I grabbed the M1 carbine out of the safe the other day and noticed that the bolt was cracked:

As you can see the locking lug on the right side was barely hanging on. I ordered a new bolt and put it in today. On the third or fourth round, something hit me in the face and I looked down to see an empty case hanging halfway out of the chamber, and noticed that the extractor was missing. Closer inspection showed that the new bolt was now cracked in exactly the same place as the old one!

One cracked bolt is bad enough, but two cracked in exactly the same place really bothers me. If anybody has an idea what's going on here, and what can be done to fix the situation, I'm all ears.

Thanks,
Cannon

[This message has been edited by Cannon (edited 05-12-2001).]

I am not an expert, but it could be a headspace problem. Check your ammo for primers that are high. Have a gunsmith check the headspace when you get another bolt. In the M1 Garand, cracked bolts are usually the result of high primers or poor headspacing. I suspect overloaded ammo could cause similar problems as well.

My brother had a Mini 14 that we managed to crack the bolt in exactly the same place, in our case it was from a gross overload situation, lots of other stuff happened too (mag blew out the bottom, case separated, etc.). What ammo are you shooting out of it?

Thanks for the responses, guys. The ammo is
old military surplus stuff that Dad and my uncle bought years ago. They shot literally hundreds of rounds of the stuff through their carbines without incident, and we've shot a fair amount of it through this gun as well. For what it's worth, the empties didn't show any obvious signs of pressure or excessive headspace.

stans, I'll check for high primers. In the garands, how does that lead to cracked bolts?

[This message has been edited by Cannon (edited 05-13-2001).]

The bolts are damaged when the gun fires and the bolt is not fully locked. Either a slam fire occurs or the round keeps the bolt from rotating into the fully locked position. The gun can be fired with the bolt only partially locked.

stans,

I didn't find any high primers, but I think you may have found the problem. I got a little more information about the ammo from Dad. My uncle, who split the case of ammo with Dad, had a Ruger Blackhawk in .30 carbine. Some of the ammo was too long to chamber in the Blackhawk's cylinder. It functioned fine in Dad's carbine, so they sorted the whole lot by length with Dad keeping the longest. Dad's original carbine is long gone, and as I said the current one has digested a lot of this same ammo, but it's entirely possible that the last box we got out could be a little long for this particular chamber keeping the bolt from locking up completely. I think we'll retire the rest of that lot of ammo.

Thanks,
Cannon