Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Had a big scare yesterday!!

Built a barreled receiver for my Eliseo tube gun. Been very slowly working on it for a year. I was able to pick up a PT&G squared up, new Remington receiver with a 1 piece bolt and M16 extractor. I chambered a medium Palma taper Shilen barrel in 6.5 Creedmore. It is 25" and has a Shilen trigger. Though the Tube Chassis was new I had no instructions. I couldn't get the A1Sc magazines to snap in. Gary Eliseo was great and emailed instructions. I had to mill the boss in the bottom of the receiver that had threads for a receiver screw?? Now my magazines work. I had some once fired Prime "Norma" brass that a forum member gave me as everybody was out of Lapua at the time. I seated some bullets long to check seating depth. Dam$$ things wouldn't chamber. Didn't know what happened. Checked the chamber and bore for an obstruction and found nothing.
Long story-short, I got up this morning and tried to chamber a new piece of brass, it was perfect. Why had I not checked the donor brass!! Headspace on it was .009 too long. I'm good to go and hope to shoot it this coming week. Now I need to decide what I will do with it.

Butch,
Did you resize them first?

I did size them, but didn't even think I would have to bump the shoulder back. For some reason I didn't check their length until this morning. You would think after all these years it would have been one of the first things that I check.

Live and learn. All's well that ends well!

I bought some once fired 308 brass once. I full sized them, wouldn't chamber. I ran them through a small base die, with a lot of resistance, still wouldn't chamber. The base of this brass was so stretched out even the small base die wouldn't push it back. New brass chambers fine.

Wayne, A buddy of mine chambered a 30BR for his brother. Brother sent him another blank for an extra 30BR barrel. Both chambered with the same reamer and Nez has a digital indicator to check head space. All measurements were the same, but he had to hit the bolt handle to extract the fired brass on the new chamber. Nez sent me a piece of brass fired in each barrel with only the primer being removed. I told him to mark them so that he only knew which came out of each barrel. I measured OAL, head space, shoulder diameter, and diameter above the extractor groove. Virtually no difference. Nez called back and said his brother had about 30 firings for ea. piece of brass. New brass fixed the problem.