Hi all,

I've been doing research for nearly two years on getting a budget rifle for mid-range target shooting, and settled on Savage early on. I just found this board this week, but I've already been going through to get myself up to speed on the Savage system and what people are doing to build and maintain their rifles.

I just took the step this week and picked up a 10T-SR in 6.5mm Creedmoor from Bass Pro Shop, and just got it out to the range today.

As far as shooting it goes, it was a great experience. I shot semi-competitively in the army and tried out for the AMU, so I've got a little experience with the M24 in 7.62 and .300 Win Mag. The recoil and overall feel of the 10T was a pleasant surprise after that.

Once I got the scope dialed in and had some breaks in the wind, and after a dozen rounds knocking the dust off my skills, I was making dime-sized groups at 100m from the bench.

That said, there are a few operational issues I ran into which I was hoping for some advice on next steps. I called Savage, but they're on break this week and nobody is answering the phones.

First, I'm getting a high number of failures to eject. The casing clears the chamber, but the bolt just loses its grip while pulling through the barrel nut area. The casing ends up "dropped" on top of the magazine, and a quick twist dumps the case out the side of the ejection port.

I saw a lot of threads about failing ejectors, but they seem to be a different set of failure conditions than I'm seeing, and I'm hoping this is just a lubrication or break in issue.

Second, the bolt release is very finicky. When I first got the gun, I believe it had the action screws improperly torqued, as I was having issues engaging the safety, the trigger would sometimes not pull and require a cycle of the bolt, and the magazine wasn't quite seating well. I took it down, lubricated according to the manual specs, and reassembled with the incremental tightening to get the action bedded, and it seemed to function much more smoothly.

Today, at the range, the bolt release "stuck", where the bottom bolt release button was just floating back and forth, and it seemed like the sear/bolt stop were stuck in the full rear position. I was unable to easily insert the bolt to the action, and almost left early because I didn't want to break a critical fire control part out of impatience. But a rap on the side of the stock seemed to unstick it, and the bolt slid right in.

After shooting, I again had difficulty getting the bolt to release, and it seemed like pulling the trigger and pressing the bolt release were not contacting the sear, and that it was jammed again. It eventually popped free, but I'm concerned that this will continue to be an issue.

Could this be an issue of stock fittment, a lubrication issue, or could I have possibly overtorqued or otherwise mucked up the reinstall of the action to the stock and caused this? Or should I bring it to Savage?

I actually live about 40 minutes from the Savage factory, so hopefully it wouldn't be too hard to get them to take a look, but I figured I'd ask here first and hope that it's something simple I can address.

Thanks for any advice you can provide,

-Jared