Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Beware: My Model 700 is Discharging

And the bolt handle and the extractor, etc. In other words, to build a CHEAPER, lower quality rifle and foist it on the shooting public with their "Three rings of steel" and "lock times' etc. The 700 came to life because Winchester's lame brained decision to do virtually the SAME THING to the Model 70 (except for the trigger, thank GOD, but they fugged that up now too). There is an entire cottage industry centered around making the 700 work properly And of course the issue of the fail on fire safety not locking the bolt..

Precisely correct.

The 700 is a great rifle---when it's well made. We all know they haven't always been well made.

The same goes for the Walker trigger. When it works correctly, it is a very good trigger. Unfortunately, the connector does not always come back to rest exactly as it's supposed to for whatever reason. When that happens, an AD can happen and when the rifle is handled carelessly, people can get shot.

It doesn't have to be an emotional issue, for Pete's sake.

Once again, bull shirt. The connector is not, nor has it ever been, the problem. Instead, the problem is exactly the same as when it happens (and it does happen) on a Winchester Model 70. The safety does not lift the sear entirely clear of the trigger, the trigger is pulled when the safety is engaged, the sear drops onto the safety and the trigger doesn't return to it's former position. Whether or not the trigger design incorporates a sear connector, the result is, the rifle fires when the safety is disengaged.
The small amount of contact between the sear and connector is just the same as the small amount of contact between the sear and trigger on any over-riding sear trigger. This is how triggers of this type can be set to give a crisp, creep-free, trigger pull. Placing the blame for firing when the safety is disengaged on the sear connector is a red herring. Jack Belk figured he could make the arguement fly and the lawyers, having no technical expertise, went all in. They didn't know much but they knew they could show some nicely colored graphics to the average group of jurors and BS them into believing almost anything. GD

You obviously have not spent much time studying the Walker design.

Let's kick that around a bit more...

In the Walker design, the safety lifts the sear off of the connector and trigger and the trigger is free to move. As long as the connector remains in solid contact with the trigger it will return to its intended position, and when the safety is disengaged the sear returns to its position on top of the connector engagement surface. If ANYTHING prevents the connector from maintaining full proper contact with the trigger, the sear will fall when the safety is disengaged. One of those things that would interfere with the proper relationship between the trigger and connector would be contact between connector and sear with the safety is engaged. There should be NO contact between those two parts with the rifle on SAFE.

Do you even know why the floating connector was implemented in the design?

And as to Model 70s, you are completely wrong.The safety in no way lifts the sear off the trigger. The safety lifts the firing pin off of the sear.

Yes, it seems to me I had heard something about some sort of floating connector which is a bad, bad thing. If you had taken the time to read previous posts, you would have seen where I explained the reason for the inclusion of the connector in the design.
The model 70 safety does indeed lift the firing pin off the sear which allows the sear to lift off the trigger. That is, this is what happens if the safety is working as it should. If it is not, the safety doesn't lift the firing pin off the sear which, in turn, does not allow the sear to clear the trigger. Then, when the trigger is pulled, with the safety engaged, the firing pin moves forward, the sear drops, and the trigger is unable to return to the unfired position; just as on the Remington. When the safety is disengaged, the rifle will fire. The existence of the sear connector is meaningless because this is not the cause of the malfunction. The cause of the malfunction is a safety which does not lift the sear sufficiently to allow the trigger to be pulled and return.
Again, the existence (or not) of the sear connector has absolutely nothing to do with this malfunction. If the connector was not part of the design, the sear would still drop when the safety was disengaged and the rifle would still fire. The root cause of the issue was not the connector but was the result of parts which were not dimensionally correct. Jack Belk chose to ignore this and hitch his wagon to the sear connector. Plainly, he has been able to convince a lot of people to do the same. Now, Mr. Belk is not a stupid man so it seems unlikely that he was unaware of the real cause. Instead, it seems more likely that he deliberately chose to go with the sear connector because a flawed design might be more actionable than simple manufacturing defects and failed QC. Of course, the end result is the same; a rifle fires when it was not intended that it do so.
When triggers malfunctioned due to a safety which did not lift the sear clear, for whatever the reason, the malfunction was repeatable and could be seen in the shop. On the rifles where the sear connector was the alleged cause of the problem, such problem could not be duplicated except artificially.
All the pretty graphics in the world don't match visible, repeatable, malfunctions. When a trigger came in with the "fire on safety disengagement" problem. The cause was easily ascertained because it was repeatable. For now, I've got to get off this site because the pop-ups are making it too difficult to write and using up my data. GD

Umpteenth thread on this topic, replete with not only facts, but personal experiences, yet pages and pages of explanations........

You would think with all the sniper rifles in circulation that the trigger issues would have surfaced (unless aftermarket were installed) not to mention the bolt handle issues, especially in the Marine Corp. I guess most have been lucky like me. For the record in 1979 I had few viable options as a left handed shooter. Savage were crappy at the time, Sako and Weatherby out of reach and Winchester couldn’t be bothered.

New trigger is installed- all is well.

Dan

Because the Marine Corps, completely rebuilds the rifles to include a pinned bolt, better extractor and of course a different trigger. Just like in the civilian world, there is an entire cottage industry centered on making all these non-existent problems go away...