berettaprofessor
Member
I am always astonished and grateful for the incredible knowledge and advice on THR. Everyone here may not be a genius, and I don't know how much the Board's average IQ dropped with the loss of RC and others recently, but collectively, it's a pretty darned impressive place.
After my new 224 Valkyrie upper sighting in debacle was solved in an Accessories Forum thread (Posted here: https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/help-bad-mount.844958/), I went out today to shoot the rifle and refine the scope picture. I took two shots with the upper standing to begin sighting it at 25 yards and it extracted normally, but then when I moved to 50 yards, every shot thereafter, prone off a bipod or standing, would fail to extract the fired case. It could be manually extracted by the "slam the butt into the ground while holding down the charging handle" (which I learned here), but it was essentially a single shot rifle. I had function-tested it prior to shooting for normal manual bolt cycle and extraction, and when I went in to clean the rifle and fix the problem, the chamber looked good, the extractor and bolt face were good, and the extracted brass looked normal. To top it off, it was again manually cycling ammo normally.
The latter function test told me that it was a problem of the extractor slipping off the case during fire, likely due to a weak extractor spring, all of which I know because of yet another thread last fall when you all helped me fix a reluctant-to-cycle AR10 (which wasn't the extractor spring that time but I remembered the advice and thoughts). I don't know who actually makes this Valk bolt carrier group (the upper is a Bear Creek upper) but when I broke it down and looked, the extractor spring was indeed pretty wimpy (still on the extractor in the first picture and at the top of the second picture with a Wolff Extra Power spring below). I replaced the original spring with the Wolff, which I had hanging around because of the earlier advice obtained here and the problem was solved!
So, thank you everyone for the graduate course in AR maintenance I've gotten and am still getting. God Bless all you geniuses this Christmas and beyond!
After my new 224 Valkyrie upper sighting in debacle was solved in an Accessories Forum thread (Posted here: https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/help-bad-mount.844958/), I went out today to shoot the rifle and refine the scope picture. I took two shots with the upper standing to begin sighting it at 25 yards and it extracted normally, but then when I moved to 50 yards, every shot thereafter, prone off a bipod or standing, would fail to extract the fired case. It could be manually extracted by the "slam the butt into the ground while holding down the charging handle" (which I learned here), but it was essentially a single shot rifle. I had function-tested it prior to shooting for normal manual bolt cycle and extraction, and when I went in to clean the rifle and fix the problem, the chamber looked good, the extractor and bolt face were good, and the extracted brass looked normal. To top it off, it was again manually cycling ammo normally.
The latter function test told me that it was a problem of the extractor slipping off the case during fire, likely due to a weak extractor spring, all of which I know because of yet another thread last fall when you all helped me fix a reluctant-to-cycle AR10 (which wasn't the extractor spring that time but I remembered the advice and thoughts). I don't know who actually makes this Valk bolt carrier group (the upper is a Bear Creek upper) but when I broke it down and looked, the extractor spring was indeed pretty wimpy (still on the extractor in the first picture and at the top of the second picture with a Wolff Extra Power spring below). I replaced the original spring with the Wolff, which I had hanging around because of the earlier advice obtained here and the problem was solved!
So, thank you everyone for the graduate course in AR maintenance I've gotten and am still getting. God Bless all you geniuses this Christmas and beyond!
