Craig Sanford
A sleepless night. I experienced back to back misfires in my .35 Whelen. Ammo was Remington factory 250 grain core lokt. One of the two misfired cartridges did fire on a second try. Bolt disassembly revealed no damage, nor excess fouling. I previously had a couple misfires in this rifle but they occurred far enough apart and under different enough circumstances that I never felt concerned, and the rifle has otherwise reliably fired hundreds of rounds with very good accuracy. One of the previous misfires was with a hand load using fire formed .30-06 brass (which could have been attributed to human error) and the other previous misfire was with factory Barnes ammo that was a leftover partial box and had been kept in less than ideal conditions for some time. Having these two new misfires back to back with properly stored Remington factory ammo has now shaken my confidence. Turning to the web reveals a number of threads on the topic of headspace and the .35 Whelen. The consensus is that rifles built before the cartridge was SAAMI standardized may be more prone to the problem, as these were all custom builds and by default used only ammo specifically hand loaded for each individual rifle. My rifle falls into this category. Yet there are still anecdotal reports of this problem occurring in Ruger and CVA rifles of much more recent manufacture. Considering that this chambering is not extremely common it may seem reasonable to conclude that this may be a problem with a disproportionate number of rifles. The seemingly more knowledgeable commentators on the topic are adamant in their assertion that there is nothing wrong with the cartridge design and that it has ample shoulder to control headspace. They say poor manufacturing of the guns themselves is the true culprit. I tend to concur, except that I would choose the word sufficient rather than ample to describe the shoulder. I find several comments relating of misfires with Remington's Whelen ammunition and some consensus that it may be problematic. I have personally shot a good amount of this Remington ammunition myself before experiencing this problem. Examining the misfired cartridge (the one that didn’t work on the second try) I find the shoulder looks and feels somewhat more rounded and slight compared to other unfired cases. This begs the question (at least in my mind) could this cartridge design, though not inherently flawed, simply be uncommonly sensitive to subtle variations in brass and individual chambers?
Please wait