Century imports a LOT of guns, and they build (or cobble together, however you want to say it) a bunch of guns too. Their imports have been consistently good, because they were built by the original factory somewhere and if they were rebuilt along the way it was by a government arsenal. Hard to screw up a gun just importing it.
But full auto, modern military rifles obviously can't be imported and sold to the citizens, and semi-auto clones of modern military autos can't be simply imported either due to federal law. There are two ways around that problem. Either the gun is redesigned to be a "sporting" weapon (lower mag capacity, thumbhole stocks, etc.) like a Saiga, or the gun is imported as a pile of parts and must be rebuilt into a working firearm on a new receiver here in the US. In either case there is a fair bit of monkeying around required to put what was once a military automatic assault rifle into the hands of a US citizen buyer as a semi-auto version of that gun.
Century has a bad rep for quality control when it comes to that kind of modification & rebuilding work. The very best advice is to know what the problem areas are to look for and inspect a gun carefully before you buy it.
The most infuriating factor, though, may be CAI's warranty policy. Their guns are warrantied for a year from the date of
manufacture, not
purchase. Many of their guns spend a big part of that year in warehouses, distributors' hands, in shipping, and in dealers' inventories. It is quite possible to buy one and call a month later with a problem only to discover that there is no warranty left. (See here:
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=658364)
