Hi,
I just acquired a Hawkeye mkII in 22-250 and as I was playing with it yesterday I noticed that it rarely actually controls the round on feeding. It will feed the round into the chamber no problem and control it once the bolt is slid forward fully (camming the bolt closed is not necessary), but it doesn't control the round before that point. It looks like the round is being stripped at the right time and the case head is positioned in almost the correct place, it just isn't high enough or forced up strongly enough to actually pop under the extractor. It appears to me that once the round is mostly into the chamber, the case head is leveraged upward and that's when it slides under the extractor, but I think it should be occurring earlier in the feeding process. Having now screwed around with my Hawkeye mkII in 30-06, I see it has a similar "problem." So, neither rifle controls the round into the chamber until the bolt is fully forward and it's not necessarily a short vs long action problem.
When cycled upside down, both rifles gain control of the case head much earlier in the process, but when turned right side up, the cases kind of slip from under the extractor again and are not being fully controlled. Maybe this is just the way these guns operate, but I'm sure I've read about people tuning them to be fully CRF so that the rifle can even be muzzle down and the extractor will still control the case directly from the magazine.
Any advice, tuning tips, etc. are appreciated.
Thanks.
