Ib,
AWA had such severe problems in getting those guns together well enough to function, as I said, that they had to call in Eldon Penner. Google him, he's pretty much "Mr. Lightning".
Many were returned by customers as being non-functional, and it was Penner who saved the program, briefly.
Had it not been for him, you would not be singing the praises of your rifles.
Toward the end of the Globberman ownership/management group, a visitor to the operation thought the sight of the company president assembling a Lightning rifle was a positive thing & wrote about it enthusiastically.
"Looky there- even the company PRESIDENT is a hands-on kinda guy!"
By then, with personnel turnover & lack of competent people to work on what was going out, the sight of a New York lawyer with zero gun experience working on a problematic product was most emphatically NOT a good thing.
Penner was able to fix the Lightning, but by then it was too late for that ownership & they sold what was left of the operation to their in-house "gunsmith", and moved on, leaving lawsuits pending not just with Colt, but elsewhere in Florida.
The Globberman consortium was a New York-based investor group.
They also, when they acquired AWA, bought COWS, the leather & costumery company, from its owner, Sebastian Ramirez.
Globberman was the AWA guy, another partner was going to be the COWS guy, since he had experience in the New York garment industry.
The COWS guy had, as did Globberman, extensive plans.
He was excited, he was experienced, he was knowledgeable, he was willing to listen to those of us who knew more about the CAS market specifically than he did, and he was forced out of his position and their investor group well before he could even get his feet on the ground.
COWS eventually reverted to Sebastian when the Globberman Group let AWA go & left town.
AWA DID manage to get nice Lightnings out.
But the program lost money & was never a successful line for AWA.
You mention the Taurus version, funny.
At that one SHOT SHOW I was standing at the Taurus booth looking the new rifle over & just casually asked the guy standing next to me what he thought of it, since he was looking at one too.
Turned out to be Eldon Penner, I'd never met him before.
The subject of AWA came up & he spent the next 20 minutes telling me about his involvement with AWA & what he'd had to do to save their Lightning.
While we were talking, a friend of his came up, laughing, and told Penner he'd been approaching the Taurus booth, noticed Penner talking to me, and right then heard a guy standing nearby tell a colleague "Oh oh, there's Eldon, let's get outa here!", and hurriedly walked off in the opposite direction.
Looking at his name badge, it was Russel Simpson, AWA's "gunsmith" & final owner.
Penner got a kick out of that.
There were so many behind-the-scenes shenanigans at AWA that, truly, a book should have been written.
The lies, deceptions, and mis-management were astounding.
Denis