First a little background. A couple of years ago, I won a rifle in a charity raffle. It’s a 700 Remington SPS Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation rifle in 7mm Rem Mag. A model I’m not particularly enamored of in a caliber that doesn’t do much for me. At least it had a terrible black matte finish and came in a hideous camouflage, plastic stock with a big RMEF medallion stuck in the side.
So rather than sell it, I decide to make a budget beater rifle out of it. We all know 700’s tend to be shooters and even though I’m not a big fan of the 7RM, with the heavier bullets it seems to be a pretty good “all around” type caliber.
Rather than send it back to Remington for the trigger recall, I just swapped in a Timney. A sprayed it with Duracoat, bedded into a Boyd’s laminate stock with Marine Tex and installed a Burress FFII 3-9 scope I had lying around. Overall, it turned out pretty nice without a bunch of dollars invested.
So I scrub out the barrel to get it ready to take to the range. For whatever reason, I decided to cycle a few rounds through it just to make sure it feeds OK. Kind of a stupid idea, right? It’s a new rifle. Of course it feeds OK.
NOT. I shove 3 rounds into the mag and start to cycle them through. I chamber the first round (closing the bolt seems to take just a bit more effort than expected, but not enough to be concerned). I eject the first round and the second one jumps out of the magazine to follow it. Hmmm… I do it again and the same thing happens. I slow the process down and the problem becomes intermittent, but now I have another issue. The extractor isn’t grabbing cases consistently. Sometimes it will extract and eject fine, other times, it gets the case about an inch or so out of the chamber and lets go.
So to summarize: New 700 SPS 7mm Rem Mag. Extractor doesn’t consistently grab the case rim and second round in magazine pops out when the first round is ejected. Sometimes.
For you 700 guys. Do I replace the riveted-in extractor with another new one? Do I spend money doing some kind of M-16 or Sako extractor? Do I replace the bolt with something sexy, replace the barrel while I’m at it and drop the whole thing into a cool McSwirly stock so that my budget build turns into a $2K project? Or do I sell it cheap as-is to someone who wants to deal with it?
