Help!



I stripped the bolt on my A-Bolt II medallion. It was not very difficult to unscrew the shroud/firing pin assembly, clean out the bolt body and re-grease. It's not that much trouble getting the thing back together either. I'll post instructions separately. It's really not much harder to do than a M70 bolt.



My problem is this: I think I removed the firing pin assembly by turning it out 7 turns. When I put it back in, I found it will screw in 8 turns. The gun will function with the firing pin assembly turned in 6, 7, or 8 turns. It looks a little funny only screwed in 6 turns, as there is a big gap in front of the shroud.



I think I have a solution, but I need your help. (Yes, I blatantly stole that line from Dora the Explorer).



BTW, my rifle is 30-06 caliber.



Here is what I see with the rifle cocked, looking straight down at the striker indicator. 3 or 4 red lines depending on how far the firing pin assembly is screwed in. If I see 3 red lines, I can look at a forward angle and see the fourth, but not by looking straight down at it.



Could you cock your rifle and take a look at your striker indicator? How many lines do you see. I realize this is a dumb solution, since Browning might have used more than one type of striker indicator.



With the bolt closed, are the gaps on either side of the bolt handle about equal (gap between shroud and handle vs. gap between handle and receiver rear bridge)? If I screw in the firing pin assembly 8 turns, the gap between the shroud and bolt handle looks a little narrower than I remember.



In the future, I will measure these things and take digital pictures before I get started. For the nonce, HELP!



H. C.

Okay, pull out the bolt. On the underside of the striker is a hole about 0.220" in diameter. Running perpendicular is a tiny hole about 1/16" on one side and a little smaller on the other.



Chuck up a 1/4" bolt in your drill press. Turn it on, and file the 1/4" bolt down to about 0.220". You can easily check to see if it fits in the hole in your striker. Unchuck it and put it in the bottom of the striker. Turn the filed-down bolt until you see the root of the threads centered in the tiny 1/16" hole. This is the easiest spot to drill. Mark that spot. Centerpunch the pencil mark and drill a 1/16" hole through the filed-down 1/4" bolt.



BTW, perhaps "bolt" is a poor choice of words. At no point in these instructions should you be drilling or filing any part on your rifle. If you already have done this, I offer my sincere apologies. From this point forward, remember that I am referring to the filed-down $0.15 1/4" hardware store bolt. I would call it a screw (and that is technically correct), but I think a change in nomenclature at this point will only make matters worse. No part of your rifle needs to touch the jaws of a vise either.



Where was I?



Ah!. Put that drilled filed-down $0.15 1/4" hardware store bolt in your vise with the drilled end sticking up. You may find as I did that the drilled filed-down $0.15 1/4" hardware store bolt needs to be at one end of your vise jaws so you will have room to swing the rifle's bolt handle 360 degrees.



Stop!



Cock your rifle. Look at your striker indicator. How many little red lines do you see? Write it down. How big is the gap between the bolt shroud and bolt handle. Write this measurement down. Better yet, post this stuff here on this thread. Someone else might need it .



Place the rifle's bolt over the drilled filed-down $0.15 1/4" hardware store bolt so the drilled end of the drilled filed-down $0.15 1/4" hardware store bolt goes into the 0.220" hole in the bottom of the striker. Thread a straightened out paper clip through the 1/16" holes and bend it so it doesn't fall out. Now if you pull on the bolt body, you will compress the firing pin spring, and if you turn the bolt handle, you can unscrew the shroud/firing pin assembly from the bolt handle/bolt body assembly. Keep that firing pin spring compressed.



It takes about 7 turns to disassemble the 2 parts. If you have fired about 7000 rounds like I have, you will probably find the inside of the bolt body disappointingly clean, and you will wonder why you have undertaken this exercise. You might as well wipe everything down with solvent and re-grease it at this point.



Reassembly is the reverse of assembly. Keep that firing pin spring compressed. You can do this by hooking your finger around the drilled filed down $0.15 hardware store bolt and pushing forward on the bolt shroud of that expensive bolt that is an original part of your rifle.



H. C.

Henry:

This may sound like a stupid question. But tell me how often you take your bolt apart for cleaning. I have not clean the bolts on any of my three A-bolts. Two of them have over 1000 rounds fired.

Danny Boy

I just remebered I have my dad's A-Bolt II. With the rifle cocked, from directly above I see only 3 orange lines on the cocking indicator. I have to angle twords the rear of the rifle to see any of the 4th orange line. Also, the reloading calipers say there is aproximately .065 of an inch between the rear edge of the bolt and the front edge of the shroud, with the bolt in the closed position.

Hope this helps,
Kristofer

Dan,

This was the first time I've had it apart, after an estimated 7000 rounds. The manual says not to disassemble the rifle any further than some point (short of stripping the bolt). Stripping the bolt was a bit of a feel-good measure on my part. I had never had a malfunction due to a dirty bolt before. No failures to fire, and no lack of smooth operation. Now that I've found it's easy, I may go ahead and do it every couple of thousand rounds.

The project started like this. Various times, when I pulled the rifle out of the safe, I saw that the oil in the bore (Break Free CLP) had run down onto the breechface. I figured some of that oil was getting down in the firing pin hole, and the original grease might be getting washed off the bolt's internal parts. What I did was not very smart. Without knowing how to disassemble the bolt, I washed the oil and everything off the inside parts of the bolt by spraying Gun Scrubber (carbeuretor cleaner) through the bolt body. (Maybe that's why the inside of the bolt didn't have a lot of crap in it when I took it apart.) How in the world was I supposed to get grease back in there? I used Wilson's Ultima Lube oil, but I felt bad that there wasn't grease in there instead. Yesterday, I decided to figure out how to get the bolt apart.

H. C.

After reading all that BS, I like my 700s even more.

Good luck to you all in getting those things back together. Gotta love that Jap engineering. Appearantly there was a good reason for the part in the instructions that said DO NOT attempt to disassemble any further.

KBGuns,

Thanks for your help. Three lines and about 0.065" (0.067" on my gun, at the point I measured) is 7 turns on my rifle's bolt.* Now I can go shoot today.

H. C.

*I think it's 7. Counting turns to disassemble is a bad way to figure out how to assemble, I guess. When I pulled the bolt apart, it was easy to tell exactly how many times I'd rotated the bolt handle. When I was putting it back together, It was hard to be sure the threads had engaged at the point I started counting rotations. I was pretty well focused on keeping that firing pin spring compressed, because I feared that pressure on the threads at the wrong time would initiate a cross-start. So when I had counted 7 turns, if the first one hadn't caught, I really had 6. Since it is possible to turn it in 8 turns and still have it function, I became confused. Measuring ahead of time is better than counting in this instance.

I'm not trying to be critical here, but I'm with Danny Boy. I have never seen a need to disassemble a bolt in my life. Some years back I purchased a new unissued Enfield. The entire bolt and action were packed solid in Cosmoline. I simply removed the bolt, soaked it in a coffee can full of clean, warm Kerosene overnight, blew it out completely with compressed air the next day, re oiled it, and it was clean as a whistle. I have bolt rifles with well over 1,000 rounds thru them, and have never taken a bolt apart. It simply isn't necessary. Bill T.

I will not own a rifle for serious use that the bolt cannot be easily field stripped on; I had one Ruger RSM MKII jam up in the cold of northern B.C. and that was it, for me.

I love rifles and own nearly 3 dozen at present, but, ALL of my working-serious hunting rifles are Mausers, "old" Mod. 70s and so forth.

I agree with Chuck, this can happen at the worst possible moment, so, a rifle that is easily stripped is best, IMHO.

280Ackleyrized,

I'll agree that I don't like buying commercial guns made in Japan just for the simple fact that I prefer to buy American whenever possible. But don't knock that Japanese engineering! Have you ever owner or worked on the old Arisaka type 38 or 99 military bolt guns? Those bolts are solid, strip down in a matter of seconds, easy to clean and reassemble, and I doubt you could put one back together wrong and not know it!

Glad I could help, HC.

The A-Bolt is not a gun I would have ever considered purshasing. Actually my dad did not buy his either, he won it in a raffle. Having said that, this rifle shoots very well, although the bolt handle is still among the ugliest things I have seen on a gun. If I ever see 'the right price' on a A-Bolt for a project gun I will not hesistate to purchase it.

Kristofer

Let me rephrase that then. Gotta love that modern Jap engineering. Was referring to just the abolts. Hell I drive a toyota. But its a lot easier than that to work on.

Actually, I think that the A-Bolt was designed by an American, Joe Badali, but, I might be wrong. In any case, I wholeheartedly agree on Toyota, I use my '93 Corolla for hunting in the B.C. mountains and the 4x4 I had would run circles around anything else in the worst conditions.

As a matter of course, I do strip the grease from all of my rifles. I have had trouble with the last three A bolts I have. They came apart easily, but when I tried to reassmeble them the threads started to strip. I sent two of the bolts back to Browning and they fixed them but didn't tell me how they did it. The third bolt I had my smith do it. He had the threads start to strip and had to file the first thread to get it started. So, what's your secret?

Bob257

To avoid stripping the threads, I kept the firing pin spring compressed far enough that it exerted no pressure on the threads during reassembly. It is well to keep that spring compressed during disassembly as well, because you don't want that firing pin spring to push the parts apart at the point they're hanging on by that last little fraction of a (screw-type) thread. If you allow the firing pin spring to do this, the ends of the threads will be damaged, and you will be all set up to cross-start and strip when you re-assemble.



To re-assemble with the spring compressed, I used the little homemade tool I described above (the filed down, drilled $0.15 hardware store 1/4" bolt). I put the tool in the vise near the left end of the jaws, with the drilled hole running perpendicular to the vise jaws. About 7/8" of the tool protruded above the vise jaws (BTW, I'm doing this over again and typing intermittently so I am sure I'm telling you correctly). I put the bolt shroud/firing pin assembly from my rifle's bolt over the tool so the 0.220" hole in the bottom of the striker fits over the end of the home-made tool. I ran a paper clip through the 1/16" holes in both sides of the striker and through the drilled hole in the homemade 1/4" tool. I bent down the paper clip to keep it from falling out.



Now, there are male threads on the forward end of the bolt shroud, and these have to go into female threads in the bolt handle/body assembly. If you push the bolt handle/body assembly over the firing pin, the shoulder of the firing pin will contact the rear end of the breechface, a little bit before the male threads on the bolt shroud engage the female threads on the bolt handle/body assembly. You could just compress the firing pin spring by pushing the two parts together, and when the threads engage, you could start tightening them, but don't.



At least, I didn't.



I wanted to be able to feel when and whether the threads were engaged correctly, and I didn't have much chance feeling that if I was compressing a heavy spring with the same hand I was turning one of the parts. Instead, I used my right hand to compress the firing pin spring, and I used my left hand to screw the bolt handle/body assembly onto the bolt shroud. To compress the bolt shroud, I hooked my right index finger around the little homemade tool, and I pushed very hard with my right thumb on the rear end of the bolt shroud. Using grip pressure, I pushed the shroud forward while pulling back the striker with the homemade tool. It takes a good little bit of pressure, and maybe the job is easier with two people working on it. I just had me. Earlier today, I was wondering why I had this arthritic pain in my right thumb joints, and now I remember exactly what caused it.



Holding the striker back and the firing pin spring compressed in that manner, I carefully screwed on the bolt handle/body assembly. After I felt the threads properly engaged, I turned the bolt handle in seven full turns. Then I got confused and started this thread.



Good luck in the future. I did mention above that I have an A-Bolt II. I don't know if the pre-A-Bolt II A-Bolts (I don't figure they called them A-Bolt I's) are the same.



H. C.

Thanks. It sounds confusing though! Maybe I'll need someone to show me sometime. I wish that Sinclair made a tool like the one they do for Remington bolts. That thing is slick!

Bob257

It's a whole lot easier than I made it sound. Just remember to hold the striker back, and the parts come apart and go together very easily.

If I do it agian, I'll snap some pictures and post them.

H. C.

Thanks! Pictures make it easier!

Bob257