Customized M305/M-14 Slamfire...What a mess!

Slam Fire's "R" US. You are lucky you have both eyes my friend. Safety Glasses will usually prevent most eye injuries.

Just before too many rant over the Norinco M-14's, there are alot of semi-autos that both commercial and military that can slam fire not just the M-14, when allowing that powerful recoil spring to accelerate the bolt from zero to 60 in 5.2M/secs. Just last week-end a friend at work witnessed a Remington 742 .30-06 slamfire. The kid carrying it forgot the magazine for it way back at camp and it was not much time left for the evening hunt. He said oh well, just one in the chamber will do. Turned away from my friend, let her fly on a chambered round and KABOOOM!. Hit a granite rock 3 feet from muzzle, peppered his jacket and face with sharpnel leaving it bleeding quite bad. My friend was just covered in granite dust. The kid refused to go to the emergency, how do you explain a firearms accident,... so he sucked it up.

They returned immediately home, and the kids father who owned the 742, said well that will never happen to anyone again and proceeded to the garage where he cut her down in 2" strips. My friend keep telling him the 742 needs to be loaded from the mag but he chopped her to scrap!
 
you'll need to check headspace.either get a go,nogo and field--the commercial type and strip the bolt or look for the military ones with the
ejector cut in it.i have found that the norcs i have seen have either way too much or way too little headspace.some of the latest 2011 batches
of m305's seem to have overtightened barrels.
a quick and dirty way to tell is look straight down on an opened chamber with the bolt rearward.
if the feed ramp (that "V" machined into the barrel) is to the right then it is overindexed.if to the left then it's underindexed.straight down is best.
underindexed may lead to too much headspace and over to too little.
 
'm not sure where the safety glasses idea started, I wear safety glasses for all activities...eyes are my life! I have a smith lined up to remove the stuck case and check the headspace. If it needs adjusting...well that gets a bit more complicated as it's a custom barrel and gas system, it'll have to go back for adjustments.
I've had slam fires and ignition out of battery on rimfires for various reasons and I've heard of a case with a bolt gun, can happen with any action. Not manually chambering a round and feeding from the mag makes good sense to me.
 
If the headspace is a bit looser than you want, the only option is going to be trying to find a bolt that corrects that. If its tighter than you want, then you just need to have the chamber cut appropriately deeper, and that shouldn't affect your barrel to gas system alignment as the barrel still screws back into the receiver to the same depth and position. It's not like a bolt gun where you cut the barrel shoulder and screw it in further to the receiver.
 
toyboy said:
you'll need to check headspace.either get a go,nogo and field--the commercial type and strip the bolt or look for the military ones with the
ejector cut in it.i have found that the norcs i have seen have either way too much or way too little headspace.some of the latest 2011 batches
of m305's seem to have overtightened barrels.
a quick and dirty way to tell is look straight down on an opened chamber with the bolt rearward.
if the feed ramp (that "V" machined into the barrel) is to the right then it is overindexed.if to the left then it's underindexed.straight down is best.
underindexed may lead to too much headspace and over to too little.
Click to expand...

Even if screwing the typical brutally overtightened barrel in or out slightly affected the head space, it would only be by a maximum of .28 of a thou per degree of rotation of the barrel. So thats at least 3.57 degrees turn per 1 thou inch barrel movement. Assuming you aren't just stretching the crap out of the barrel tenon threads, as I suspect most of it is on a stock Norinco. So if your barrel is slightly out of index, it has minimal effect on headspace at a pitch of 10 tpi / 100 thou per revolution which works out to .28 thou movement per degree of rotation.
 
yomomma said:
Weak firing pin spring?
Click to expand...

WHAT firing pin spring? The M14 family of rifles have a free floating firing pin...

As other guys have said, this accident was likely caused by releasing the bolt onto a chambered round & NOT stripping the round from the magazine as the bolt closed & chambered it...

Cheers
Jay
 
All the Remington semi-auto rifles 742, 7400, 74 sportsman have a spring on the firing pin as far as I know... But as said before the M14 does not. Whenever I load up my Remingtons I always strip a round from the mag, then remove it and put another shell in just for safety sake and Im used to doing that anyways for the M14
 
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