Firing pin spring tension

I'd heard in the past from an experienced competitor that he changed the firing pin spring in his custom actioned rifle every year to avoid ignition problems causing vertical downrange. At the time I had a bunch of rounds over 5-6 yrs thru my main comp gun and no indication of any problem, so I just filed it away under "interesting, but not sure if I buy it".

More recently a friend was having some issues with erratic ES using a known good load in his comp gun - with a custom action. After some discussion, I mentioned the bit about the spring as I was out of any better ideas. Lo & behold, it worked.

After asking around a bit it sounds like this is a somewhat common thing with some of the custom actions out there... but I don't think I've run across anyone with a factory action - Savage or Rem-chester - that either has this problem or that changes the firing pin spring regularly.

So.... figured I'd ask here: has anyone else ran into this, or otherwise gave experience with it on their Savage action?

Typically factory springs never give up much in compression strength because they are usually a little stronger than what specs call for. In most cases the biggest culprit in ignition problems are caused by insuffient firing pin travel, coupled with excessive sear drag. I've ran into several cases in custom actions where that is the same problem. I've never seen many problems with custom actions that are Remington clones, but the others, especially BAT and Nesika Bay, this problem seems to be more evident.

A word of caution about advice from competitors, don't take everything at face value. As with any professional competition, many will do a thing simply because the one who was the most successful was doing it; Or superstition.

But to the question, no I have never noticed it. My original FP is very rapidly approaching 6,000 rounds and will still produce single digit ES numbers from 5-shot groups.

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Originally Posted by darkker

A word of caution about advice from competitors, don't take everything at face value. As with any professional competition, many will do a thing simply because the one who was the most successful was doing it; Or superstition.

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Amen. That was more or less my initial response the first time I heard of this; it wasn't til recently that I encountered a case where it actually solved the problem - which started raising questions.

Thanks Fred!

memilanuk,
What action were you working with? I don't have much experience with tuning rifles in general and no experience with custom target rifles so any ifo I can gather is beneficial.

At least two of the ones I know of with this issue are Pandas. Responses elsewhere seem to agree with Fred in that some BAT actions may be particularly prone to it, along with Barnards if the end cap on the bolt comes loose.



Some what ironically, I have an older Target Action that is prone to having the bolt assy screw come loose during a match... dang thing seems like it almost shoots *better* like that....?

As always Fred, your input is high value as is Darkker's. That phenomena to me would indicate the possibility that the spring design/metallurgy/heat treat was less than ideal. Every time I rebuild a bolt I clean it thoroughly, inspect it and re lubricate prior to reassembly. I am curious if this is what is really making the difference on the mentioned actions. One would need a spring compression test unit to know for certain I assume.

I've done a little spring design. I'd bet the springs are designed for millions of cycles. If there are issues with the springs itself, its probably like Robinhood and Fred said, metallurgy, heat treat, or something else firing pin related.

Anytime I ever experienced an igniton issue with a Panda, it was always trigger related, if someone hadn't changed out the spring with a "high performance" version.