Savage misfires

[wboggs]

Recently acquired a Savage FT/R in .308. It misfires on some of the rounds. Headspace is within specs. as is unfired and loaded rounds in Lapua brass. The primer showa a very faint mark on the rounds that don't fire. A post on Savage shooters yielded the advice to go up on the trigger pull adjustment and it would solve the problem.I'm looking for others who may have experienced this problem and advice.

 

[RonAKA]

I went through some issues with my Savage Target AccuTrigger. It would not fire in about 1 in 10 tries. The AccuTrigger leaf did not lock up. It just did not fire. I played around with trigger pull and it did not help. I finally concluded that the safety was not moving to the full fire position, and while the sear was releasing, the firing pin was being caught by the safety. Now in my case, I do not recall ever seeing any kind of dent in the primer, but I can't say I looked either. I usually just lifted the bolt, and carefully put it down again, and eventually all fired

In any case I took the thing apart, and cleaned it. They have kind of a strange way(at least to me) of holding the safety in each position. There is a coil spring which sits across a plate that has recesses in it. When you slide the safety forward and back the spring flexes out of the way and then rests in each recess. I found it was not really holding that well in the full forward (fire) position. I found some crap (plumbers putty) that I had used to mask the trigger when bedding it, and that may have been part of the travel issue.

In any case I have put around 150 rounds through it since my cleaning and tune up, and have not had one single failure to fire. What I do when waiting for the gun to cool is push the safety full ahead, and now it seems to be staying there. I currently have it set at 7 oz. of pull.

Hope that helps some. Your issue could be quite different, and something else may be binding the firing pin. But, I doubt that increasing the trigger pull will do anything in any case.

 

[wboggs]

This sounds like the problem my rifle has. I noticed that the safety was sometime hard to disengage and move to the full fire position but at the time did not correlate the two events. The sear was falling with every shot whether it went off or not and a close inspection of the primer revealed only a very slight mark, maybe not from the firing pin at all but from the bolt face. The rounds that fired had a normal indentation and looked normal in all respects and did not resemble a weak strike, The unfired rounds were probably never hit by the firing pin.Will keep you posted. Thanks again. Very helpful

 

[Laurie]

If it is the trigger pull weight setting issue, it will usually only apply if adjusted to less than 12 ounces - they seem to be pretty reliable at anything on or above that. Go lower and they'll often work for some time then gradually become increasingbly unreliable.

The unreliability manifests itself in two ways - an increasing tendency for the trigger assembly machanism to lock up solid as the bolt is closed, and the even more frustrating one in my view where everything seems fine on firing, but the pin is blocked and doesn't move fully forward. The external sear lever drops with a click, but if you look at it closely in dry-firing, the movement is restricted and the sound isn't quite 'right'. (It lacks the positive 'clack' it should make if it's working properly.)

As Ron says, the safety is involved in whatever's happrning to a greater or lesser degree. When my 12 PT action started to play up, I could get it to work for a short time by applying then disengaging it. After a while this trick failed too. Two complete turns of the pull weight adjuster raised the setting to dead on the pound mark and the trigger has performed flawlessly since.

You do have to squeeze the trigger straight back so that the central red safety blade is fully compressed before any pressure goes onto the main blade. If the pull weight setting is low, this feature becomes acute, so that any slight pressure on the main blade before the safety accutrigger blade is fully depressed causes a misfire.

A final thing to note is that the three screw actions are quite sensitive to action torque settings, or rather are very sensitive to that applied to the rear screw. There is a method for finding the ideal torque that involves the use of a small torque driver, and every time you take the action out of the stock, you need to tighten the screws up in the same fashion to the same torque otherwise your zero will move significantly. I mention this as you may find the rifle shoots to somewhere quite differently if you take the action out of the stock to have a look at the trigger assembly. The adjustment method is explained in a post somewhere on this forum, and will no doubt be regularly discussed on the Savage Shooters Forum. (A simple trigger adjustment required me to remove the barrelled action in my rifle, but I think you can adjust yours through the stock?)

 

[wboggs]

Thanks to all for the help. Will get on the problem that I understand the relationship between the firing pin, safety, and AccuTrigger. Will post my results when the problem is fixed.
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