things. He may ask you to email him a photograph of it. He's not just wasting your time, as he has used this style of troubleshooting to catch many small issues like using the wrong sized flint etc.
If the problem is something that we feel is something that needs to be professionally repaired, he will email you the warranty form to fill out and send with the lock. It is important that the form be sent with the lock because it is how we keep track of who to send it back to when it is done. Please fill it out legibly. If the gun is less than 12 months old, just send the lock and the form. If it is older than 12 months, please include the $10 fee.
Please do not call and email daily to "check on" the repair. Every hour spent answering this sort of needless inquiry and going to look where your lock is in line is an hour spent NOT fixing locks. You will get a notice emailed to you by the USPS system when your lock ships back out. If you need the gun by this weekend for your annual event and just remembered that the frizzen is worn out because it was acting up last year, well perhaps you should have been practicing a bit with your weapon more than 48 hours before your parade. We do not date guarantee anything. Repairs are done in the order they come in. Please get to know your weapon and take care of any issues as they happen instead of waiting until right before the next time you need it.
On the form is a series of checkboxes where we ask what the problem is. MOST problems fall under the symptoms listed on the form. If not, please describe what the problem is. Do not just write "per our email conversation" in the box. We get 100's of emails every day and don't remember your email conversation. Please stick to the symptoms and don't editorialize on the form, telling us how you are disappointed because you tried 12 different flints and the worn frizzen still doesn't spark does not help us troubleshoot it.
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A lock that is caked in rust is not a properly maintained lock. Neither is a lock that has rust pits and wire brush marks all over it because it WAS caked in rust and you used a wire wheel to remove the evidence. The worst example of this is a "minuteman" reeanctor who bought a gun one year, used it in his annual parade in the rain, and put it away wet and dirty. The next spring rolled around and he calls us up, furious, because his "frizzen broke". When questioned about what he meant by this he said "I don't know, it just broke, must be cheap metal". He was told to send it in and we'd fit a new frizzen to it and to please include the broken part so we can figure out why it broke as it had never happened before. When it got here we saw the whole story...his frizzen wasn't "broke", it was rusted solid to the lockplate and wouldn't move. OK, that is an extreme case, but the fact is that it doesn't take much rust at all to take a flintlock out of commission. The space underneath the frizzen and frizzen spring is the most susceptible area, so please meet us halfway on this and maintain your locks properly. Warranties cover defects, not bad maintenance.
It should go without saying that a lock that has been reworked to do a "trigger job" by your friend who works on guns as a hobby and he messed it up is not a warranty repair. People get over their heads quickly. I have no issues with people tinkering with gunlocks as we all had to start someplace, but once Bubba has gone at the full cock notch with a grinder, consider the warranty voided.
It doesn't matter how long your buddy has been reenacting, he either knows how to fix flinters or he doesn't. If he doesn't actually know how to do it, don't let him mess with your lock and void the warranty! Being a reenactor doesn't mean he knows how to fix locks. I've been eating Chinese food for most of my life but it doesn't mean I know how to make lo mein. You've probably been driving a car for decades, but it doesn't mean you can troubleshoot and repair an automatic transmission. Leave the specialized work to the specialists.
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This fee is mostly to help with shipping costs and the time spent doing the paperwork. We put this policy in place to fix a problem we were having with a certain pirate reenactor groups sending in all of the locks in the group once a year for "tuning", since there was no fee. Like so many times in life, it only takes a couple of problem individuals to ruin it for everyone else and once they had to pay that $10 per lock, they magically stopped needing "tuning and repair" every winter.
Repaired locks are returned via USPS Priority mail. You will get a notice in your email from USPS to tell you when it ships and to give you a tracking number. Please do not "check on" the repair by sending us emails and calling every day. When it ships, you will be notified by USPS. I'm not sure what people are "checking on" when they do this. Do they expect to speak to their lock in case it is homesick? If we didn't have to answer these people who are "checking on" things, we could get more work done and you'd get your lock back faster. I am 100% positive that people will read this and email us anyway, not because they are "checking on it", but because they are just curious about how it is going.
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This warranty is transferable and is not limited to the original owner of the gun.
We stand behind our guns, it's that simple. It doesn't matter if you bought it yesterday in person or if you bought it off of a trade blanket are the 3rd owner since it was sold in 2002, if something goes wrong with the lock, we'll fix it.
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Please do not send us just a frizzen or just a bent sear or whatever. We will want to see the whole lock so we can determine what the root of the problem is and correct it. We'll also want to test the lock to be sure it is working consistently before we send it back. Recently someone sent in the whole lock for a frizzen reharden, minus the topjaw and jaw screw. How do you expect us to test the lock with a flint if we can't mount a flint in it? A little common sense goes a long way.
Likewise, please do not send the entire gun unless we specifically request it. Every time a gun gets handed over to the post office or UPS, there is a chance the stock will get broken or some other tragic event. Sometimes we'll need the stock to troubleshoot a problem, for instance a double barrel flintlock pistol. Most of the time, however, we will just want the lock. Please don't send us the lock screws either. Put them in a safe place while the lock is gone. I suggest a plastic sandwich bag held to the gun with a rubber band.
We will not send you replacement parts. 99.99% of the time, a lock needs to be repaired with a file, a hammer, or something similar. Parts rarely need to be replaced. Any replacement parts need to be laboriously hand fitted. If you knew how to do that sort of thing, you'd be fixing your own lock instead of sending it in for service.
We will not send you a new frizzen or a new lock. If your frizzen is worn, it gets rehardened. We know how to fix this stuff, please do not tell us how to do our job.
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This issue is the one that made me feel the need to write this new warranty page that explains the backstory to each of these rules. Over the winter, in a single week we received two separate boxes of locks sent in by two different reenactment groups.
There were over 20 locks all together, in various state of disrepair, and some of them were not even from our guns. They were sent in by the "unit armorers" who felt they needed the frizzens hardened and lost parts replaced. We took two days to go through them, test them, do the paperwork on them and prepare them for return shipment. Out of the 20+ locks, there were only three that actually needed the frizzens to be rehardened. In one of the boxes, none of the locks actually needed to be repaired, they had just sent them in for a pre-season "tune up". The biggest issue with them was that there was rust on them, keeping the frizzens from opening properly. This sort of waste of our valuable time is just uncalled for. A warranty is not a maintenance program, it is to repair defects. Looking over and testing perfectly good locks wasted two whole day of our time that could have been spent getting new guns prepped or other repairs done faster.
The warranty covers individual guns. Each one is handled on a case-by-case basis. All of your group's guns are not covered en masse, we do not provide a free maintenance service for individuals or reenacting units. If you are part of a group and having a problem with your gun, contact us about it. Do not wait until your "armorer" does something, he does not provide this warranty, we do.
We will NOT accept boxes of mixed locks from groups.
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