Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles known issues with Howa/Vanguard rifles

I have a Vanguard from back before there were different models.

A 243, the loaded rounds slide back and forth in the mag.
Noisy and annoying. (The spring isn't weak, and never has had a feeding problem)
My dad has a 25-06 and 7mag of just newer enough vintage to be VGX guns.
No issues with the mag.

It's the fastest rusting gun I have ever seen.
On rainy hunts, Dad and I would wipe our rifles down every night,
and we're the only ones to get brown. We would get spots when guys who never
even dried their guns didn't. Rust quick in the safe too. Always kept even with it,
and haven't had noticeable pitting or permanent damage. Other than my floorplate, it
got a weird blotchy look.

Mine also battered the cocking cam. Most would never notice,but i thing the timing was
off. Slamming the bolt had the tip of the cam hitting too soon before the lugs, and it isn't
hard enough to resist deforming.

Dad's 7mag had a problem with the firing pin. Maybe 100 rounds fired, he couldn't
get it to go off. (At an elk of course, never at range) Turns out the pin was too short,
and suddenly wouldnt work reliably. Never blew a primer, no idea what happened.

Just quit using mine 30 years ago, too heavy, moved on.
Dad continues to use the 7mm, has killed stuff from Qubec to Colorado.

I don't think I have ever heard these complaints, so while they are known
to me, they must not be common.

As far as buying a new one?
I would, a lightweight though.

The bolt stop screw is a real thing, as noted by the headcount earlier. It is, as far as I am aware, the only wart on the rifle. I currently have three. I've looked at the stop screws under magnification, and they are significantly variable. The part was designed poorly, and then some are machined much worse than others with circumferential grooves right at the "snap here" stress riser corner.

Fortunately, you can deal with it by having your smith machine a small shoulder bushing and putting a properly manufactured M3 screw through it. He'll have to do a tiny bit of inletting on the stock to clear the bolt head, but it will be rock solid.

Would also be possible to drill and tap it to M4 and just sleeve the screw, making it even beefier.

Good info, thanks for posting that. I seem to remember people asking about possible upgrades here, but don't recall anyone that's done it.

I don't have a Howa/Vanguard but it looks like the factory screw has a shoulder for the bolt stop to pivot on, whereas a 700 uses one of the pins holding the trigger in place.

So, that solution moves the impact force, which normally goes from the left bolt lug hitting the stop and into the screw, to the bushing and into the receiver, correct? Instead of taking the impact, the screw now simply keeps the bolt stop from migrating laterally to the left.

The screw still takes shear forces, but it is actually strong enough to take them. A SHCS from a quality supplier like YFS is likely to be grade 12.9, which is ~190,000 psi material (off the top of my head). It's heat treated. The threads are rolled, so the grain flows correctly and continuously, rather than being cut. The head is formed with a radius at the transition to the shank. All the surfaces are burnished smooth, free of defects.

The Howa bolt stop screw is, to a fastener geek, a bit of an abomination. It incorporates multiple not-the-best practices, or "things to never do," in one part. It is designed with a sharp/square transition from the shoulder part to the shank of the screw, which is bad enough, concentrating stress. It is turned, not rolled and formed, so the grain structure of the metal doesn't flow around the form, it just gets cut discontinuously. The surface quality of the machining is variable. Some are smoother, some have worse grooving where the tool didn't leave it smooth. That's why some of the screws suck worse than others. I don't know what material it's made from or if it's heat treated.

If I was building a Howa/Vanguard to go after animals that would be very expensive to lose, or might take great exception to my attempts to kill them, I would probably upgrade to the M4 screw just to be safe. If I ever ran out of other stuff to do for engineering-like fun, I'd set up a test fixture and measure the force required to break a selection of Howa screws, as well as the M3 and M4 bushing concepts.

I hear what you're saying. That is music to my ears.

Been doing product development and testing for 20+ years, in an engineering role myself. Seen a wide spectrum of failures, and successes. Most recently, with Japanese suppliers. Although they are extremely detail oriented, they don't always factor in the "hard use" cases. Seen it with powertrains and drivetrains. When their stuff started breaking, they seemed shocked. It wasn't until both sides realized that they didn't account for hard use cases, that it made sense. Apparently in the Japanese viewpoint, the operator should never be hard on a machine.

That isn't how American users think or operate And perhaps an explanation why that tiny bolt stop screw was chosen for the Howa/Vanguard. In the Japanese viewpoint, no sane person would ever yank the bolt back hard enough to break it. Japanese engineers said the same thing when we were destroying their drivetrains during development.

Explain the Top Gear Hilux episode, then...

I don't follow. Only thing that I recall is a Yota in the surf.

Just a generic, yet iconic, example of a Japanese-engineered product holding up to unreasonably hard use.

OK, got it. Robust, for those environmental conditions. I'd call that a corner case, and not the typical use case, but I get your point