This is a double post from gunsmithing forum but I need some info.I am not a lever gun expert. I inherited this one and wanted to have it tuned up and rechambered. I the Marlin 336 rechambered to .30-30 Improved, an action job done, and the trigger was supposed to be cleaned up to offer as light and crisp a break as possible with a requested weight of no more than 4-4.5lbs. The gun was also re-blued because it has quite a bit of surface rust and some light pitting on the receiver from where it had not been maintained before I go t it. It has taken over a year to get this thing back and I just opened it up and took a look at it.

It appears that the chamber was cut after the metal was re-blued, chamfered after bluing for certain, and there is light rust in the chamber and the top of the barrel "extension" for lack of better words. It appears to have rust leaching from the threads also.



I have cleaned as much of it as possible from the action as possible but have concerns about long term serviceability.

It feeds ok as far as I can tell given the two cast lead dummies he provided and I just sized and loaded the empty case he sent with a Hornady FTX and it seems to feed fine as well. The cases come out scratched to hell though. It doesn't want to eject empty cases unless I run the gun hard. Two questions about these cases:



1. In the top picture of the cases, why does the groove above the rim disappear when I resize the cases? Is the brass thin and soft or is the chamber oversized and is the cases being over-worked at the web?

2. What causes these dents just below the shoulder? They were on every case he sent.

The trigger is inconsistent. It will break with no creep about 60% of the time and about 40% of the time it has somewhere between a little and lot of creep. I primarily shoot bolt action and AR guns with good triggers. What is a realistic expectation for a lever gun trigger?

I want to gather some information here before I go back to the smith with my complaints.

Tuning a 336 trigger is a simple thing.It is matter of changing the angle of the sear and taking stress off the trigger spring by re bending it.It should break crisp at about the same weight every time.Or a Wild West Trigger can be installed and you get a crisp trigger with no Marlin flop.You do not even need to remove the barrel to make it an AI.You just need to be careful and only take 1/4 to1/2 turns and backing off to clean out.Itlooks like a rush job were the reamer was just cranked in and out.Something must be hitting on ejection to cause that dent.I do not have the gun in my hands to see what.I would just be neck sizing now because you want to be head spacing on the shoulder.Who did the work???

1. He was supposed to work the trigger over but my invoice doesn't say that. It accounts for action work.

2. The rifle had to be disassembled because the barrel received a polish blue and the receiver a semi-gloss. The barrel was to be crowned and chambered on a lathe.

3. It makes me think the barrel may never have been pulled, the chamber hand cut, and the crown cut with some sort of piloted tool. Then I feel like it may have been blued while the barrel was on and the rust is bluing salts leeching out.

4. I will FL size just like I do for my match AR rifles with just a .002-.003" bump at the shoulder.

Id find myself another gunsmith, you got yourself in a terrible mess.

That was terribly helpful. Can you give any insight into what you think is causing any of the issues I have noted so that I can make the best argument when I get hold of the gun. He shipped me my gun without me paying for it so right now I'm not in quite the mess you think but I do have a mess to fix.

I haven't heard back from the smith but he shipped me the gun without charging me for it, just sent an invoice. Does anyone have a recommendation for a fix for any of the listed isses? Will polishing the chamber get rid of the longitudinal scratches on the case?

I went and shot the rifle today to see if I could replicate the scratches and dents. Cases do come out scratched but not dented. I think the dents below the shoulder may come from feeding them through the gun but cannot say for sure until I load some up and go try it again.

Are the scratches from the loading gate? Very often the edge of the loading gate is sharp and scratches the case pushing them in. Try single loading to the chamber to see if the case comes out scratched. If it still does you have a burr around the chamber.
Easy fix for the action is a pioneer gunworks spring kit to lighten hammer cocking on levering and the plunger pin in the kit that makes the lever latch easier. A wild west happy trigger will fix the trigger pull to a crisp smooth 3 pounds or so. They are about $100. but install literally in less time than I could tell you how to do it. You can do all this work without the new parts, but if you are not a confident tinkerer. This is the easiest way. Marlins are very easy to work on.

If you have a Dremel tool with a flexible drive shaft you could lightly polish the chamber with a felt wheel that would fit in the chamber and some jewelers rouge,You can only do it lightly.There are maybe some burrs in the chamber from a dull reamer.

The reamer is a new PT&G because he had to order it for this gun. The chamber has a light chamfer (the bright ring that isn't blued)but doesn't have what I would call a bevel. I tried to get a picture to show the rough/rusted chamber and the chamfer:



I don't think the scratches are from the loading gate because they are around the entire circumference of the case. The look similar to scratches I have seen on guns that have rusty chambers from poorly dehumidified arms rooms. I have a tool I can polish the chamber with but that is what I paid him (not yet tho) for. This is a fired round with a .30-30 Win that got cycled through the mag, into the chamber and ejected. The parent case has a scratch on one side from cycling and does not resemble the fired case scratches.


I considered doing a Wild West trigger but he said he could clean the trigger up so I let him; I should have bought the Wild West trigger.

I guess what I'm looking for is an indication of whether y'all think this can be remedied with set back, re-chamber,and another go at the trigger. Or does this need to go to another smith to fix it?

scratches all the way around would not be the loading gate. I would probably let a pro work on it because of the chamber issue.

7mmfreak,

Yes, I think the scratches can be remedied by polishing the chamber to no more than 320 grit.

For the brass flow removing the groove above the rim during re-sizing: did you try re-sizing with a nickel between the die and the shell-holder to set die height and work down until you could just chamber? AI shoulder angle is supposed to prevent the case lengthening IIRC, so you might not want to bump the shoulder back much. Might fix it.

Dents look like they're from hitting the gate during extraction/ejection. Might be just because the dummy rounds are un-naturally front-heavy.

HTH,
Steve

That dummy has no shoulder set back but I sized the rest with .002" setback.

All's well that ends well they say. The gun shoots fine and cycles fine although there is some rust I can't quite get out and the trigger is a creey 5#. I finished fitting up the new Ballard style stock (I still need to cut it to length and fit a recoil pad and apply the finish) for it and took it to the range after installing the Williams TK receiver sight:


I shot a few shots off-hand at 25m to get it on paper then went to the bench at 100yds. The front sight is too short so with the receiver sight just barely clearing the receiver I am hitting about 8" above POA. It also has a bead which I don't like; I have never been able to get a sight picture that allowed for the hold I like. I prefer a blade and that is what I will replace it with since I prefer a 6 o'clock hold. Center holds work best for me with a bead front. Using a center hold I a five shot group, made a sight adjustment and figured out I needed a taller front sight. You can see them above the paper:


I switched to a 6 o'clock hold and shot three more (same three as on the square target but I had the reduced 600yds target pasted over it):

Wow, looks like it shoots great! Glad everything worked out.

Nothing wrong with the way it shoots!

I like your butt stock.Where did you purchase it?OB

quote:

Originally posted by OLBIKER:
I like your butt stock.Where did you purchase it?OB

It's a TreeBone 90% profile and inlet. It was a little undersized so there is proud metal on the lower tang. I built it up with brown Pro-Bed2000 so there is room for improvement and once I get it final fitted I will have the slave duplicated and try one more time so it doesn't look like a blemishes stock.

After doing the math I found there was no sight of the correct height to get me where I needed to be for proper zero while keeping the receiver sight sitting low. I ordered a Skinner Partridge that was .500" tall and will file it down to correct height once I get load development done with this rifle. I had to take .013 off the dovetail with a triangular file to get it to fit:


Old sight punched out with Skinner punch (well made if you need a sight punch that is brass):


My range is shut down for maintenance today so I hope to get a chance to shoot it tomorrow or this weekend because I will be gone for another week starting Monday.

I went out to work down the sight and fire-form another 50 rounds for the gun. I still have another 15 to fire-form because I quit when a thunderstorm rolled in. Nothing as spectacular as last outing but I got the sight centered up. Top group is 2.2", center group is 1.8", and bottom group is 2.1":


I took it out to 300yds just for gigs. I marked off all the existing holes on the target backer with a sharpie marker. I shot two sighters and was about 2 minutes low so I dialed up and let five loose. From the round at 11 o'clock to the round at 7 o'clock is 13.5" but the three just left of center are 1.3". I would like to say it was the 6# trigger but since it is all elevation I'm guessing it was an error in my hold. I needed a little bigger target since this one just looked like a small dot on top of my post:

They blued the action and barrel together and that is why is leaking salts out of the threads..poor practice..

I'd send it back and get it fixed right. no since in that kind of shoddy work..the chamber or magazine is tearing up your brass and that sucks...It shoots great for a rifle of that class..but probably by accident..its poor workmanship for sure.

After fire-forming 100 Federal factory rounds I gave the bore a good cleaning. I removed a ton of carbon fouling but there was very little copper coming out the barrel. This is a 1953 gun with 4-groove rifling and it appears to be quite good.

I loaded 5 rounds each of BL-(C)2 at 37 to 39 grains in .5gn increments under a Hornady 150gn RN Interlock bullet with a Fed GM210M primer. This is the first five rounds out of the clean barel with 37gn of powder and measures 1.402" center to center:


The rest of the groups were about double that size so I loaded up another 25 rounds at 37gn for testing and probably a little hunting. I need to order a Wolf reduced power hammer spring because at 6-7# I go through at least two breathing cycles to break the trigger and it is starting to really irritate me. Half the time I end up glancing down at the hammer to see if it is actually cocked even though I know it is.

One thing I forgot to add in the event any of you ever try a .30-30 Improved (or any improved for that matter). Sizing sharp shouldered cases can be an issue and with a sizing die you can can give the shoulder a slight bulge that prevents chambering. I figured that out when I started with the .280 Improved when I was about 18. So, I just barely bump them and measure shoulder junction diameter as I make each die adjustment. The issue that was new for me was collapsing shoulders when seating bullets. The .30-30 brass is very thin and when I was setting up my dies and making a dummy or three I started collapsing shoulders which caused the shoulder/body junction to bulge up to .025" or so.

If you ever run into this get either a Lyman M die or Lee Expander and just bell about 1/16" of the neck. You will likely only get .001" of constriction/tension after you do this so you will need some sort of crimp die. I am using a Lee Factory Crimp to just barely touch the portion of the neck that got expanded by the M die.

I gave the gunsmith section a read then took my trigger assembly apart. The sear retains its original angle so I'm not sure how much trigger work I actually got. I decided to bend the return spring before cutting the sear. That alone cut 25% off the weight and it feels much better. I'm going to hit the range this morning and see if it needs more work.

I have found that if one uses a file trim die for the original sizing change, then inside neck ream to take out that build up in the shoulder junction, then resize in your die, you won't lose any cases..I do this to make 25-35s from 30-30 and 32 special...just running them thru dies is trickey as Win. All 94 lever action brass is seriously thin and of poor quality and I was losing too many cases..Annealing is recommended with that stuff also..