I purchased a light 12 and got around to shooting it last weekend. The gun will not eject shell automatically and pick up new shell. Any thoughts?
Hey joe, welcome to the Browning Owners Community!! Assuming you gave it a nice cleaning when you first got it, does it have any unusual wear marks in the chamber? when you say it will not eject, does the shell seem to get stuck from ejecting or does it simply not even try to cycle the round?
BadJoe - Make sure you have the friction rings set for "light" or "heavy" loads. How the rings are oriented will make a difference with ejecting and feeding the next round. Try these two links. (Save them for reference later on for other fun "how-to's.") How to change the rings: http://www.browning.com/customerservice ... asp?id=105 Auto-5 field service manual: http://www.midwestgunworks.com/field_se ... manual.pdf
As stated above, make sure the rings are set properly. Also make sure the rings are oiled a bit. The barrel and bolt need to come just about all the way back to kick out the spent case and pick up a new shell. You should be able to put the butt of the unloaded (no shells in chamber or magazine) gun on the ground and push the barrel down into the receiver so that the bolt locks back without excessive force. The old A5 shotguns are certainly not like those more modern guns that can shoot all loads interchangeably.
Same thing happened to me a few years back. I hadn't fired my Light 12 since the early 70s so I thought it may just need a little oil. The problem was the rings. I'd never fired loads light enough for them to eject using the setup for heavy loads. In fact, I didn't even know about the rings. Dad bought the gun for me in the early-mid 60s. Here's a good video on the ring setup if you don't have a manual. I plan to shoot my gun in a couple of days and wanted to check out the ring setup and found this video. The setup is described about half way through the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UhDm19gQZM
