Hello,
I drug out a 270 WSM rifle I’ve had for a few years but never shot it in AWHILE!

This is a sporter barrel I believe I bought from a member here on this forum, and set it up in an action I had laying around.


I replaced the bolt face with one that measured .5350 and set the headspace with a set of PTG GO/NOGO gauges marked 270/300 WSM.


The last time I shot this rifle I did not put in my notes I had any problems, But this time when I processed the fired-from-this-rifle brass (FL sized, trimmed to 2.090)
I tried a few pieces of brass before I loaded any of them to see how they chambered and the bolt closed about 95% and then was real hard to close and just as hard to open the bolt.


I decided to anneal all the brass and start over processing the brass. The same results! And on the rim of the head of the brass were a couple of small nicks in the brass.

I got my GO-NOGO gauges out and checked the headspace and it was fine…. Easy to close on the GO gauge and the bolt stopped at about the 3 o’clock position on the NO-GO.


I called myself scrubbing the chamber/barrel real well in case there were any buildup before I put it away months ago as well as this time.



Any ideas here what might be going on here?

Thanks for looking!