Norell conversion

[KurtM]

Just got a buddies Norell conversion working for him. It had never worked well since he got it in the early 80s. It would stove pipe, double feed, bolt over base.... You name it! This was on an AMT 10-22 clone. First the barrel wasn't square to the receiver radially, so the extractor was in a bind. It had dented the barrel in at the extractor slot and was causing extraction problems. Next the extractor was. Sharp and square no radius to allow proper feeding from magazines. The barrel had no champher at the bottom to guide cartridges into the chamber. The extractor cut in the bolt was too deep allowing the extractor to come over to far to allow proper feeding from a magazine, and had a tab of metal sticking into the bolt face forcing cartridges to be loaded at an angle slowing and jamming the bolt. A tapper punch got the chamber round again. Beveled the extractor, and with a small center punch raise a bump in the extractor groove so it would sit at the right level in the bolt face. After that it did better, but not quite there. Still bolt over base malfunctions as the bolt out ran the feeding of the magazine. Tried 4 different types and a drum mag, and all just couldn't keep up. Then I remembered a trick with the Beta Drum for the ARs, those double snail drum 100 round mags. You've got to use a bit of graphite to slick up the drum to feed efficiently. So grabbed the 25 round Ruger MX-25 mags and put a puff of graphite every 5 round while loading. Did the same with the 70 round Drum mag, every 5 rounds. Then I shook the hell out of them. The conversion now runs damn near 100%. Only stoppage was a couple of dud rounds where the primer didn't go off. Cyclic rate on this bad boy is right around 1100 rounds per minute, maybe a bit more. What a fun little .22! With the 70 round drum you can write your name in lead!

As a side note the tax stamp holder was present for all operations and at no time did I have sole possession of the rifle.