Roger Ferrell is a gunsmith in Fatetteville, Georgia who has done quite a bit of work for JudgeB and Mbogo375. JudgeG told me Roger talks directly with God and walks on water to get to his shop every day, which is a pretty strong recommendation for a gunsmith.

I must now agree totally with the esteemed jurist from St. Simons, GA; Roger is the greatest!

You see, Roger took my 404 (you know, the one that has been the subject of several thousand words on this forum over the course of the last three years) and vowed not to return it until he found out what was wrong with it. Well, he found out.

You see, all it was (as I reported last week) was the firing pin spring was weak. It was hard to run this down because protrusion was perfect. It just was not hitting the primer with enough force to explode it unless the round was held tightly against the bolt face. This is what led everybody, including me and several other gunsmiths, to think the problem was headspace. After casting the chamber, Roger said no way. Everything measured perfectly to CIP standard.

I took the gun to the range Saturday and fired 40 rounds, all minimumly headspaced, with the new spring in place. The first round in the rifle was one that had three indentures in the primer from three previous failed attempts to fire it. Imagine my joy when it went BOOM! In fact, all 40 rounds went BOOM, and to top it off, most three shot groups measured under an inch! (well withing the minute-of-buffalo goal I had established)

I'm still having one small feeding problem with A-Square solids (nothing else) from the left side, but I understand that this is not unusual for this particular bullet. We're going to fix that then we're off to Africa for the "real" test.

I'm so happy!!!!!!!

Hooray! A good educational post. It now seems so obvious. Weak indentation of primer attributed to excess headspace, but no, the simplest, most obvious cause was glossed over. Must have been excruciatingly frustrating. RIP.

Yep, Roger is the best. He's the only one allowed to touch my guns.

Glad you got the 404 situation resolved!

Pertinax

What a great relief! (And another feather in Roger's cap.)

Congratulations, and thanks for sending along the good word on a fine Smith.

GAHunter,

Glad to see you got it working.

Roger gets a kudo for thinking inside the bolt.

jim

I thought you said the rounds would not fire on recocking? No offense but this is pretty rudimentary stuff.

I'm confused, Rodgunbuilder. What do you mean by "recocking". When a round wouldn't fire, it wouldn't fire no matter how many times you recocked, which led us to believe headspace was the culprit.

GAHunter,

It is a rare thing to find a truely gifted gunsmith. There are far to many "smiths" out there, that seem to have only found a board and some paint, on which to put, Gunsmith.

Glad its working, now go shoot something

Hog Killer

Roger got the scope base holes on my VZ-24 in .35 Whelen(initial work by someone else) lined up straight for me so I could actually zero it without running the Leupold out of adjustment.

He also tolerated my endless questions and rambling mixed with a little drooling over other projects he had in his shop at the time..

I guess the next question would be where in Georgia is Fatetteville. Kinda important since I am in Florida.

That would be Fayetteville!!

Slightly South of Atlanta off of I-85.

No offense, but you mean to say that you had a "weak" firing pin spring and no matter how many times you recocked the piece and pulled the trigger that the gun would not go off? As I remember you also stated that with different ammo you had nearly 100% reliability. That will be the first time I've ever seen a gun with a "weak" firing pin strike that would not fire the cartridge on a second or third try, assuming the firing pin strike occured at all. The priming material is usually sensitized after the first strike and will almost always go off with even a weak second strike. In any event glad your problem is solved!-Rob

Yes, I did have ammo that would fire 100 percent of the time. This was ammo that I expanded the neck on and sized back down to where the bolt would just barely close. Tight would be an understatement.

A piece of brass treated this way always fired, and when reloaded by sizing the case just enough to hold the bullet, would give me 100 percent ignition on the second go-round. But that was it! After that first reloading, it was just as like as not to misfire upon further loadings, unless you expanded the neck again.

Roger surmizes that the false shoulder I was creating caused enough back pressure to let the pin strike solidly enough to fire the primer. Apparently the false shoulder was not taken completly out after one firing (the 404 is not the highest pressure round on the block), because it would fire upon being neck sized and reloaded (you still had positive pressure when turning down the bolt). The third time you tried to load it without blowing out the neck, however, it had no positive pressure when the bolt was turned down and was just as likely to misfire as not.

You may recall I posted the question (still thinking it was all headspace), if anyone had had their brass actually shrink upon successive firings? I thought my brass was shrinking and that was causing excessive headspace. I never would have thought that the shoulder I was creating would last through being fired.

One of the things Roger found was the locking lugs on the rifle were badly burred from locking down on ammo that was way tighter than the rifle was intended to utilize. But it was the only way it would fire reliably. It simply needed to be held immobile against the bolt face to ignite.

Utilizing this method of creating brass, I took the rifle to Namibia and took two mountain zebra and an eland. But I knew in my heart that this was not the way things were supposed to work.

Now, thanks to Roger, I don't have to worry about it.

GAHUNTER I am certainly glade that all your past problems with your 404 are behind you.

Now, it's time to come clean about who built this rifle. This was asked a bunch of times when I first got it and was having problems. I did not want to tell then because I was not 100 percent sure that he screwed up -- and as it turns out, he did not mis-ream the barrel as we suspected.

But what he was guilty of was sending me back a rifle that he knew was not working. I had sent him a box of RWS factory ammo, and most of it misfired when he tested the rifle. This led him to call me and tell me that I had sent him ammo that was headspaced too short. When I got the rifle and the factory ammo would not fire AND my handloads would not fire, he said it was obvious that my dies were wrong and that I needed to buy properly sized ammo. This is what led me on the path to believing that the whole problem was in headspacing -- especially when I found out that excessively tight ammo fired consistantly.

In fairness, Roger does not believe the builder caused the spring problem (which besides being short, was badly crimped). There was just no reason for him to have been inside the bolt. I bought the basic rifle used and never fired it when it was a .375, so it could have been a pre-existing condition.

But Hamilton Bowen of Bowen Classic Arms should never have sent me back a rifle that he knew was not working after he built it.

Am I wrong in thinking this?

GAHunter,

I don't recall all the details of the incident and I would say it depended just how much did Hamilton Bowen do to try to resolve the situation and also what exactly did you pay for? I mean if you paid for say just a rebarrel, maybe it could be argued that a faulty firing pin spring was not his business????

Still, a faulty firing pin/spring is pretty basic stuff and I would have thought a competant gunsmith would have picked it up fairly quicky before assuming more exotic problems...

Getting back to the fault, it sounds to me as if the firing pin simply was not travelling far enough forward to strike the primer properly...Maybe the spring was a little short as well as on the weak side...perhaps it had be replaced in the past with the wrong spring?

Regards,

Pete

quote:

Originally posted by GAHUNTER:
But what he was guilty of was sending me back a rifle that he knew was not working. I had sent him a box of RWS factory ammo, and most of it misfired when he tested the rifle. This led him to call me and tell me that I had sent him ammo that was headspaced too short. When I got the rifle and the factory ammo would not fire AND my handloads would not fire, he said it was obvious that my dies were wrong and that I needed to buy properly sized ammo. This is what led me on the path to believing that the whole problem was in headspacing -- especially when I found out that excessively tight ammo fired consistantly.

In fairness, Roger does not believe the builder caused the spring problem (which besides being short, was badly crimped). There was just no reason for him to have been inside the bolt. I bought the basic rifle used and never fired it when it was a .375, so it could have been a pre-existing condition.

But Hamilton Bowen of Bowen Classic Arms should never have sent me back a rifle that he knew was not working after he built it.

Am I wrong in thinking this?

GAHUNTER,
What was Bowen supposed to do for you, with regards to this rifle? I looked through your previous posts, but could not find the details.
I'm just wondering how, if both factory ammunition and handloads didn't fire consistently, he could just blow it off. Granted, the .404J suffers from a multiplicity of 'standards', but how much work would it have been to fireform cases to the chamber, and load properly headspaced ammunition?

I know his work doesn't come cheaply...

George

There was no stipulation as to what was to happen when I sent him the rifle. I simply expected to get back a WORKING 404 Jeffery. For this I paid $1,700 dollars and I supplied the base rifle, at a cost of $950 plus all shipping.

What I got back was a beautiful work or art. This I have to hand to Hamilton; he knows how to make a rifle look good! Unfortunately, he kept insisting that the problem in the mechanics of the gun was ammo -- and I bought it for a couple of years (in more ways than one).

Again, in fairness, I did not send the rifle back to him. We corresponded a lot via email and phone, and once I found out that tight ammo would fire, he wrote it off as a "fixed" problem. What I had no way of knowing was how much damage I was doing to the rifle my forcing oversized ammo into the chamber.

One of the bad things that came from this was I did a little bad-mouthing CH4D, since it is their dies that I am using. Since Hamilton told me the ammo I was shooting was bad, then the problem just HAD to be with the dies. What a conincidence, huh -- bad RWS factory ammo AND bad sizing dies. Turns out my dies are PERFECT!

I'm as guilty as anybody in this. I should have sent him back the rifle and insisted that it not be returned until it fired every time. It is a testament to my ignorance that I took him at face value and figured that I was doing something wrong in making ammo (even though I load for eight other calibers and have never had an ammo problem).

Well, don't beat yourself up too badly. It was aggravating, but at least the problem is solved.

George

Glad to here you got is sorted out!

I guess it comes down to having pistol smiths work on pistols, and rifle smiths work on rifles. I'd even subdevide rifle smiths into BR smiths, general rifle smiths, and big bore smiths. Nobody is an expert at everything.

Paul,

You are spot one with that one!

BTW, Bowen has announced that they will no longer do any rifle conversion work due to the retirement of their re-boing source and the time involved in the conversions.

They are going back to pistols only, right where they need to be, IMHO.