Chamber out of round?

[Damartin95]

So I bought a second hand custom rifle in 300 prc. Got some factory hornady ammo to mess around with before I handload. This is where I had the first issue, about 1/3 of factory shells where very tight closing in the rifle due to bullet contacting the Lans( colored the cartridge with blue and you could see heavy marks on bullets. Not a big deal, just thought I'd seat the bullets alittle deeper. So I went ahead shot a few of the loads that chambered easily so I would have a few pieces of once fired brass. The problem is that the once fires brass will only chamber when the brass is oriented a specific direction. I'm assuming this is the direction it was fired in, leading me to believe the chamber may be out of round.

The brass wasn't deprimed, cleaned or set back in any way, just fired once and then attempted to rechamber. I did check the gun with go/no go gauge and check the brass with calipers to see if I could find any spots out of round.( I couldn't but they doesn't mean it's not there)

So my question is anything else It could be of that I should check?
Also if I plan on full length sizing the brass(which i do) does it really matter?
Trying to find a way not to have to rebarrel the gun I just bought lol

 

[Castle Rock]

It’s almost impossible to ream a chamber out of round
Size a case and see how you go, my money says you won’t have any problems
Make a dummy round to check seating depth

 

[cowboy]

If you can’t resize your once fired brass I wouldn’t fight it very long - been there, done that. Rather than rebarrel I’d take it to a competent gunsmith and have him clean out your chamber by running a SAAMI reamer into your chamber to clean it up and also give you the proper OAL to your lands.
if you want to go down a deep rabbit hole just google PRC pressure problems, clickers and OAL.
The PRC cartridges are proprietary Hornady designed cartridges and when they submitted their dimensional criteria to SAAMI for approval and acceptance everyone started jumping on the band wagon only to realize that approved dimensions were border line tight.
I just had a barrel rechambered and cleaned up - no big deal and 1/10th the cost of new barrel.

 

[TaperPin]

The bolt face may be machined a little wonky. If it’s off just a few .001”, rotating a fired case would then be off twice that.

It would seem easy to machine a simple bolt face, but if a gunsmith is opening it up from a standard size bolt face, it’s hard to hang onto without a special jig, hard to dial in, and the rest of the action may not be in line with the center of the bolt. If the action threads are wonky, it causes the same problems. If the bolt face is off one direction and the receiver threads are off in the other, and the barrel threads are off making it worse, stacking of errors gives you fits.

I’ll bet the receiver threads are close enough, the bolt face is only off a little bit, and the main issue is how the barrel was threaded. If the guy doing the work had a small hobby lathe and the barrel threads were cut using a steady rest, that would have to follow the outer dimensions of the barrel, which are off unless trued to the bore. Then a piloted reamer would follow the bore.

Worst case would be a hobby “gunsmith” without a lathe and he hand turned the reamer to enlarge a chambered 30-06 barrel to the PRC - that could be way way off.

The good news is it’s easy to sort out. Once the barrel is pulled, measuring the bolt face to front of receiver takes 2 minutes. Indicating the barrel in a lathe makes it easy to measure the concentricity of the bore, chamber, threads and shoulder. It might be an easy fix, or the threads need to be cut off, rethreaded and rechambered.

Never underestimate the ability of a guy and inexpensive out of whack lathe to screw a gun up!

 

[Shortschaf]

Rolling that brass around on a flat surface would show if it's out of round pretty quickly Id think

But honestly I wouldn't worry about how the fired brass chambers at all

As long as sized stuff works and its accurate nothing else matters. Sounds like the chamber's just a little on the tight side if factory ammo is tight. If that bothers you, then have your gs kiss it with a reamer