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Hi all.

I acquired an unfired Tikka M695 rifle in .270 when my father passed. He had obtained the rifle as a raffle prize from one of the clubs he belonged to, but whether it was South Mountain Rod & Gun club, the BRS Sportsman's Club, or the local American Legion post he couldn't remember.

Anyhow, he had this rifle for some years in his gun cabinet and never fired it. After it came to me it continued to be stored indoors in a gun cabinet, right up until I asked my son to see if he could put it on paper for me last week.

He brought a full box of ammo back to me, explaining that the rifle wouldn't bust a primer... wouldn't even touch a primer. That's when I remember my dad (in the last months of his life) telling me that for whatever reason this rifle had been displayed at the club with the firing pin out of it, the firing pin was still out of it, and said pin was in his dresser drawer. Therefore as of yesterday I was assuming that this firing pin was gone forever in the mess that has been my father's estate.

So. After I got over the ensuing panic, I took the rifle back into my shop and that's where I discovered that the firing pin was, in fact, still in the rifle. I could cycle the bolt, drop the trigger with a click and see the cocking indicator on the back of the bolt move, indicating that the spring had sprung and the pin had fallen more or less as it should.

I put a live primer in an empty .270 cartridge, chambered it, and dropped the trigger.

[click]

I opened up the bolt... the primer had not the least little indentation. No mark at all.

That led me to believe that my dad had probably thought the firing pin was missing because of just this behavior. Be that as it may, I watched a couple YouTube videos quick and learned how to disassemble that bolt. Turns out the M695s and the T3s are no different from each other.

As soon as I got the firing pin assembly out of it, I saw the culprit... rust. Rough rust in patches over the shank of the firing pin, and more on the inside of the bolt body. Evidently some combination of rust and debris was in the front end of the bolt body and preventing the firing pin from dropping all the way home.

I'm able to get the firing pin cleaned up. I'm able to clean up the bulk of the bolt body too. But what do I do about the rust in the little funnel-shaped hole in the back of the bolt face, where it's nigh-impossible to get to?

Any ideas you might have would be most welcome.

-AaronB

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What material? My first inclination would be a pint glass of white vinegar and come back in a week. (Checking it frequently so's nothing happens when you aren't looking.) If that doesn't loosen things up, I would try getting any sort of rod and Scotch Brite down in there to scrub a little. Make sure you have a plan to get the SB out afterwards. I should think either/or or both should return function.

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Good steel, but not stainless.

I had considered naval jelly also... not sure what that would do for me, if anything.

-AaronB

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As it turns out, the firing pin isn't dropping all the way because it's getting hung up on the sear... which isn't dropping far enough. When I pull the trigger it rotates down and away, but then it stops and the striker hangs on it. It's preventing the last millimeter of travel.

Which is starting to look like a gunsmith problem.

-AaronB

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...it was the Bubba.

Previously I thought I had narrowed this rifle's issue down to the trigger sear. Before I dropped $200 on the Timney replacement unit, however, I decided to do a little diagnostic. The firing pin wasn't dropping all the way, and the visual tell-tale was the cocking indicator, which still left a little bit of its red dot exposed.

[image]

The diagnostic was, I would leave the bolt in the action but remove the trigger assembly, and see if the firing pin would drop all the way. So I tried that, and... nothing changed. The view from the underside of the action confirmed that the bolt was almost closed, but not quite.

[image]

A close look at the bolt handle confirmed it. This is as far closed as it would go.

[image]

So my next step was to check in the bolt lug recesses in the receiver, looking for debris. I sprayed it out with brake cleaner... no dice. Since I was running out of possibilities for the problem, I finally narrowed it down to this:

[image]

The kind person who installed the 2-piece Weaver scope mounts for this rifle put the rearmost hole on the front mount all the way through, to make room for the length of the rear machine screw holding that mount on. The tip of that screw was sticking down into the upper bolt lug recess, stopping the lug from turning all the way home, and so preventing the bolt from being fully in battery.

Well, one good Bubba deserves another, so with a pair of pliers and my bench grinder I took about 20 percent of the length of that screw off the tip, and reassembled it. At last success; I was able to successfully pop a primer in a chambered empty case.

Now maybe I can get this rifle zeroed, which was how this business all got started.

-AaronB

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.

--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

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...I feel like it was kinda obvious, once I had looked at it long enough.

-Aaron

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:-D

--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

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of when I swapped the bolt on my Swedish Mauser for a bent bolt. A well known gun guy and yours truly couldn't figure out why that rifle no longer functioned... until we eventually figured out that the stock needed relieved to allow the bolt to fully close. Talk about obvious! Finding a hole through the receiver into the locking lug recess isn't nearly so visible as the need to relieve a bolt cut in the stock. As JimT says - "Good catch!"

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***

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The Weaver base screws are usually overlong. It is also recommended to install the bases with the screws loose, then tighten/loosen them one at a time to ensure the base is secure when torqued and not the screw bottoming in a blind hole. Might want to check that as well if you already haven't.

Sometimes the easiest issues (if you miss them on the first pass) are the hardest to sort out.

Related information. I have what was known back when as a 'screw gizzie' - just two pieces of spring stock riveted together with a hole in one side for the screw threads to pass though. The other spring captures the head of the screw while you touch the threaded end to a grinder in order to shorten it. This device was ensconced in a special place and now I can't find it. If it is eventually found, it will be ensconced in an extra extra special place so that it will not be lost a second time...

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Former boss of mine had a Remington pump .30-06 that he decided to install a scope on prior to deer season. On opening day he was in his stand and a buck came along. He attempted to chamber a round and discovered that the bolt would not move. Seems he had run one or more of the mount screws all the way through the top of the receiver and jammed the bolt tight.

It never occurred to him to check the function of his rifle before going hunting, and obviously not to zero the scope he had installed. This was not unusual behavior for this particular fellow.

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To quote O Brother Where Art Thou:

"That don't make no sense!!!"

-AaronB

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There is no way he could have, since he could not fire a shot or even put a round in the chamber. Guess he figured as long as the scope was pointed in the same general direction as the barrel that was good to go. As I said, this was not unusual behavior for this fellow. He was a great guy to work for but "not the sharpest knife in the drawer".

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Of course there's no way he zeroed the scope. I'm just astonished at the bigger-picture issue, which to me is that it never occurred to him to even try!

-AaronB

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Aaron, have you ever seen a "day before opener sighting in day"? In Colorado I had the privilege of meeting up with Dalton Carr at the local range the day before rifle season opened. It was an eye opener for sure, and explains why I'm not too keen on public land hunting. And these are the folk that at least make an effort to sight in! I can well imagine the thought process of folks who think that hunting is easy. Just buy a scoped rifle at the store and "it comes to you ready to go". Just shove some ammo in and put the crosshairs on the kill zone of the critter and it's meat in the freezer! And then there's the folks who figure that they've got to have the biggest loudenboomer cartridge to take game with - but can't keep two shots (if any) on the same zip code, much less near the bullseye. I saw one chubby guy with an '06 trying to get his rifle on paper. Complaining about the recoil each shot, not accomplishing anything near a group, to say the least. At another range on a different day I saw a guy with a 340 Weatherby - if I recall correctly. It was a Weatherby "elk rifle" anyway. He couldn't hit the paper, much less group his shots. Afraid of the recoil. I put enough rounds on paper to show him that the rifle was sighted in (for MY eyes, anyway) and he was ready to go. The percentage of people in the general public who do not understand the basics of how rifles, ammo, scopes and shooting work is much higher than it should be in what used to be "a nation of riflemen".

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I worked at Walmart and was at the sporting goods counter for a bit. I can’t guess how many ‘package rifles/shotguns’ we’d sell in the day or two before deer season. I was right on. Mississippi River and had customers from IL (shotgun) and MO (rifle). They would buy a gun with a factory mounted scope (cheap Bushnell from memory) and a box of ammo or slugs. You could tell that they were headed right to public land to scare something up and blast away at it. The worst part was these jerks would always come back the next week or so with pictures of the great deer they’d shot and here I am working up loads, practicing all summer and come deer season, wouldn’t see anything other than squirrels!

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https://facebook.com/M2bKydex/

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