Can ramping up production hurt quality control? Sure. When Colt was forced to quadruple production of the M16 they bought barrels later proven to have tight chambers. They were even replacing those guns in the field - in Vietnam - within hearing of ongoing rifle fire.
That is something entirely different than a company scheduling production into another shift, adding some line workers, and spreading out the experienced crew to maintain production standards. The machines don't radically change, gauges and micrometers remain in calibration, and tooling gets reordered sooner. How many passes it can take doesn't mean you cheap out and keep using a cutter beyond it's life. All you would do is make more junk and many of these plants exercise measurement and document control to meet ISO standards. It's arguable all that does is document they make more junk but the reality is inundating Customer Service with bad guns doesn't mean you are doing it better.
For the most part the factories expanded their production schedule and then let the chips fall where they may. If orders started stretching out into months and even next year - GOOD! It's nice to get a backlog and have a definite schedule. It beats the normal seasonal collapse where management is attempting to get incoming revenue to pay the outgoing expenses and keep their salaries liquid.
There is one issue, tho. If you make 10,000 rifles you expect them all to be in spec but you know for a fact that some will have parts in them that don't work optimally for the first 200 rounds, and maybe a few that never will. The reality is that making a machine with moving parts in it - all of them made to the specifications - also means that Part A which measures correctly +/- .015" mated to Part B also in spec still don't fit perfectly. Now up your production to 50,000 and you will result in 5X more of that somewhat rare and singular situation. Your Quality Control has NOT gone down - it's still one per 10,000, for example. What went up were your production numbers. Now you make 5.
So the public - especially on the internet - reads about 4 more bad guns and it's hyped out of proportion to the real facts that a lot more guns are being made. This happens to ANY product that sees high demand. I was once looking at a Nikon camera back in the days of 35mm and asked a guy selling them if it was a good model. He said, "Sure - but you might want to think about it. They are making a lot more of those, so they are also making that many more duds. If you buy one of the slightly different models - say, the "C" version? They only make 10% of those which means they get a lot more personal attention on the line, and a lot less duds."
If you buy a popular model you are going to get more duds on the market than the rarer optional ones. Basic math. And no, it does NOT mean QC went in the toilet. It could even improve by 50% and you still have more duds. In fact if the factory tried to hold to just the one gun a month from the previous production rate, and then production jumps 5 fold, making just one bad gun is going to be exponentially more expensive to prevent.
Now we get to just how did three guns in a row turn out bad for one buyer? Some new info needs to be provided. We would need to get into someone's personal life pretty closely to figure that out. What constitutes "bad" - exactly what were the defects in each? Was their a change in perspective due to having certain guns satisfying inner drives but it couldn't be sustained with later purchases? I think we should recognize that some of us go thru buying binges and after a while we reach a saturation level where cognitive dissonance finally wins out.
Not expecting answers, just bringing up the possibility. Few of us actually talk it out with others to see where they were headed. And it's not like some of us haven't done that recently and are still waiting to receive products we already know will be a complete waste of our money. What we were looking for sometimes can't be satisfied with material goods. Buying guns isn't immune from that.
