Erma E M1 Carbine front sight

[Patrick Chadwick]

"I still need to work on cycling issues."

Me too. I have a beautiful 67er. But there is one major weak point in the design: no continuous ramp into the chamber. So any slight misalignment of the bullet as it enters the chamber causes the bullet to snag on the chamber edge. Try hand-cycling a few rounds and look at the bullet noses. Odds are there is a bit of scraping. Not only is this ballistically a bad thing, but the scrapings cause other problems, which are addressed below.

There are 5 things you could check/try:
1) Both the recess in the bolt head for the cartridge base and the slot for the extractor can become crudded up with a mixture of grease and lead scrapings. As a result, the cartridge base does not sit down squarely in the recess and the extractor may fail to latch properly. Cartridge guiding is impaired, and if the build-up is large enough, then ignition may be impaired as well. CLEAN the bolt head area as well as you can. As for the extractor slot: see 3).

2) The front "wings" on the magazine lips are often slightly bent. They need to be VERY carefully tweaked so that the bullet has the smallest possible clearance between the lips, without it being a rubbing fit. This improves cartridge guidance.

3) If you are now feeling a bit more confident, then clean out the extractor slot in the barrel. It is necessary to partially dismantle the rifle to do this properly. Be warned: do NOT just start taking it to bits. Things will fall off and disappear, and it could really spoil your day! There is good pictorial information on the internet for doing it correctly:
http://www.m1carbinesinc.com/carbine_em1.html
will help you a lot.

4) If you have got this far, then slide out the striker from the bolt and clean both it and the hole through which the striker passes. Crud in this hole + old grease or oil has a hydraulic braking effect on the striker, thus impairing ignition.

5) Having attended to points 1) to 4), try out as many different types of .22 ammo as you can get. Tip: forget the specialist 50meter target ammo. This is lightly loaded to provide maximum accuracy at 50 meters/yards, but can be too weak to cycle the action. Stick to standard ammo with standard loading.