Brass & Feeding of the Model 14

[nambujim]

I am continually being nagged by Tom Hemphill to help folks out on the Forum when it comes to the Model 14, a very quirky yet fun rifle to collect, shoot, and in particular to repair. It is 75 degrees in Charlotte today and Tom got a foot of snow in MN so as a personal favor to him and to provide reading material for the rest of you I'll pass on a few bits of information gleaned from repairing these guns over the last 30 years.

First of all let's talk about Western/Winchester Brass or loaded rounds being used in the Model 14, I simply don't like it and found that for "various" reasons it does not work anywhere near as well as Remington brass. Over the years I encountered the problem mainly with the .30 & .32 Caliber stuff and wondered if it was just me when I casually mentioned this to Ken Blauch. Now Ken is a man of few words and when it comes to these rifles I consider him "the authority" so when he casually replied "I never much liked their stuff" or something close to that but I then knew it wasn't just me.

As a result I rounded up several nice pieces of assorted Western & Winchester brass, made dummy rounds out of them, and used them along with their Remington counterpart to test the feed & ejection of rifles I get in for repair. The results were interesting in that while the Remington brass almost always worked, the Western-Winchester would either hang up during the feed or ejected poorly or not at all. Nobody wants to listen to a load of technical crap as to why this happens so I'll make it short and tell you that it does!!

You do need to keep in mind that the Model 14 does NOT like brass that has been in anyway distorted, it likes to be fed pristene stuff whereupon making it through the gun will come out somewhat "nicked up" and these nicks need to be tended to during the reloading process.

I now have a theory on why the Western-Winchester is not as "user friendly" to Model 14 owners and that is I think their test rifles were Model 8's or 81's because I took all that stuff that wouldn't load properly in Model 14's and went to the range this morning with a friend who had a Model 8 in both calibers. All my nasty brass that was hesitant to go through numerous Model 14's flew through the Model 8.

All of this is probably moot since the only brass now readily available is .30 Remington R-P along with the same stuff sized up or down which readily works in all my guns or those I have repaired.

One other minor note of interest is that I only use dummy rounds for testing the feed on all the Model 14's I repair/test, several years back I started using only new brass without primers after almost loading a live round I had cleverly left in the die box along with the dummies. The primerless dummies work brilliantly until I discovered the .25 Cal version wouldn't feed into the magazine
because the bullet from the cartridge you were loading would insert itself into the primer hole of the one in front of it. Making it even more interesting is that this only happens when you try to load the third round.......the first one goes up into the mechinism, the second into the magazine, and then you get the problem. Again, this is on .25 Cal. primerless dummies only.

Oh Well, hope you weren't bored and that I made Tom happy but will add one final thing and that is about my handle "Nambujim" for which I get a lot of email about. I'll change it when I own more Model 14's than I do Type 14 Nambu's which of late have become ghastly expensive so I now just concentrate on the Remington's.

Regards!

Jim