Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Action and/or trigger problems at minus 40 degrees f ?

it was an old Finnbear with that long guide on the right side of the bolt body. No sure what the purpose of that was, but that was what cause it to freeze shut.

I think in general people over lube their guns. I use a small dab of grease on the locking lugs and on the cooking piece and that's it. I will blow off with compressed air and and wipe down with Rem oil if it gets soaking wet. Never had a gun not function doing it this way.

RD, that is not a CRF action on that rifle.

Exactly. I work outside year round. A couple years ago we decided 'it's too cold to work', so I pulled my kid out of school and we filled a mule deer tag that day. Took all day, but we got it done. -46C. Good memories for the both of us.

I prefer M70s that have been worked over, but in my experience most well cared for rifles will work fine, in most conditions. We've had rifles freeze solid over the years, but in all cases the user was carrying chambered... One shot and the action functions fine. Obviously a trigger freezing is a whole other matter...

Now that we know what works, and what doesn't, has the OP?

If you're subsistence hunting on your SHTF property, you'd better be laid in before it gets -40..

Any rifle I take to Canada gets this same treatment.

Yes Bwalker is right.

I stand corrected. However don't most/all CRF's have that full length guide/extractor ? That is what froze shut. It wasn't the "sako type" hook extractor that froze. IMO, it is that long guide that was the magnet for ice/moisture that rendered the action inoperable. Actually you could see the ice in there. The only CRF actions that I know of that don't have that are the Ed Brown 704 and the McMillan CRF. Maybe they were onto something.

None will show up with mine. At 40 below, they'll be in the house with me.

RD: I think we got off topic as I don't recall mentioning CRF vs PF as an issue. I was talking about the trigger on a Rem 700;actually what I saw with the two rifles was a trigger that would not work on one ( frozen), and a safety mortise that clogged with snow on the other.

Once the guy cleared the clog in the mortice as best he could by flashlight in the woods;he finally got the safety to move forward, but the trigger was also frozen up and would not work.

I don't think this is a CRF vs PF issue so much as it is that certain parts of a rifle, or action style, may be somewhat more vulnerable to gathering debris, moisture,snow, ice accumulation, etc and not operating, than another.

At some point I guess anything can get so bound up it won't work(I know how to do it with a pre 64 M70, or what will make it "not work");and I have hunted little Remington carbines up north in lots of snow without incident...but it was after I saw the snafu cited above, and was careful to keep crap out of the action area best I could.

All mine went "bang!" when I wanted them to.

What happened with that Sako I don't know but I think you are onto the reason.

Coldest I ever hunted was -20 and I shot a doe and my firing pin on my Marlin 336 broke! Luckily I didn't need a second shot.

If a rifle freezes, does it matter what type of extractor or trigger or firing pin assembly or 600 trick moves it had / That's the point I was trying to make, but I understand why you would think that's where I was heading. In actuality, in this case, my point was that any rifle can freeze rendering inoperable and the topic here is how to prepare a rifle for extreme conditions. You and I could walk hand and hand in utopia if a 700 had the old style mod 70 trigger............... (and a timed safety and a repined, reground trigger and new mag box and a new follower and a rebuilt bolt release and a new polished Williams extractor........... )

I was the "third man" that evening. The only rifle that would go bang was my pre war M70 with that simple old trigger.The rifle was just as snow clogged and frozen as the others but it still worked.



That said I think the bottom line with all this is if hunting extreme cold, make sure the rifle is "clean" inside and out,free of old oil and debris,try to keep it that way (not always possible),and run it dry except for a very thin application of lube that you trust to provide protection and not congeal at low temps.

Try to keep the thing free of snow and moisture that might turn to ice at the wrong time. This just might avoid little snafus.

Bob, two of my rifles have the Black-T coatings throughout,which I stated requires NO lubricant at all and a third rifle, an all stainless 700 has a 40x trigger Black-T throughout. I bought that rifle from Bobby Hart, a 30 Super (30-8mmMag) and I bought the 40X trigger from Bobby and sent it to Birdsong for disassembly and coating before having it installed by Hart on the finished rifle, To my knowledge, the only part of a SS 700 that isn't SS is the bolt nose which is coated with some sort of black coating on the nose itself. My other hunting rigs are fully Black-T'ed such as my Remington Custom Shop 700 African Plains Rifle in 300 Win Mag and my Husqvarna 1900 action with a Hart barrel bedded McMillan stocked 06.









Willams bottom metal that I had MP-3 finished





[img]http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r74/RDFinn/Husky06Custom.jpg[/img]

One thing, I think, yet unmentioned that makes this care easier and, thus, more likely to get done is a bolt that's easy and tool free to remove and disassemble.

If there is a simpler bolt to disassemble that the Husqvarna 1900, I haven't seen it. Remove bolt from action, turn shroud clockwise with your hand 180 degrees and the bolt shroud/firing pin assembly slides out. To reassemble, insert firing pin/shroud assembly into bolt body and turn shroud 180 degrees clockwise and you're done. To tools what so ever needed.

I've only played with earlier Husqvarnas, but I'm not surprised that their last action was, too, very well designed and executed.

Lube and condensation are two different things. Wet lube at cold temps, or thru evaporation get thick, hence my dry lube thing. Wet lubes collect crud at all temps above freezing, and maybe somewhat below.

Dry to touch lubes do neither.

Condensation/moisture freezing up in interior parts doesn't care what kind of lube you use.

In my experience - though the lube or lack of it is a big factor- another big issue is specific design. I've had sticky trigger parts on various brands of bolt rifles in the cold. A couple of designs which haven't given me trouble, even in very deep cold: -30� to -40� F, have been the Ruger #1 and Mini actions.

I had to make a few turns on a M760 Winchester but that simple feature made it possible to dangle the firing pin, by my cold finger tips, in the gas tank of one of our machines in order to free it up so that we could dispatch a big bull.