I bought my 110EP after shooting the cover gun used in a lot of magazines. I was the first person to put rounds through the cover gun so you can’t say it was cherry picked from the factory.
My first one was LASER accurate, just like the cover gun I shot but it had serious issues making it essentially a single shot rifle.
It wouldn’t feed because of the extractor, and I had to hand load rounds into the chamber. It wouldn’t extract the fired round and it wouldn’t eject a fired round the times it did extract.
Using factory ammo it required two hands to lift the bolt on a fired round, the brass showed no signs of pressure. I tried Federal Gold Medal Match, Hornady Match and handloads. All were the same.
Cycling the bold was rough and it galled the shit out of the lugs, chewed them up something awful.
Savage made me ship it back on my dime, didn’t touch it for three months and decided in month 4 they would send me a new one, that took a month.
It wasn’t until other folks got involved that I saw any movement.
I love the replacement rifle but even it had issues. Wouldn’t feed or eject until I changed the extractor ball and the ejector.
I’m an airplane mechanic by trade so I sent them a very detailed squawk list that included pictures, measurements and detailed descriptions of the problem. If they had bothered to read it they would’ve had an easier time deciding to send me a new one.
All in all, it cost me $100 in ammo, $25 in parts and $175 in shipping costs to get my “elite” rifle to not function like a Kentucky rifle.
It is disappointing to see Savage drop the ball on the customer support side, they should wake up and up their game.
I have a Savage 12 in 6.5 CM and it is the most accurate gun in my safe. Factory blueprinted action and bolt. Have seen multiple 1” groups at 600 when conditions are calm. But the bolt lift is fairly hard, so you lose sight picture when you cycle the bolt in a prone position. It does not always feed reliably. OK when shot slowly from a bench, and single feeding, and if you are happy to break position every time. Also ejection works maybe 80% of the time, but at least extraction works well enough. I will never sell the rifle, because it is as accurate as some F class rifles, at least in calm conditions when my lack of wind reading skills matter much less.
It seems Savage is happy to built accurate rifles that functions sub-par (or sometimes not not at all) compared to say a Ruger RPR in 338, which is in the same price category as the Elite Precision. The world has moved on, and Savage is falling behind. The quality of the action matters to most folks. These problems have been known to Savage top management for decades, and they have chosen not to redesign their action. These are simple problems that good mechanical engineers can out-design.
I am looking for a 338 LM right now. Looked at Savage Elite Precision, and watched the prices creep up as the panic buying took hold. How do you justify spending $2.3K on a Savage 338 when an MPA dealer like Extreme Guns and Ammo (close by in Rosenburg just outside my home town of Houston) will sell you a discounted MPA chassis gun off the rack for less than $2.9K, if you ask nicely, and you get a Defiance action, a hand lapped Spencer barrel, a good brake, a superb TriggerTech Special trigger, with the chamber indicated to 0.1 thou? And a 0.5 MOA guarantee? I think most folks will pay that fairly small premium for a semi custom rifle and a zero wait.
My 6.5 CM that i bought from ExtremeGuns was in stock, in fact they had dozens of them in stock, it had zero issues and shot 0.4” groups on day one with Hornady factory match ammo. Berger factory ammo did even better, and group size improved to 0.3” with hand loads. Sometimes in the 1’s and 2’s.
Every time i contacted MPA by email, for example to order a new (weird) 7 twist 30 cal long barrel in 300 WSM for monos, or a muzzle brake replacement (mine was a Gen 1 and incompatible with the Kinetic Solutions barrel tuner), they bent over backwards to help me. And I’m nobody. After 2000 rounds the rifle developed an occasional misfire and SD went up, i contacted them immediately, got a quick response (24 hours later), and Woody helped me trouble shoot it. Their attitude was “Let’s run through these trouble shooting steps with you, and if that does not resolve it, send in the rifle and we will fix it”. Turned out it was self-inflicted: Grease somehow got into the bolt body, delaying the firing pin fall (causing drag), i cleaned it out with a good solvent, and SD is now back at 7 fps, problem solved!
But Savage is not alone, i have had a bad experience with Remington two years ago. Badly cut chamber, with burrs inside, sent the gun back (they paid for it), but it is still not fully resolved. Brass comes out with deep scratches on it. Not sure i want to reload brass like that.
I think these days most people are just not tolerant of poor product quality or poor customer service anymore. Both Savage and Remington need to learn that lesson. Remington had multiple bankruptcies already, and their product quality problems contributed to their woes. Savage needs to pay attention to their long running problems. They are still a profitable company, and can afford a design update once in 15 or 20 years.
