Benelli R1
- Thread starter rbernie
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I just paid for two 2011s, One of which isn't mine.
I'm safe to look....... till My toy budget recovers, then all bets are off.
Another R1 (30-06) owner chiming in..... Have not shot it much; maybe 50-75 rounds. Accuracy was between 1-1.5 inches with factory and about an inch with reloads (165 gr). My gun hates reloads, will not put them into battery. Likely rectified with small bases dies...? All that said, I like the gun and the felt-recoil of 30-06 is similar to a .243 with the R1. Mine is dressed in beautiful walnut with a Leupold VX-2 3-9 on top. Aside from the wood the gun is ugly as sin but I enjoy owning one....
EJ
EJ
Try fl sizing and just keeping pressure on for a full 10-20 seconds, see if it'll chamber that brass, MIGHT not need sb dies, my brother had a similar problem with his valk ar15.
the other thing to check is if you still have any gap between the die and shell holder with a case in and the ram at full stroke (on a came over this will be RIGHT before it cams), then theres still some room to bring the die down a bit more. Ive actually found that all of my presses have enough slop in the linkage, that when the die is set to touch the shell holder at the top of stroke, they end up with a 1/16th or so gap when a case is inserted. I dont usually take ALL of that gap out, but ill back it down till theres just a sliver of light showing between holder and die, if THAT doesn't fix chambering issues id move onto SBDs.
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rbernie
Contributing Member
I decided to take a look at the trigger pack and see what I could learn.
As delivered, the trigger has a two stage pull; the first stage pulls at around 2lb and the second stage at 5lb, at least according to my Timney mechanical gauge. This is probably very appropriate for a mangum-class semiauto field gun that will be fired from the shoulder, but it certainly makes accurate fire from a rest a little harder than it needs to be.
Here are some pictures of the trigger pack:
The disconnector is the front hook within the red circle, and the sear is the rear hook within the trigger pack. The sear is nested within, but mechanically separate from, the disconnector. The hammer contains engagement surfaces front and rear for the disconnecter and sear, respectively, circled in yellow.
When the hammer is cocked, you can see the very large amount of seat engagement; it measures out at roughly .075 inch (as best that I could get my dial caliper to measure the dimensions within the housing).
As the trigger is pulled, it appears to push downward on the back of the sear, causing the disconnecter and sear group to rock rearward until the disconnector hits the front face of the hammer. At that point, the disconnector stops movement and the sear continues to move to the rear. It was very difficult to measure with a dial caliper, especially considering the fact that the edges are all radiused, but my guess is that the engagement surface at this point is about .020”.
This is how Benelli achieves a two-stage affect; it would appear that the sear has a fairly stiff spring underneath it as it rests on the disconnector housing. (Without taking the pack apart, I am visualizing it as similar to, but reversed from, the relationship between an AR15 sear and disconnector.)
With the trigger pack out of the gun, I spent the day yesterday dry firing as I sat on my various work conference calls. All told, I probably subjected the trigger to more than 500 dry fire cycles. By the time I had gotten tired of this exercise, I could see a very faint and small area of burnishing on the hammer engagement surface. When I re-tested the trigger pull, I found that dry firing had made very little practical impact on the pull weight; the second stage now tests at 4.75lb, even if it seems a bit crisper in the bargain. It was interesting to note that I tried (kinda kludgy and hard to repeat) to measure the trigger pull for the second stage when the hammer hook was just off the sear (removing the sliding friction from the measurement), and the gauge pretty much gave me 4.5lb-5lb every time.
The summary of all of this is that the R1 trigger is likely to perform largely as delivered throughout it’s lifecycle, and if you want a better trigger pull then you’re going to have to dive into the trigger pack and likely work on the sear return spring as your principal area of interest. My gut tells me that the mechanical relationships between the disconnector and hammer and sear will make it unlikely that changes in geometry will yield good result, and the lack of real measurable progress from dry-firing tells me that the surfaces are fairly well machined and hardened as delivered and stoning is gonna be a long process for questionable return. It does appear to me that the majority of the second stage pull weight is NOT from engagement surfaces, but from the sear return spring itself.
As delivered, the trigger has a two stage pull; the first stage pulls at around 2lb and the second stage at 5lb, at least according to my Timney mechanical gauge. This is probably very appropriate for a mangum-class semiauto field gun that will be fired from the shoulder, but it certainly makes accurate fire from a rest a little harder than it needs to be.
Here are some pictures of the trigger pack:
The disconnector is the front hook within the red circle, and the sear is the rear hook within the trigger pack. The sear is nested within, but mechanically separate from, the disconnector. The hammer contains engagement surfaces front and rear for the disconnecter and sear, respectively, circled in yellow.
When the hammer is cocked, you can see the very large amount of seat engagement; it measures out at roughly .075 inch (as best that I could get my dial caliper to measure the dimensions within the housing).
As the trigger is pulled, it appears to push downward on the back of the sear, causing the disconnecter and sear group to rock rearward until the disconnector hits the front face of the hammer. At that point, the disconnector stops movement and the sear continues to move to the rear. It was very difficult to measure with a dial caliper, especially considering the fact that the edges are all radiused, but my guess is that the engagement surface at this point is about .020”.
This is how Benelli achieves a two-stage affect; it would appear that the sear has a fairly stiff spring underneath it as it rests on the disconnector housing. (Without taking the pack apart, I am visualizing it as similar to, but reversed from, the relationship between an AR15 sear and disconnector.)
With the trigger pack out of the gun, I spent the day yesterday dry firing as I sat on my various work conference calls. All told, I probably subjected the trigger to more than 500 dry fire cycles. By the time I had gotten tired of this exercise, I could see a very faint and small area of burnishing on the hammer engagement surface. When I re-tested the trigger pull, I found that dry firing had made very little practical impact on the pull weight; the second stage now tests at 4.75lb, even if it seems a bit crisper in the bargain. It was interesting to note that I tried (kinda kludgy and hard to repeat) to measure the trigger pull for the second stage when the hammer hook was just off the sear (removing the sliding friction from the measurement), and the gauge pretty much gave me 4.5lb-5lb every time.
The summary of all of this is that the R1 trigger is likely to perform largely as delivered throughout it’s lifecycle, and if you want a better trigger pull then you’re going to have to dive into the trigger pack and likely work on the sear return spring as your principal area of interest. My gut tells me that the mechanical relationships between the disconnector and hammer and sear will make it unlikely that changes in geometry will yield good result, and the lack of real measurable progress from dry-firing tells me that the surfaces are fairly well machined and hardened as delivered and stoning is gonna be a long process for questionable return. It does appear to me that the majority of the second stage pull weight is NOT from engagement surfaces, but from the sear return spring itself.
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rbernie
Contributing Member
And... things did not go the way that I wanted. I spent three hours on Friday, and 50 rounds, trying to get consistent performance from this rifle when shooting off of a front bag (as I would using an improvised rest in the field). I still don’t think that I have found that answer. It does seem that the rifle does not like to have the bag placed too far forward on the forearm, and I settled on resting it just ahead of the magazine. I also continue to struggle with the trigger and my hand placement, and I really feel like I’m moving the rifle around way too much for its own good.
I wound up shooting five shot 100yd groups instead of ten shot groups, just because my results were so variable. This is pretty much average for my experience:
Generally, the ‘flier’ would be the second or third shot, and then the rest would form a rough cluster between the two or three outliers. Depending on where I rested the rifle on the bag or how I gripped it, I could make the group (but I hate to call it a group) literally move several inches in az or el. That was the most frustrating part - it wasn’t just that the rifle was not as accurate as I was hoping, but that the results between strings were too variable for my liking. I will admit that I am not a particularly great rifle shooter from a precision perspective, because so much of my emphasis has been on snap shots offhand, but I don’t think that my experiences with this rifle so far are completely of my own doing.
Right now the rifle is wearing a Vortex Razor HD LH 2x-10x. I am probably going to mount an optic on the rifle that has a side focus, so that I can eliminate the prospect of either having a defective optic or excessive variability in my head position.
I did check the gas system, and it did not loosen at all during the shooting session and it was very firmly snugged. Whatever is going on, it is not due to variability in the fitment of the barrel and gas system.
I wound up shooting five shot 100yd groups instead of ten shot groups, just because my results were so variable. This is pretty much average for my experience:
Generally, the ‘flier’ would be the second or third shot, and then the rest would form a rough cluster between the two or three outliers. Depending on where I rested the rifle on the bag or how I gripped it, I could make the group (but I hate to call it a group) literally move several inches in az or el. That was the most frustrating part - it wasn’t just that the rifle was not as accurate as I was hoping, but that the results between strings were too variable for my liking. I will admit that I am not a particularly great rifle shooter from a precision perspective, because so much of my emphasis has been on snap shots offhand, but I don’t think that my experiences with this rifle so far are completely of my own doing.
Right now the rifle is wearing a Vortex Razor HD LH 2x-10x. I am probably going to mount an optic on the rifle that has a side focus, so that I can eliminate the prospect of either having a defective optic or excessive variability in my head position.
I did check the gas system, and it did not loosen at all during the shooting session and it was very firmly snugged. Whatever is going on, it is not due to variability in the fitment of the barrel and gas system.
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rbernie
Contributing Member
Roger. I did try to rest in my offhand on the top of the scope to help stabilize the rifle into the bag, and that did not seem to bring any joy.
These rifles do seem to need a good break in period, I haven't kept track of your round count, I'd ask though if you did a load workup for this rifle? Iirc, you just threw these together, have you played with development?
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rbernie
Contributing Member
The test loads were put together from data provided by QuickLoad:
This load was specifically chosen because it shows a barrel time of 1.024ms, which puts it just past node 4 (1.013ms) for a 22" tube. It's not a tuned load, but it's a calculated load that should be a good starting point - I'd expect it be MOA-ish, and that's good enough. But again - ultimate accuracy wasn't / isn't nearly as important to me as consistent string-to-string behaviors. That is what I still need to achieve.
I strongly suspect that it's a combination of trigger control and consistency in head placement. I've mounted up a side-focus Monarch for the next range test, to see if I can eliminate some part of my technique from the list of variables.
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