I ordered 19# spring on Monday afternoon, arrived this morning (priority usps mail). You may be able to get one by Friday..
I ordered Monday, Spetember 10th and tracking shows it will not arrive until the 17th!
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I ordered 19# spring on Monday afternoon, arrived this morning (priority usps mail). You may be able to get one by Friday..
I ordered Monday, Spetember 10th and tracking shows it will not arrive until the 17th!
My tracking shows that it just arrived at my PO. If your match was over this way again I would loan you my heavy spring.
OK, so I replaced my spring with the 19# and did some testing. I had five ftf out of 31 hand loads. I had both CCI and Federal primers fail to fire. All those that failed, did fire when tried again. This is better than the 40% failure I was seeing on handloads before, but still not great.
The factory hornady (147 Eld-M) I shot had no rounds fail to fire.
When I replaced the spring it looked like the bolt was lubricated with a grease. The grease may be heavy enough to slow the pin down just slightly, so I am going to strip the bolt, clean out all the grease and lube with something lighter. Also going to replace the trigger (Timney) with something else.
Hmmm!
Is it possible to reassemble the bolt without the spring then see by pushing the firing pin by hand while holding the trigger back to see if there is any interference.
Possibly, but I don't fancy removing and installing the spring again. I am not a big fan of the bolt's assembly/disassembly procedure. Getting the spring off is OK, but for me getting the spring back on sucks.
I've stripped down the bolt, cleaned and removed all the grease, lubed with oil, and have another trigger to test with. Going to the range to test tomorrow, so hopefully I will have some good data to report back with.
Any tips to removing the firing pin spring? I have the washer but when I push down on it, the spring wants to stay on the keyed locking washer that meets up with the castle nut.
And when I compress the spring, it doesn’t seem to move far enough to allow the keyed washer to spin freely of the nut. There is not enough clearance.
So, good day at the range today. 1 round failed to fire from 75 hand loads. I put that in the margin of error for hand loads so I say that is pretty good.
To recap, was seeing 40% fail to fire on hand loads (CCI 200 primers). Replaced spring with 19#, and cleaned grease out of bolt and lubed with a lighter oil. Seems much better now.
Edit: Didn't replace the trigger since I wasn't seeing significant number of failures. All rounds fired with Timney 517.
Was the failure a light primer strike?
Have you had a failure to fire before with your hand loads on other rifles?
Ditto. Many thousands of rounds.Thousands of hand-loaded rounds, never had one that didn't go off. Take from that what you will.
Never said it was. But when you've got brass that's tight in the chamber and the thing hits the primer without going bang it's clearly not a problem with headspace.Using a piece of brass to headspace is not infallible.
Never said it was. But when you've got brass that's tight in the chamber and the thing hits the primer without going bang it's clearly not a problem with headspace.
I'm pretty sure you misunderstand entirely what I just said. The chamber is tight enough that when I first ran the brass through the gun most rounds were a pretty snug fit (including a number of those that failed to fire) because I only ran an expander ball through the virgin brass to avoid making it undersized and causing precisely the problems you are referring to.While you may certainly have some other issue with the Timney putting excessive upward pressure on the sear or even the firing pin spring being too light, headspacing off a piece of brass isn't a good way to roll unless running false shoulders.
I've done exactly as you and have seen exactly what you are seeing here.
Run false shoulders and see if your issues disapear.
I'd bet money they do.
While you may certainly have some other issue with the Timney putting excessive upward pressure on the sear or even the firing pin spring being too light, headspacing off a piece of brass isn't a good way to roll unless running false shoulders.
I've done exactly as you and have seen exactly what you are seeing here.
Run false shoulders and see if your issues disapear.
I'd bet money they do.
Hope all goes well, that's a crappy situation to be in.I'll be hitting the range at least once more this week and then it's up to SD for a match. I'll post how things go as I get more time.
I'm embarrassed to say that I'm bringing a back up gun, just in case.
I received my 19# spring today, but not until after I hit the range.
Over the weekend, I disassembled the bolt, well, most of it. I couldn't get the retaining nut/washer off so I soaked it with brake cleaner and cleaned it up best I could.
After cleaning, I reassembled everything.
Hit the range today after work with the same exact ammo I've had FTFs with. I fired twenty rounds today with zero issues. Now we're getting somewhere. I'm wondering if the spring was just dirty and the grit/grime was causing the spring to not push the firing pin the way it should be, meaning the spring is essentially too weak.
The first thing I noticed was the amount of force necessary to open and close is the bolt is noticeably higher.
And not just a but higher, I'm talking fire a really hot round and have to lift like you got a pair hard.
Now, the bolt was dry during this process, so I take the bolt apart to apply some oil to the inside moving parts.
So, took the bolt out, applied a thin layer of oil to the spring, and some grease to the lugs. This helped out a lot, but the bolt lift is still harder than before. I can't imagine running a 22# spring.
I'll be hitting the range at least once more this week and then it's up to SD for a match. I'll post how things go as I get more time.
I'm embarrassed to say that I'm bringing a back up gun, just in case.
I have not had issues with rounds failing to fire before. The strike on this round looks hard enough to have set it off, to me at least.
View attachment 6946008
Definitely clean it up good. They put a lot of oil all over it for rust prevention, which I personally think is a plus because it guarantees your action isn't going to rust even if it ends up in a super humid conditions during shipping.I saw my Nucleus at the FFL for the first time today. The bolt had some streaks of black grease coming out of the extractor area. I'll be sure to clean it well.
Definitely clean it up good. They put a lot of oil all over it for rust prevention, which I personally think is a plus because it guarantees your action isn't going to rust even if it ends up in a super humid conditions during shipping.
Just fully take it apart and clean off all the oil they added, then add oil or grease where appropriate (the cocking cams and bolt lugs, mostly). Also make sure to take off the rail and clean underneath there before tightening the screws down with a little loctite - I didn't at first and actually had my rail slip around a little bit after some bumpy travel. Everything else on the gun was still tight and torqued properly, and the issue disappeared once I removed the rail (turns out they put liberal amounts of oil there too) and then reattached with a touch of loctite. My mistake entirely there though.
When I put the rail back on I just torqued them to "good and tight" with some blue loctite on the screws and a thin line placed underneath the rail itself. Not cranking on it hard enough to risk stripping the screws or damage the threads, but pretty tight otherwise. I only really use a torque wrench on my action screws and scope rings.What did you torque the rail screws at?
Well... Friday on sight in day, I had 8 of 20 with light primer strikes. Could visibly see they were light. Saturday had 1 failure out of 100. Ammo both days was from same batch of hand loads. This was with 19# spring.
When I put the rail back on I just torqued them to "good and tight" with some blue loctite on the screws and a thin line placed underneath the rail itself. Not cranking on it hard enough to risk stripping the screws or damage the threads, but pretty tight otherwise. I only really use a torque wrench on my action screws and scope rings.
Do you plan on trying a different trigger? It would be interesting if say a TriggerTech solved your problems. These primer problems are making me real nervous about my Nucleus. I don’t think I’ve ever had a primer fail to ignite in either of my Bighorns or my Defiance in the 7k+ total rounds fired through them.
Has anyone had a light primer strike using any other trigger than a Timney?
That is really strange. I hope you get it figured out and working properly. Keep us updated if you don't mind.I forgot to add that I switched to a Triggertech Diamond before this weekend. The light strikes this weekend were with the TT and not the Timney.
I see no rhyme or reason why one day it has a high rate of failure, one day not.
I'm running a 6.5cm with the timney Calvin Elite 2 stage and have yet to have a light strike or failure to fire. ran it in the guardian match last weekend and it ran like a scolded dog. This is with the #16 spring. I've got about 360 rounds through it with 0 issues of any sort. I absolutely love mine and it sucks to see others not having the same success as me.
Now that my TriggerTech is in the rifle I swapped back to the 16 pound spring this afternoon. I plan to do some load development with different bullets this weekend, so I'll report back with results.