Misfire Advice?

[hoonahtic]

Maybe someone has some advice or can point me in the right direction?

I have a Remington model 700 which I recently shipped south to have the bolt skeletonized and fluted and duracoated. Its a .300 RUM and is upwards of 10 pounds sans scope so the work was not really for lightening but cosmetics. When I got it back from the shop I popped a Timney Trigger in to replace the stock trigger which had been slowly tightening up on me for the last few years. Went through the safety cycling and testing to ensure that the installation had gone according to plan.

Everything worked fine and I sent a few rounds down-range the next day to get the scope sighted in. Rounds 1-5 were fine, but when I pulled the trigger on round 6 all that happened was the snap of trigger pull/pin moving forward. No bang. I held gun in the firing position for a long 30 seconds and then removed the round. The firing pin had made a dent in the primer that looked to be about the depth of the ones that had went off. Threw this round in the ocean, hopefully never to be heard of again. Thought to myself "maybe round was a dud" even though it was remington factory loaded ammo. Shot 7 was fired like normal and then round 8 - another misfire. Wait, look, throw in ocean.

I don't really want to be out on the range with a gun that I am unsure of what will happen when I pull the trigger. I am in the Juneau area and don't think there are any gunsmiths within driving distance who will work on bolts/firing pins. I took it to Rayco a few days ago and they suggested sending it to a gunsmith in either anchorage/fairbanks area and having them work on it.

Could the sudden misfire development be from the fluting process? Trigger installation? Painting/coating or something? Any advice from those who may have had this problem or know of a gunsmith who can assess problem/fix and will send things through the mail would be greatly appreciated.

[gunbugs]

Its probably the duracoat. A thickness has been built up on the FP assembly and now it is "dragging" on the coating. A disassembly and removal of the coating on the moving parts of the firing pin assembly will probably do the trick. Pay particular attention to where the cocking piece and firing pin pass through the bolt shroud.

[ADfields]

Yup likely coating dragging but could be from the fluting also, cutting tool deflection reduceing the inside diameter of the bolt. As Doug says remove any coating from the firing pin, calking peace as well as the ID of the bolt shroud if you are able to disassemble the firing pen assembly.

Once that is clean hold the bolt vertical and drop the firing pen assembly into it, just get the front started in the hole and let it drop. It should fall all the way to the threads (good idea to compare this test to a well working bolt from another 700 if you never done it), if there is too much drag on the spring use a flap of 350 emery on a split rod chucked in a drill to relive whatever its dragging on inside the bolt body.

[wykee5]

Casey,
These guys most likely know what they are talking about because they have way more experience than I do and because the problem seems to have started after you got the gun back. However, it could be the ammo. I have a Rem 700 in .223 that I purchased used, so I don't know how many rounds were through it before I bought it. That being said, I put hundreds of rounds through it myself, mostly Ultramax but plenty of others. Than one day I didn't have ultramax nor did the store where I was at, so I bought some Winchester ammo. 6 rounds out of the 50 round box failed to fire. Seeing as there was no ocean nearby, I pocketed the rounds for the time being and sent them back to Winchester with a letter stating my displeasure. They found "nothing wrong with the ammunition" and the failure to fire was most likely caused by a "weak firing pin spring." That was many years ago, and with a few hundred more rounds through the gun, I have not had another misfire. The only thing I have done differently since then was to never ever buy any more Winchester rifle ammunition.
I am not saying this is the case with your situation, but before you spend money sending the gun somewhere to get looked at, be sure to try a different brand or box of ammunition.