Quote Originally Posted by fgw_in_fla View Post
That looks alot like one of my bolt head / faces when it blew a primer out the wrong way & burned the bolt face with a permanant impression of the primer. I had bought a bag of Win brass & I believe it was defective or the primer pocket was too wide in diameter. It took quite a while to clean the soot out of the bolt & polish the bolt face to get the pitting out of it. It never did clean up 100%. The dark discoloration can be cleaned up with a little Hoppe's No. 9, a Q-Tip, a little steel wool & some elbow grease. Wrap a small piece of steel wool around the Q-tip cotton, dip it in the Hoppe's and polish it up nicely. The part that's leaving an impression in primers is pretty bad. The only remedy I can think of for that is to replace the bolt head. They cost around 25 bucks or so and pretty easy to swap out. If you do a swap out there's no need to do the other stuff.
I really don't think Savage will be of any help since that looks like a bad primer or loose brass let a primer leak or something case head / primer related. You'd be better off to buy a new bolt head & swap it out yourself.
You can try cleaning it up & polishing it but I think it's too far gone for that based on your photos.
Do you think there's any reason to believe/not believe the gun might not be chambering properly? I would be expecting some funky misfire issues if they were primer related alone. I don't know if it ever happens in the bolt action world, but it's not too hard to blow up an AR receiver if it fires out of battery.