My 1891 Argentine Mauser won't feed cast bullets from the magazine. It has at times, but not consistently. I'd like to use this rifle in our clubs CMP matches, but I can't get it to feed properly with the Lee Fat 30 or a new NOE 314299. It feeds 150 gr j-word bullets just fine though. Here are some pics:
Note that the magazine follower(?) doesn't rise all the way to the top on the front end. There is friction between it and the metal above it. It seems that there should be more oomph below this point. (The OAL isn't too long, the cartridge is just pushed forward in this shot. A cartridge with a deeply seated bullet looks the same.)
With a loaded round in the magazine, the follower won't push the nose up into the loading ramp and so it just bangs into the end of the magazine on closing the bolt. With a full 5 rounds in the magazine, the top two will feed, but the last three won't. I thought about bending the springs, but don't want to bugger anything up.
I had to time out of a rapid fire round once because of this, but another time I made it just fine. I've tried many different OAL's. I believe the cases are all full length resized. Yesterday I made it work by shooting the Fat 30 on the slow fire rounds and jacketed bullets on the rapid fire rounds and using two different points of aim. The jacketed rounds were leftovers from an old experiment and I only had 20 left to use. (I would have pulled it off better if the second batch of 10 weren't a slightly different load and shot higher than the first - no time to peek at the spotting scope during the round.)
I had a friends '91 engineer carbine for a while, and noticed that it was less finicky, but it jammed at times also.
Any ideas?