E-Lander magazine problems

[dblazevich]

Hey all,

Just finished shooting a match with my 12.5" 6.5 Grendel. First time I've used it past zeroing it using 5x rounds at a time.

I heard good things about the E-Lander mags, but they absolutely sucked. I have 5x 17 rounders and 1x 24 rounder.

I have had all of them loaded for about 6 months with Hornady Black. When pulling the Hornady rounds out, and throughout the competition with my Wolf ammo, i saw the following failures:

-Rounds "nose-diving"
-Rounds getting stuck (rounds 1-2 were loose since there was no tension from rounds 3-4 being stuck)
-Fully loaded mag would rattle (not necessarily a failure but not normal)
-Bolt not being able to pull round from a fresh magazine (too much spring tension / friction)

Errors were pretty sporadic. Sometimes they worked great and sometimes they failed. I reloaded a magazine that had 2/4 failures and it ran all 17 rounds fine.

Any suggestions? Should I contact E-Lander for review, or is this something I can fix myself?

[lazyengineer]

Mine work good, and I've run 3-gun with them I guess my first question is are you whacking the back of the mags, to line up and bottom out the rounds?

Also, can you say what make the rifle is?

[dblazevich]

Yes, the back of the rounds all lined up and i have them a good whacking to try and correct the issue while in the middle of the stage - no success.

Self build rifle:
Anderson lower
Aero lpk
Aero upper
Toolcraft BCG
BA 12.5" barrel

Problems all exist when trying to strip the rounds by hand

[Kswhitetails]

Hand sand your feed lips. They may be from a batch of sharp lips. Make sure nothing is catching the cases as they start to move forward. Nose diving is typically too much mag spring. May need to cycle them a few times to straighten them out. Loading them helps to take some of the difficulty out of loading them, putting a couple hundred rounds through them cleans up the rest of it. Feed lips, follower tabs, etc.

[lazyengineer]

Roger that. Yea, for whatever reason the Grendel shape drags on the mag-lips something fierce. It's a PITA to strip out Grendel rounds, yet unloading a 5.56 mag is easy. I don't understand the physics of that. As Ks mentioned, breaking in the mags tends to help smooth that out. but really, unless these were 1st-use brand new mags, they should have smoothed up.

The only failure I ever had was a slow bolt-closure on a brand-new 10 round E-lander. I rotated the gun to look inside the port, and that jostling alone was enough for the bolt spring to finish closing the bolt, and for me to keep firing. Ran 100% ever since.

I guess you could try to open up the gas system more. I'm running PSA on an Anderson lower, and they seem a bit generous on gas. One advantage this gives is the gun gets jostled a little more, which I think helps mags run better. I will say, my PSA and Elanders have been very reliable together, and I'm pushing close to 1000+ round downrange by now. Everything from Wolf to reloads to Hornady factory; all of it runs.

At this point, if you can't find something specific and then correct it, I have to admit, one's faith and confidence in the system has got to be a bit shaken by now. Sounds frustrating. Have you tried throwing the upper on a different lower?

[VASCAR2]

Ballistic Advantage was using a small gas port on the 12.5” 6.5 Grendel barrels because they assumed most users would be using suppressors. If the 6.5 Grendel is under gassed plus new E-Lander mags I could see where you might experience stoppages.

The only way I can unload a fully loaded E-Lander mag is using a piece of rigid plastic to push the second cartridge down to relieve pressure on the top cartridge in the mag. I then use a pencil with an eraser to push the top cartridge out of the mag. The new E-Lander mags rattle but once the springs take set my E-Lander mags no longer rattle when loaded. Once the mag springs wear my 6.5 Grendel mags are no harder to load or unload than my ASC 6.5 Grendel mags.

If your cartridges are binding inside the mag and inhibiting the cartridges from rising inspect the front seam where the mag is spot welded. If this seam is improperly welded you can experience feed issues and I’d contact the vendor where you purchased the mag. I mark my mags so I can identify a troublesome mag.

Faxon 12” Group Buy 6.5 Grendel barrels with carbine length gas port have .068” gas port and seem to function reliably.

I checked some of the threads on Ballistic Advantage 12.5” Hansen barrel gas port size and they were .055”. Forum members were drilling out their gas port to get reliable function or returning their barrels to have the gas ports enlarged. Some members were drilling their ports to .065” others went as large as .070”.

I don’t know what size gas port BA is currently using on their 12.5” 6.5 Grendel Barrels.

[dblazevich]

[QUOTE=VASCAR2;239313]Ballistic Advantage was using a small gas port on the 12.5? 6.5 Grendel barrels because they assumed most users would be using suppressors. If the 6.5 Grendel is under gassed plus new E-Lander mags I could see where you might experience stoppages.

The only way I can unload a fully loaded E-Lander mag is using a piece of rigid plastic to push the second cartridge down to relieve pressure on the top cartridge in the mag. I then use a pencil with an eraser to push the top cartridge out of the mag. The new E-Lander mags rattle but once the springs take set my E-Lander mags no longer rattle when loaded. Once the mag springs wear my 6.5 Grendel mags are no harder to load or unload than my ASC 6.5 Grendel mags.

If your cartridges are binding inside the mag and inhibiting the cartridges from rising inspect the front seam where the mag is spot welded. If this seam is improperly welded you can experience feed issues and I?d contact the vendor where you purchased the mag. I mark my mags so I can identify a troublesome mag.

Faxon 12? Group Buy 6.5 Grendel barrels with carbine length gas port have .068? gas port and seem to function reliably.
This is good information -

I actually opened up my port to .078" and then dialed it down with a gas block. I initially had some pretty bad short stroking problems with the original barrel when I was zeroing the rifle.

It sounds like I need to sand down and wear these magazines in a good bit. I'll bust out the Dremel and dowel this weekend and get to work. Thanks for the advice everyone!

[FRB6.5]

I have a recent BA 12.5" barrel, it was not fully drilled through, it measured .065 on the surface with a pin gage and .062 to reach into the bore. I opened it up to match.
FWIW the 12" Green Mountain group buy measure .068 with a pin gage.

Both ran fine with Hornady AG and Black, I do not have any Wolf 100 gr. to try.

[Lastrites]

Elanders, besides the potential of sharp lips that need deburring and polishing the inside corners at the front of the lips can be sharp as well. A rough spot weld that you could file and buff you need to also see if the front edge is catching the bottom mouth of the case so you may need to deburr and polish there as well or possibly have to relieve just a touch of material. Clean and lightly oil, then take a wooden dowel or something and cycle the spring a bunch of times to help with spring break-in. Springs really only break in when they are cycled and not rest whether that is empty or loaded.

[A5BLASTER]

I would pick up a few CPD grendel mags of the capacity you like and work with them.

My other mag suggestion isn't real feasible for most folks so I won't mention it.

[Kswhitetails]

I seem to recall that I had many of these issues with each of my Elanders. I got a couple at a time, not all at once. I do know I've run steel case in all of them. They almost all run stiffer by far than my 556 mags, but that's to be expected, before I got my grendels, I shot a bit of 556, and the mags show it.

Use will probably make things feed as they should, but I don't think we should ever expect the mags to feel like our 556 counterparts, they're completely different animals. I guess I'll know when one of my mags hits the 5k mark...

[dblazevich]

Okay, I tried wearing in the magazines like crazy and some of them are still failing. Going to try to run a few more tests to narrow down the good mags vs bad mags to see if component swapping will help narrow down the issue

[Shooter31]

what do ya'll use to polish out the feedlips? Just curious.

[Kswhitetails]

Red 3M scotchbrite and elbow grease. Gloves. Good gloves.

[A5BLASTER]

what do ya'll use to polish out the feedlips? Just curious.

I used my debt card to polish the feed lips on my elander mags when I was useing that mag style.