The first 1-5 dry fires it cocks smoothly with normal effort compared to other savages. By the 10th dry fire the bolt is noticeably harder to open. At 15 dry fires the bolt is very hard to open and after 18 dry fires I needed a mallet to hammer open the bolt. In between dry fires I opened and closed the bolt with normal effort.



Disassembling/reassembling the bolt resets the process. Uncocking, loosening/retightening the BAS and then recocking resumes with difficult cocking.


Now here’s where it gets weird…


In an effort to determine which part of the bolt was causing the issue, I swapped out the bolt body, firing pin assembly, cocking piece pin and cocking piece sleeve on an older savage 111 and did the same dry firing process with the same results. After each failure I added an original 111 part back into the bolt until all parts were added back. Surely with all the “good” parts back in the bolt it will work as it did before the test right? Nope, now the 111 has the same issue of progressively difficult cocking until the bolt is disassembled/reassembled.



I have a loose Savage 10 action that I dry fired 25+ times consecutively without issue just to keep my sanity.