Some better, some worse. They were manufactured by the Austrian Army's Vienna Arsenal and by a variety of Austrian contractors, and it depends on who manufactured them and which importers handled them. Some of the arms sold to the Federal Army by Böker and Company, for example, are described in the company's internal correspondence as "seconds." Compounding the problem, the Federal Army's inspection process for all arms in Europe in 1861-2 was utterly incompetent, and wasn't much better at the New York Ordnance Agency, through which all of the Federal Army's foreign arms purchases passed. The Ordnance Office assigned one inspector to go to Europe to inspect all of Böker and Company's 186,000 arms, and I strongly suspect that he was on the take. As a counterpoint, the British legation in Brussels reported that some Liege manufactured Enfield barrels were being shipped to England for manufacture into Enfield rifle muskets without proof as "gas pipes."
Paragraph 1426 of the 1863 version of the Revised United States Army Regulations required unit commanders to submit bi-monthly damaged arms reports. Occasionally an army does something bright, because the stated purpose of the requirement was to permit the compilation of the reports into instructions to the Federal armories to “correct defects in the manufacture” of arms. The National Archives has preserved a small file of these reports. A large percentage of the reports for all weapons in service dealt with broken or mashed nipples; broken or weak springs, particularly main springs; broken hammers; broken screws; and burst barrels. The problems were universal, with the majority of the reports involving Springfield, British, “French,” and Belgian manufactured arms. Despite all the whining in the field, there were only six reports related to Austrian arms in the file. Most of the problems for all of the weapons involved failures in metallurgy on the part of the manufacturers.
When the Ordnance Office sent qualified ordnance officers out to inspect regiments' Austrian arms following complaints from the field the inspectors generally found the problems were related to abject maintenance failures by the troops and corresponding leadership failures by their officers. Why on earth would you want to clean the things?
Regards,
Don Dixon