Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing 700 magnum extractor

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?

If the rifle is unfired, why not try Remington's warranty service first?

mudhen is correct.

Send it back to Remington. But first put the stock trigger and stock back on before you send it back. If you don't you wont be getting them back, Remington will replace everything non factory.

Then I guess I should send the barreled action without the trigger. I no longer have the tupperware or the trigger. I'll call them up and see what they say. Thanks for the advice.

Below is from the Remington website. I'm not the original purchaser, it's over two years old and I never filled out a warranty card. Looks pretty grim.


Who and what is covered by this warranty and for how long?
Remington warrants to you, the original purchaser of a new firearm, that for two years from the date of purchase in the United States or Canada, your Remington firearm will be free from defects in material and workmanship.
What must you do to make a claim under this warranty?
First, when you purchase your firearm, you must complete and mail the warranty registration card to us. Then, if you discover a defect, you must notify us or an authorized Remington warranty repair center before the end of the two-year period.

Well,
I can't blame Remington. If you can't buy another extractor from Brownells or other places, let a good local gunsmith repair it for you. I would highly recommend not using a Sako extractor for safety reasons.

FWIW, I took it to the range Friday and ran a box of cheap factory loads through it to sight it in and break the barrel in. The extractor worked fine on empty cases and the feeding problem seems to have disappeared. Hmmmm...
I fired a few groups and it looks like it may turn out to be a shooter. Three groups with 139 gr Hornady factory loads ranged from 3/4" to 1-1/4". We'll see what happens when I cook up some handloads and settle in to really shoot.
Fingers crossed.

I thought the newer bolts had a rivetless extractor?

The used '06 I got looks like a bubba replaced the extractor and rivet with a hammer

As I understand it, the small and medium bolts have the rivetless extractor, but the magnums still have the old style.

Remy extractors can fail and be damaged if hard debris like a piece of a case rim gets caught in the nose of the bolt and jams the extractor up, but otherwise they work well.

A lot of their new rifles come very dirty from the factory with debris from machining still in the barrel and bolt.

Before I'd look at anything else, I'd carefully clean the entire rifle and the inside of the bolt and extractor recess, and see if that solves the problems.