Point 1 to be fair, this was a Lyman "ready to shoot" rifle in a box. It was obviously assembled by semi skilled or careless workers.
If youre buying a kit, maybe you can take better care not to remove so much wood from the mortised areas and leave sanding marks going in one direction on the barrel. I had to reshape the pregnant looking buttstock too which resembeled a deflated football.
Point 2 I sent it back to the retailer and got anohter one, it was somewhat better the work mentioned above was performed on it. It came out looking rather nice, aside from the big gaps around the lock and trigger where I cant add back some wood but a lot of folks dont care about this sort of thing nowadays.
Point 3 I ended up having to remove some wood under the tang area as the barrel and the breech hook area were not even parallel (even though the top surfaces ie flats were ground off parallel) making the wedges almost impossible to install and remove. I had originally attributed this to warpage.
Point 4 it shoots pretty good now after doing some minor smithing on the rear sight as described in another thread. My Jonathon M Browning Mtn Rifle has what appears to be the same sight. It works just fine and was made pefectly. The Lyman sight was made crooked, I mean the leaf (rear blade) was cut higher on one side than the other and not flat (parallel) to the barrel. I fixed most of this problem but its ground crooked around the profile. Most people on this site at least prefer grinding down the primitive sight supplied (cast iron) to fit one load I reckon.
Conclusion, I dont accuse Lyman of sending out "bad parts" I doubt they even know how bad some of these rifles look when they go out. Sure they are responsible regardless of who assembles these for them. They never responded to emails I sent through their "contact us" website. (no I didnt bother calling let them figure it out) The idjits that put these together for Lyman (never could find out where) are probably "paid by the piece" they didnt even wait for the cheap oil stain finish to dry before assembling both of the ones I got, the first was glued together so badly I feared I would damage it trying to drive the lock out, the second was still sticky and required a lot of clean up. I refinished it with tung oil it came out looking great but the cheap azz wood being used is somewhat pulpy in places and will never be "great" upon close inspection.
In other words I think by design and maybe former standards this is a good rifle, I think Lyman just abandoned any attempt at quality control on their pre-assembled guns and have probably outsourced their assembly to Myanmar or rural China. These current offerings are just not up to the standards of even the low end Investarms products that I have owned or have seen.
By all means build the kit, in hindsight I shouldve done just that but time being a factor for me due to job and family it would take me months but it wouldve been a lot more detailed as far as fit and finish.