A stiff manufacturing schedule and tight specifications turned a bore finishing operation on a component into a foreman’s nightmare, as performance of a complex manufacturing system was marred by scatter well beyond target capability, owing to a broad range of factors. A peculiar pattern of deviations from nominal diameter was observed, exhibiting inter alia a bimodal shape, as well as outliers affecting mainly one tail. In the quest for identification of main sources of trouble, statistical process modeling was resorted to, uncovering some problems concerning empirical distributions approximating those underlying data at hand.