Extremely hard to long distance diagnose this, but thought I'd throw it out for discussion.
My wife's 38-55 high wall has to have the lever hit hard to extract the cartridge. I determined to fix it today. Luckily, I have a lot of spare parts to compare to.
The extractor works by having a short "step" on the back of it, that the breech block hits near bottom, and rotates the extractor around a pin. The extractor is maybe 3/8 inch off the pivot point, so pretty short lever.
When I compare this extractor to several others, I see no dimensional differences, except maybe a tiny bit of wear at the back corner of the extractor "shelf" where the block hits the extractor.
The chamber is tight on fired cartridges; that is part of the problem. Sized, unfired cases eject easily.
I used prussian blue to see where things rubbed and hit, etc and determined the rim cut in the extractor isn't jamming the extractor. The back side of the extractor opposite the rim was dragging the wall, so I stoned it and relived the corners till it wasn't. The bottom corner of the rim extension on the extractor was dragging on the bottom of the barrel extractor cut, so I relieved it slightly, and radiused both extractor and barrel edges. At this time, I'm sure the extractor itself isn't jamming.
I'm going to pull the barrel, and polish the back of the chamber slightly, so it's not so tight. I've done that a bit before, but the hard extraction has gotten worse over time. Not sure if that's the gun, or the brass being used more times. I prefer not to resize, but will if I have to. However, even resized brass sticks after firing; I've determined that already.
I'm considering TIG welding a tiny bit on the extractor shelf corner where it hits the breech block, to see if that would fix it.
Any thoughts or similar experience?
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