Shot the gun for the first time today, factory remington 405 gr load. The first shot, very little recoil, and when i broke the action and removed the shell, smoke billowed out. Looked down the barrel and about 15 seconds later, when the smoke cleared out of the barrel, there were kernels of powder in the barrel. Severel rounds required me to hit the primer twice to ignite, one took 3 strikes. Any ideas as to what is going on?

Sounds like bad primers or bad powder. How old is this ammo you're shooting? Do you have any other ammo you can shoot instead?

Never had that problem with factory ammo, but I can tell you it's possible to use too little IMR3031 under a 300 grain lead bullet. Unburned kernels everywhere. Any chance your ammo was unlabeled handloads in a reused factory box?

These were brand new (purchased friday) factory remington loads. I plan on contacting remington tomorrow about the ammunition, but I plan on contacting H&R as well to see about this. It seems odd to me that 10 out of 20 shells would exhibit ignition problems, but I think the unburned powder may be an ammunition problem. It is really wierd I have never had problems with remington ammunition and in the past two days I have had .308s with split necks from the factory and now this problem.

You might go to the H&R Handi forum at Graybeard's. According to those guys if you don't pull the trigger all the way back it may interfere with ignition. There are several idiosyncrasies of these rifles that you might want to know about and they are covered at Graybeards.

Yea i thought about that trigger thing before, but I dont believe it to be the case here, as primers had good indentions in them. It still would not explain the powder situation. I called Remington on Monday and they want me to buy another box of the same lot, and try a few rounds. If the same occurs, they want to mail me a box and shipping label to mail the loads back for ballistic testing.

Are the hits in the center of the primers?

No most are a good bit high of center.

There ya go! My bet is H&R won't replace, but give it a try.

But how would that cause unburned powder?

quote:

Originally posted by model7LSS:
Yea i thought about that trigger thing before, but I dont believe it to be the case here, as primers had good indentions in them. It still would not explain the powder situation. I called Remington on Monday and they want me to buy another box of the same lot, and try a few rounds. If the same occurs, they want to mail me a box and shipping label to mail the loads back for ballistic testing.

Low pressure (meaning all factory 45-70 ammo) will leave a lot of unburned kernels with extruded powder.

I called H&R yesterday and they said that the primer strike was the cause of the misfires, to send the gun back to them and they will take care of it. When I asked about the powder issue, they didnt know much, but said that the barrels on these guns were slightly larger than normal for using cast bullets and gas checks. Dont know the truth in that, but...