Tikka fails to fire

Boomer said:
I must be slower than normal this morning; I've read your post several times now and I'm still not sure what you're telling us. Are you saying that the firing pin hit the primer hard enough to set back the shoulder of the cartridge? Then you say you would pull the bullet to engage the rifling and shoot it to get the brass. Well if you initially intended to shoot the round without the bullet engaging the rifling, you must be increasing the COAL to make up for the excessive headspace of the cartridge with the set back shoulder, so the firing pin strikes the primer with sufficient force to fire the round.

Take it from me, no matter how fast the firing pin is driven, it cannot set back the cartridge case shoulder; the firing pin would pierce the primer, and compress the anvil and soft priming compound into bottom of the primer pocket long before there as any deformation to the shoulder. I submit that if your cartridge has enough movement in the chamber to result in a misfire, you have created dangerously excessive headspace when you resize, or your rifle chamber has excessive headspace, and you have misinterpreted this as a set back shoulder. But check the height of your shell holder to ensure its within spec, and if it, and the length of your resizing die are correct, I urge you to get a gunsmith to check your rifle's chamber dimensions.
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it absolutely can set back the shoulder. I would pull the bullet so it engages the rifling simply so the case head was forced back against the bolt face and shoot. case is now fire formed properly. cases were brand new never fired. chamber headspace is not an issue, its very tight. this happened about 12-15 times in the first 200 shots(2 batches of 100 new never fired lake city brass) has not happened since. I took the bolt apart everything looked spotless. I would take a case, lake city and Remington, seat a fired primer and try fire on it 3 or 4 times and the shoulder was pushed pack quite a ways, less on the Remington they seem thicker in the neck area so I assume thicker in the shoulder area. a round that misfired once in the tikka would never go off in the tikka on the second 3ed 4th try just get shorter from base to shoulder every time. if I took a once misfired round in the tikka and tried it in my ruger it went off. twice misfired in the tikka it was too short for the ruger firing pin to reach the primer. every round I disassembled to check the primer has a primer with a lot of fire when I held a match to it. primers were cci 450 and still are. something slowed the pin down where it had insufficient force to ignite the primer but enough to push the shoulder back. the tikka pins seem to come through the bolt face a long ways compared to my other bolt actions. I cant post pics on here but if you wanna post some I could email you a pic showing how far the pin comes through vs other rifles of mine, and a new never fired case vs a fire formed case vs a lc case with a dud primer that has been "misfired" on 3 times. standing on a flat surface so we can compare shoulder height.
 
prairie lover said:
it absolutely can set back the shoulder. I would pull the bullet so it engages the rifling simply so the case head was forced back against the bolt face and shoot. case is now fire formed properly. cases were brand new never fired. chamber headspace is not an issue, its very tight. this happened about 12-15 times in the first 200 shots(2 batches of 100 new never fired lake city brass) has not happened since. I took the bolt apart everything looked spotless. I would take a case, lake city and Remington, seat a fired primer and try fire on it 3 or 4 times and the shoulder was pushed pack quite a ways, less on the Remington they seem thicker in the neck area so I assume thicker in the shoulder area. a round that misfired once in the tikka would never go off in the tikka on the second 3ed 4th try just get shorter from base to shoulder every time. if I took a once misfired round in the tikka and tried it in my ruger it went off. twice misfired in the tikka it was too short for the ruger firing pin to reach the primer. every round I disassembled to check the primer has a primer with a lot of fire when I held a match to it. primers were cci 450 and still are. something slowed the pin down where it had insufficient force to ignite the primer but enough to push the shoulder back. the tikka pins seem to come through the bolt face a long ways compared to my other bolt actions. I cant post pics on here but if you wanna post some I could email you a pic showing how far the pin comes through vs other rifles of mine, and a new never fired case vs a fire formed case vs a lc case with a dud primer that has been "misfired" on 3 times. standing on a flat surface so we can compare shoulder height.
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First let me say that IMHO, you are playing with fire by intentionally firing cartridges that have excessive headspace. Sooner or later this practice will bite you.

Secondly, let me also say that I think you honestly believe your firing pin strikes are responsible for the excessive headspace, but sometimes we misinterpret our observations. I think the excessive headspace is manufactured during your resizing operation, and when the rounds fire, its due to the unusually long firing pin protrusion you allude to (Tikka) or to the CRF extractor holding the cartridge so the firing pin strike is sufficient to fire it (Ruger). I believe it would be interesting to compare the base to shoulder length of new brass with the brass you've resized using your procedures and dies, by means of a case comparator and a micrometer, rather than by eyeballing them. If you were to neck size only, I bet your failures to fire would disappear, until you were forced to full length resize so you could chamber your cartridge, at which point the phenomenon would reappear.

Regardless of the reason why you have cartridges with excessive headspace, stop shooting them in your rifles. This practice results in incipient case head separations, which has no significant safety ramifications when everything goes right, and the brass cartridge case maintains a seal that holds in the propellant gases. But should things go wrong, the gases could escape, collapse the cartridge case, then enter the firing pin raceway, hitting you in the face, and possibly damaging your rifle.
 
Boomer said:
First let me say that IMHO, you are playing with fire by intentionally firing cartridges that have excessive headspace. Sooner or later this practice will bite you.

Secondly, let me also say that I think you honestly believe your firing pin strikes are responsible for the excessive headspace, but sometimes we misinterpret our observations. I think the excessive headspace is manufactured during your resizing operation, and when the rounds fire, its due to the unusually long firing pin protrusion you allude to (Tikka) or to the CRF extractor holding the cartridge so the firing pin strike is sufficient to fire it (Ruger). I believe it would be interesting to compare the base to shoulder length of new brass with the brass you've resized using your procedures and dies, by means of a case comparator and a micrometer, rather than by eyeballing them. If you were to neck size only, I bet your failures to fire would disappear, until you were forced to full length resize so you could chamber your cartridge, at which point the phenomenon would reappear.



Regardless of the reason why you have cartridges with excessive headspace, stop shooting them in your rifles. This practice results in incipient case head separations, which has no significant safety ramifications when everything goes right, and the brass cartridge case maintains a seal that holds in the propellant gases. But should things go wrong, the gases could escape, collapse the cartridge case, then enter the firing pin raceway, hitting you in the face, and possibly damaging your rifle.
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I am far more than a beginner reloader :) I have the tools to measure how far I am setting the shoulders back on almost every round I reload for. I have dies set to each rifle and when full length sizing fire formed ammo I push the shoulder back 2-3 thou. like I said earlier google tikka misfire. its happened before with no real explanation. also I use cci primers which are known to be harder than some others(federal) to set off. now the brass that was doing this was brand new, and ran through a full length die before loading. some pieces of brass may have been short at the shoulder right from the factory but I doubt tat. I did not go measure them all though.
 
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left to right. loaded round ready to fire. fire formed brass, new brass, never been loaded or primed. and a new brass with a primer seated and then I "shot" it 4 times taking measurements each time.
the fire formed brass being our benchmark here I will just list how much shorter each other brass was when measured at the shoulder.
sized and ready to fire-1 thou
new never sized-4 thou.
new round seated live primer and fired, 7 thou.
2ed time pin hit it, primer is dead from here on out-16 thou
3ed- 21 thou
4th-28 thou
now in hindsight I should not have seated a live primer in the case, I should have seated a fired one. a live primer will push back against the pin and that's why we only seen 3 thou difference between the new case and first hit but on a live primer case. each hit on a dead primer substantially moved the shoulder back, and a misfire on a real live case this is essentially whats happening, the primer nor the case is gonna push back onto the bolt face under pressure.

other pic shows the length difference in how far the pin comes through the bolt. tikka t3 and weatherby vanguard. all my other bolt guns are more like the vanguard than the tikka. I have no idea why tikka feels they need that much. another thing the tikka seems to have about 2-3 times the spring strength on that pin, which makes the misfire issues I had are even more puzzling. each misfire pushed the shoulder forward but never made more than a small dent, about half of whats normal on the primer. primers were checked and they were not duds. all I can come up with is somewhere the pin was tight on something and got slowed down a lot. hasn't happened in a long time so I guess it "broke in" now.
 
The Kurgan said:
If the tolerances were that tight, do you think the Canadian government would have chosen a Tikka-based rifle for Northern Canadian duties? Or, are the Ranger rifles more sloppy and forgiving?
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sometimes we are over thinking and the Government and those that take the decisions are not the final user ....
 
Well - As a minimum, you should correct the firing pin protrusion. Perhaps it has mushroomed a bit to cause drag in the firing pin hole. Things will get nasty if it starts to pierce primers....
 
cosmic said:
Well - As a minimum, you should correct the firing pin protrusion. Perhaps it has mushroomed a bit to cause drag in the firing pin hole. Things will get nasty if it starts to pierce primers....
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that's the thing it never pierces a primer. you would thing it would with the firing pin protrusion being so great. tikkas as a whole are like that. couldn't tell you why. and when I took the bolt apart I checked everything. nothing out of the ordinary was found and the issue went away.
call it break in period or whatever you want. issue disappeared so I don't worry about it. personally I think its a combo of something slowed down the pin and thin/soft shoulders on the lc brass. doing that little experiment with lapua or rem brass shows a lot less shoulder set back due to thicker shoulders.
 
Aniest said:
I know someone who had this exact same problem: in the end it turned out to be exceptionally tight tolerances, too viscous of gun oil and dirt.
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Aniest said:
What I know for absolute fact was a firing pin that failed to move as intended: it had actually in this case jammed forward.
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That is my Tikka T3 in .270 Remington. It is about 8 years old. Very good gun, shot a lot with it. Still own it and would not sell it. :)

The grime and oil froze in the bolt. Trying to remove a live round, safety on, gun pointed up, nothing near the trigger it fired on me! :eek: Good thing for good safety practices!

I was told it was because the grime and thick oil froze in the firing pin spring: too well machined. Jammed the firing pin forward enough to fire the primer.

Love the gun, but I soak the bolt in cleaner each winter, only use very thin sewing machine oil in it.

Again: safety first.
 
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