Grab your pet bolt rifle and slowly open the bolt, you will notice as you bring the bolt handle most of the way open/up it pops back a little bit.Īt the rear of the bolt, just in front of the handle is a ramp and a corresponding one on the receiver/action. Unknown to most bolt-action rifle owners, their pet turnbolt has what is called a Primary Extraction Cam. Most owners will then try to force the stuck casing out. When you mix those kind of pressures with a pitted, rusty and/or dirty chamber the relatively soft brass casing expands in the chamber and gets hopelessly stuck in the gun. The firing/chamber pressure of modern rifle cartridges can easily reach over 60,000 PSI.
In our humid climate, rust will accumulate at an alarming rate, which exacerbates the problem.Īll of these issues contribute to a chamber that becomes rough. The most common is to not clean the rifle properly and most specifically, the chamber. To be fair, most of the extractor problems encountered with this system have been due to varying degrees of abuse by their owner(s). I have also seen Mausers, Springfields, Rugers, Savages, Winchesters and probably some other makes/brands I have forgotten about suffer the same extreme conditions and no one received anything more than small particles “peppering” them. I will not mention him by name as he might decide to “take me out” and he can do it from about any distance he chooses… In the latter case, the shooter is a very accomplished reloader and target shooter, which goes to show that anyone can make a stupid mistake. I have seen a few Remington rifles with this feature “blown up.” Two were done by reloading/hand loading inattention or just flat out stupidity, and one was fired with a cleaning rod in the barrel. The bolt nose is thin enough that if there is a catastrophic failure of a fired round, it will expand outwards and pretty much seal off the chamber so that nothing, or very little, gets back to the shooter. The last ring is the receiver or action itself. Since the bolt nose is inset into this recess when it is in battery, it becomes the second (middle) of the three rings. The next ring is the recess in the breech end of the barrel (which is the mouth, or beginning, of the chamber). There is a tiny clip type of extractor inset into this bolt nose that is really inadequate. To make this possible the more robust and reliable extractors every other rifle has cannot be used. The innermost “ring” is a fully enclosed bolt face/nose. It is the result of the “Three Rings of Steel” that its manufacturer used to tout heavily in its advertising. The single biggest fault of this design is its extractor. Luckily, most, if not all, of this rifle’s inadequacies can be remedied. I can’t understand why this rifle is so well thought of. In fact there is very little difference between the earlier and later rifles, most component parts are even interchangeable. In reality, it’s been a couple of decades longer than that, since the 700 itself is an evolution of the earlier 721/722/725 models. The Remington Model 700 has been one of the darlings of target shooters, military and police snipers and counter-snipers, as well as hunters, for almost 50 years now.