The early production ones were crap (Oh, there are no Kiwi built F88s - they bought all @5K from us), mostly because of issues with the drawings from which they were produced, once that was all resolved (by the late 90s) most all of the bugs that were not inherent to the design were ironed out. The Lithgow barrels were always better than the original Austrian versions (I had to provide two examples from stocks to the Steyr reps to take back home to examine as they did not believe the internal tolerances and quality that was being maintained in our production). Till the cerakote finished was adopted (over the last 5 years or so) the coating on the F88 was always problematic, nothing a rattle can of flat black could not fix though...