• Watch Out for Scammers!

    We've now added a color code for all accounts. Orange accounts are new members, Blue are full members, and Green are Supporters. If you get a message about a sale from an orange account, make sure you pay attention before sending any money!

Mausingfield feed issues

Horns8491

Full Member
Full Member
Minuteman
Apr 24, 2017
251
22
Im not happy with the way my M5 feeds. The problem is that the rounds don't snap up into the claw extractor without an excessive force being applied to the bolt. The only way to get a round to feed into the chamber is to run the bolt at 100 mph. I do run it hard most of the time, but it's definitely not smooth.

In the attached video, you can see the round pop out of the magazine as the bolt moves forward. I was hoping that it would pop all the way into the claw extractor, but you can see that the round is still held below the bolt face, and it is not controlled by the extractor. I then push the bolt forward and it hits a hard stop where the round is jammed with a sharp upwards pointing angle. In the video, when the bolt stops moving forward, it's because it won't go any farther. I suppose I might be able to jam it home at that point but not without putting way more force on it than I want.

As anyone else having this issue? Is there a way to adjust the claw extractor to make it easier for the round to pop onto the bolt face?

I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice.
 
Chad from LRI has posted on this before. You have to "tune" the claw extractor so the shell pressure is such that it will feed properly. Here is a blurb from his FB page on it:

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=894369813991111&id=405264722901625

The gist...

"Tuning a non rotating claw extractor is a necessary skill set for any gunsmith that works with CRF type actions. It is not a difficult thing to do, but it IS a VERY easy thing to screw up. If you do mess it up, the extractor is junk. You buy another and start over. Mausingfield extractors are not cheap. They are machined from billet chromoly and the "bend" in the extractor is machined into the part. It's made that way, there's no worker bee kinking these things on a press.

I bring this up only to caution those who may elect to buy one and have it installed by a shop not known for CRF type work. Make sure you verify this FIRST.

Failure to do so will result in a rifle that does not feed worth a darn. It'll stick the bolt about 2/3rds the way along the feeding cycle. The immediate response for most is to go blazing away with a dremel tool on the loading ramp or to start molesting the feed lips on the magazine. This is WRONG. Your solving the wrong problem and making a potentially very expensive mess. All that needs to be done is a little careful fitting on a portion of the extractor claw. If you go too far though, you kill the shell pressure and the gun won't extract reliably. It'll drop the fired case during extraction and this is just as bad. (imagine being charged by a dangerous game animal and the gun locks up during a followup shot. -you just became lunch. . .)"
 
Thanks Aaron. I'll check out the video. Chad built this rifle. I hope I don't have to send it back for service but maybe that's the answer. If I do end up messing with it, I'm going to strip the cerakote and get it DLCd. This shoots 1/4 moa and if I could just get it to feed smoothly it would be nirvana
 
Thanks Aaron. I'll check out the video. Chad built this rifle. I hope I don't have to send it back for service but maybe that's the answer. If I do end up messing with it, I'm going to strip the cerakote and get it DLCd. This shoots 1/4 moa and if I could just get it to feed smoothly it would be nirvana

Give Chad a call and he can walk you through it. It may just require small amount of filing/rounding out the clamshell of the claw extractor.
 
Perhaps before you post next time give the guy who built the gun a chance to diagnose and fix it before complaining. Guys like chad are the top dogs in the industry and if all they see is people complaining ( which 90% of the time is user error or ignorance) they will stop coming here and giving advice and help for free to the world. In the time you made your video and wrote your post you could have called LRI and gotten a solution in half the time.
 
Perhaps before you post next time give the guy who built the gun a chance to diagnose and fix it before complaining. Guys like chad are the top dogs in the industry and if all they see is people complaining ( which 90% of the time is user error or ignorance) they will stop coming here and giving advice and help for free to the world. In the time you made your video and wrote your post you could have called LRI and gotten a solution in half the time.

You didn't happen to go by the name of Cobracutter on the "old site" did you?
 
A few things.

1) You want the extractor face to be more or less a straight line down from the 9 o'clock position as you face it.
2) You want to chamfer the bottom edge so that the forward bottom edge of the extractor doesn't interfere with the front edge of the rim cut-out on the case (see pic below)
m5contention_zps2vdrotie.jpg


3) You want the extractor to have enough meat on it to apply tension to the case and hold it to the bolt face, but not so much that a case can't pop up onto the bolt face.

m5beforeafter3d_zps99sladac.jpg


beforeafter_zpsebw0zt0x.jpg



If there is too much material on the extractor in the wrong places, you'll get the jam in the video above where the bolt goes forward about 3/4 the way then everything halts and the case wants to nose-up and jam unless you HAMMER it home.

I did the necessary modification in about 45 minutes with ultra-mild dremel abrasive wheels. It isn't a ton of material that needs to be removed, just a little in the right spot.
 
Another thing to look at here is the magazine(s) being used. A lot of times the AI magazines will benefit from altering the feed lip geometry a bit. Shortening then seems to help. The idea being is to let go of the cartridge body sooner in the stroke so than the entry angle into the breech (at the point where the case is being captured by the extractor) is reduced a bit. I call it "advancing the timing" here in the shop. Shorter, porky cases like a BR, Dasher, etc often benefit from this the most as the radical angle they have into the breech can make them a little more fussy.

As always, we're here to help. I get gassed up daily/hourly with email, texts, PM's here on the Hide, FB messenger, FB posts, FB PM's, phone calls, typed letters (yeah, no kidding), and walk ins.

I've done the math, our phone traffic alone pencils out to just over 16 hours per month, per employee. We've joked about closing the shop and just opening a call center. :)

I make myself as available as I can to our clients. When you run the kind of work volume that we have, being instantly available isn't always possible.

If you continue to have problems, please give us a shout.

C.
 
Ledzep,

just wanted to say that in the thousands of pages of of daily bullshit we get here, that post is on point and what the site used to be all about.

Thank you.

Chris
 
  • Like
Reactions: AzraelsShadow