Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Please talk me out of the Sako 85

Like Steelhead and DakotaDeer said the 85 has a very bad ejector design unless it's on a 94 Winchester. There's a ton of discussion on this in various threads. The ejector blade is at dead 6 o'clock on the bolt face, pushing the cartridge or case straight up. The extractor at about 10 o'clock can be easily overwhelmed. If the case mouth hits the scope, and on mine it was 100% of the time, the case head keeps pushing on the ejector until the case rim pops out of the extractor and the case lays down in the action. Mine was a 85M in 30-06. Customer service with Beretta/Sako told me they couldn't guarantee ejection on every scope and mount combination users come up with. They refused to do anything about it. I was using a 1" scope tube in medium Leupold mounts. Pretty exotic, huh. Buy at your own risk. Below is a picture of the bolt face positioned during the ejection cycle. Hard to imagine it might bounce cases off the scope isn't it. LOL.



edit: In fairness to customer service with regard to correction of the problem, there really isn't much way to compensate for this faulty design. On the other hand they didn't have to lie in placing the blame on me and my equipment. They know better.