What about an M1 Garand, from CAI? Know much about those?
depends on when it was made. the first batch from the late 90's were imported from China (Canadian Lend-Lease iirc to fight the Soviets and Japan) and Morocco. the second batch from the late 2000's Century contracted Lithgow in Australia to produce the receivers on old lend-lease tooling they had and imported parts kits from Italy, Denmark, Holland, and other countries to finish them. another batch was made in Spain and finish work was done by SEI in the US, then were assembled using the parts kits mentioned. the first batch was perfectly fine and like any other surplus gun aside from some stamping for the importer ("ST ALBANS VT").
here's the problem: while Spain did both the casting and the finish machining, Century decided to cheap out and sent most of the ADI Lithgow made castings to a contractor that tried to use CNC programs to automate the finish machining. this isn't possible as the geometry is too complex for anything short of a 6 axis multi million dollar CNC to do. you will need a human to do the finish machining of the raceways, bolt rails, and certain journals around the barrel shoulder - lots of tapered journals, long tapers for the receiver itself, and the receiver is fitted to the barrel and machined to fit with a specific bolt and op rod with fitting work, the location and depth of the FP retraction and alignment of the heel to the bolt raceway, et c - it's why these parts are all serialized and matched to the same rifle at the factory. the work was good enough that parts can interchange readily but not necessarily between manufacturers. a shame, really, because the actual ADI Lithgow receiver casting is very good quality, but let down by shoddy machine work.
i don't know if Century ever fully assembled any Lithgow receivers into rifles, but i would suspect they would be quite dangerous without deep, knowledgeable inspection. Century
did make the Spanish receivers into rifles in-house and these have some small issues that can be fixed with hand-fitting, but the parts themselves are fine - Century simply didn't do the effort to size and fit each rifle together to save costs. for the buyer, these would be good project guns as the ones i've seen only required one or two parts swaps or some minor fitting work.
so basically unless you can inspect in-person i would suggest you avoid and consider a CMP M1 or a SEI M1. at least they know what they are doing.
