Ejection of loaded rounds

[Marcus]

A friend of mine called me the other day and asked me to come over and take a look at a rifle for him. It`s an AP74,a .22LR AR15 copy. It looks and strips like the real deal. Prob is is wouldn`t feed more than 2 rds. without a feed jam. So I stripped it ,found a bunch of grit and some rough spot welds in the mag and some burrs on the bolt. I cleaned all this up(as well as the rest of the gun) with solvent,compressed air and my trusty Dremmel. I polished the feed ramp too while I was in there. Bingo no more feed jams,instead it failed to eject the rounds with them falling into the back ot the chamber! DOH! I went through everything again,found a few rough spots on the ejector,smoothed em out. Did a few other minor tweaks too but it just wouldn`t eject right. He didn`t have any emptied on hand and it was too late to go out and shoot it so all testing was done by hand cycling. Finally I realized the bullet was hanging up in the chamber enough to keep it from ejecting. I filed the nose off a LRN round turning it into a wadcutter,it still fed but now it ejected fine! So it would seem the OAL of loaded rounds it too much to eject. Is this unusual? I don`t have any guns that have this "problem". Opinions? Marcus

 

[George Stringer]

Marcus, it isn't all that unusual. I've seen several rifles that didn't particularly want to eject a loaded round but had no problem when fired. Pistols too. My personal carry gun will not eject a loaded round. It has a long nose or combat ejector. What happens is simply that the ejector attempts to do it's job before the nose of the bullet clears the chamber. George