A little off topic, but I'll chime in since it directly relates to this.
Near as I can tell, there have been at least 5 different handle revisions to the Remington M700 action. When the RR prefix receivers hit the floors around 15 or so years ago a change was made. With that change the vendor from where they were sourced also migrated. Something happened during that time because the PE cam surface was altered. -quite radically.
I have worked closely with Remington at the executive level to try and resolve this. That is supposed to happen in the near future.
Regardless, it still leaves us with a few million of these things floating around that often suffer from anemic primary extraction. I offer two levels of service for this. I call them "Time and Tig" and "Time and Tig with Time Advance."
Time and Tig:
I pull the handled and scoot it around until I achieve the best PE possible without altering the PE cam. This is the most popular and gets it "sorta right." The handles we do here are both welded and soldered. Welding does the heavy lifting as its done at the root of the shear point between the base of the handle and the bolt body. It's then sweated with SS to adhere the "strap" portion of the handle so that there's twice the adhesion.
T&T with Time Advance:
This is a bit more forensic. I zap the PE cam surface with some air-hardening filler rod using a tig welder and then machine the lump back into the cam geometry so that it is actually tangent to the cam surface of the receiver. Doing all of this also advances the cam timing so that it engages sooner relative to the bolt's rotation. The idea is to take advantage of what is possible in full and spread the linear, rearward motion of the bolt over a longer duration of handle rotation to reduce the amount of effort required from the shooter. Once fitted up, it's also attached in the same manner as the more affordable service.
It's about 3x the labor. Even with fixturing it requires a bit of handwork with files and stones to get right. Because the material hardens intentionally, it's not the easiest job to do, and it's harder on stuff. (tooling)
The other solution I have:
Replace the handle completely. Last year I bought a metric shit ton of obsolete parts from Remmy. One was a gold mine find. Genuine NOS (New Old Stock) 40x handles in carbon and stainless. (RH only, sorry Lefties, your shit out of luck) These have more meat to them and the PE cam surface is correctly done. Whenever possible I prefer to just install these as its about the same money for the work and I don't have to curse as much.
You can find these services and parts on our store.
Happy to help.
C.
