Are Lever Action Rifles Reliable?

hello there everybody i am chris baker and i am speaking to you from here at the luckygunner.com world headquarters when i launched this series i said that it was going to be all about having fun with lever action rifles now that's a little different than the other series series is that i've done in the past when i did my series on pocket pistols and shotguns and revolvers i was looking at them exclusively almost from the perspective of self-defense i spent a lot of time considering the strengths and weaknesses of the different guns as life-saving tools reliability is always a big part of that for the lever action series the topic of self-defense is going to come up from time to time but it's not going to be the main focus even so i do want to tackle the issue of reliability because this is an area where there seems to be a lot of misconceptions for whatever reason lever actions have a reputation for being rugged and tough and reliable they are the perfect gun for the prepper or the outdoor survivalist but the truth is that compared to almost any other rifle being made today lever actions are more delicate and prone to failure i love lever actions and we are going to have a lot of fun with them in this series it's not necessarily fun to focus on all of the shortcomings of something that you enjoy but today i do feel like i've got to do a little bit of that myth busting so i'm going to give you five reasons why lever action rifles are not as reliable or durable as the prevailing sentiment might suggest so number one survivorship bias this does not really say anything about the inherent mechanical reliability of lever actions but i think it helps explain why they have such an inflated reputation survivorship bias is a logical fallacy where we tend to focus on the evidence that we can see and overlook the evidence we can't see there are a lot of pretty old but still functional lever action rifles out there like this one that makes it easy to assume that lever actions are hardy dependable rifles that last forever but what we are not as likely to see are all of the broken and worn out lever actions that have been left to rust in the back of closets tens of millions of lever actions have been produced in the last 160 years even if 90 of them broke down and turned into dust there would still be plenty of them floating around out there for somebody to point out and say look at that you see nothing stops a lever action we also most of the time don't know a whole lot about how much these old rifles have been fired or what conditions they've been exposed to any rifle will last a hundred years if it's just sitting in a gun safe as long as it gets oiled every once in a while even regular use is not the same thing as heavy or hard use your granddaddy could have taken a handful of deer every hunting season with his 30-30 and still not have fired more than about 200 rounds total in a 40-year period that gun may have been 100 reliable for him and what he wanted to do with it but if you took that same rifle to like a cowboy action match or some kind of rifle class it very well could choke within the first five minutes part of the challenge of answering whether lever actions are reliable is understanding what we mean by the word reliable everybody has a different standard in mind generally speaking our standard for reliability is much higher today than it was a few decades ago we expect our guns to endure higher round counts and harsher treatment than our grandparents did so just because you've got a lever action that's 50 or 60 years old and still functional doesn't mean it's the ideal survival rifle for the inevitable coming apocalypse numero dos mechanical complexity a lot of people associate manually operated firearms with mechanical simplicity a semi-automatic must have more moving parts and that means more things that can go wrong right but if you've ever taken a lever action apart you know these guns are not simple there's a lot going on inside the action whenever you run the lever and it's all interconnected whenever one part moves all the parts have to move and they all have to move at the correct time and in the correct order there are a lot of metal pieces rubbing up against other metal pieces if any piece of the puzzle including the ammunition itself is not just the right size and shape the whole thing stops you can have the tiniest burr or manufacturing defect in a single part and the gun will just stop cycling altogether that mechanical complexity is part of why lever actions tend to be relatively expensive to make it's why reliability problems are difficult to diagnose and even harder to repair without a gunsmith if i was going to get a gun based purely on mechanical simplicity i would pick up a bolt action long before a lever action by comparison bolt action rifles are pretty straightforward machines these days even the cheap ones like this ruger american tend to work pretty well most of the time they've got a magazine which may or may not be detachable that pushes the rounds up and then you've got a bolt that moves back and forth to cycle the rounds in and out of the chamber that's pretty much all there is to the feeding cycle stuff can still break there's just not as many things to break as a lever action now there might be other reasons to choose a lever action over a bolt action but reliability is not usually one of them a lever action is kind of like a manual clockwork mechanism just because it's reliant on manpower to cycle the action doesn't necessarily mean it's robust number three screws everywhere a more specific aspect of lever action design that tends to cause problems is the liberal use of screws especially in the receiver screws and firearms don't always play together real nice the kinds of forces and vibrations that a gun is subjected to when it's fired are the same kind of forces that often make screws want to unscrew themselves if i were to have a problem with this ar-15 the most likely culprit is the optic mount that is the weakest link in the whole system so i put a witness mark on each screw with a paint marker so i can tell if any of them start to back out same thing with this bolt action the optic mount screws are probably the most likely part of the gun to give me trouble second would be the screws attaching the optic rail to the receiver and third would be the screws attaching the action to the stock if any of those things start to come loose i will begin having problems with accuracy but the gun will still function the screws in a lever action tend to have a more mission critical job and there are a lot of them not including the screws on the top for mounting optics or the screws back here holding in the buttstock this henry big boy has six screws one two three four five six screws just in the receiver marlins also have six screws that hold the action together the receiver of this winchester model 94 has nine screws in it and there are other screws on these rifles but it seems like the receiver screws are the ones that are most likely to have problems and from what i've seen it also seems like marlins are more likely to have issues than other brands sometimes the screws will never give you a problem with other guns they seem to be constantly loose whether you've been shooting it or not so it never hurts to check the receiver screws to make sure they are tight before and after a shooting session or before you take it out in the field you might also consider some thread locker if you've got a problem screw i suggest starting with purple loctite 222 because it is made for small diameter screws like these and remember a little bit goes a long way to add insult to injury the screws used in lever actions are most often these little delicate flat head screws that can be easily damaged if you use the wrong screwdriver so you can't just use any old screwdriver from the hardware store you need hollow ground screwdrivers and they need to be the correct width and thickness for the screw and keep in mind each gun will have at least two or three different size screw heads to tighten every screw on this marlin for example i have to use four different screwdriver bits now i do want to mention the new marlin dark series rifles because they actually have torx head screws in the receiver i think that's an excellent feature especially if you value function over form everybody's got a set of torx bits and the screws are a lot harder to damage than the flat head screws there are some aftermarket thumb screws available to replace the lever screw for marlin and henry rifles wild west guns makes this one and ranger point precision also has several different versions obviously a thumb screw is a lot easier to check and keep snug without tools the lever screw is also the only screw that you actually have to remove in order to take out the lever and the bolt for cleaning and maintenance but with or without the thumb screw if you own a lever action rifle you really should invest in a decent set of gunsmithing screwdriver bits for all of the other receiver screws number four user induced malfunctions any manually operated firearm is only as reliable as the person shooting it with lever action rifles there are numerous ways the shooter can induce problems in the firing cycle the most common by far is short stroking the action that's when you don't run the lever out completely until it stops so the gun doesn't get to complete that part of the cycle usually you end up with a failure to feed or failure to eject this will often happen if you get in too much of a hurry or if you are not very familiar with the gun some lever actions will not consistently eject if you run the action too slowly or too quickly some will not feed properly if the gun is not oriented just right they rely on gravity working in a certain direction in order to feed so if the gun is not parallel to the ground and you're trying to run the action like that or if it's canted over to one side or the other then the gun might not feed on the first try marlin rifles that have the cross bolt safety tend to mess people up with most other rifles if the safety is on the trigger won't move and that's your clue that you've forgotten something but when the marlin safety is on you can still pull the trigger and the hammer will fall the safety stops it before it hits the firing pin but to the shooter it seems like you've just had a failure to fire so the you might just try to cycle the action and try to shoot it again you could end up emptying the whole gun that way before you realize that you've had the safety on the whole time it's not uncommon to get a lever action that's picky about what kind of ammo it will run now that's not usually what we think of as a user induced problem but i'm going to include it in this category since the user is the one who chooses what ammo to feed it the most well-known example is probably the 357 and to a lesser extent the 44 magnum lever actions they are supposed to be compatible with 38 special and 44 special respectively and usually they are but a lot of guns are noticeably less reliable and less smooth with the specials if the overall length of the cartridge is too short it might move around too much when it's on the carrier and it seems like that can cause some hiccups in the feeding cycle sometimes it's not just the length of the cartridge but the shape of the bullet that can have an effect on the feeding again with the handgun cartridges in particular this can be an issue some lever actions run a lot more smoothly with round nose full metal jacket ammo than with anything else again just because a gun is manually operated does not mean it's inherently reliable you still have to give it the right inputs so that it'll do what you want number five intended use the lever action rifles made today are just not designed to be subjected to the kind of use and abuse that we take for granted that our modern semi-autos can tolerate i'm thinking especially of ar pattern rifles here but really any rifle with a modern military pedigree was designed around certain considerations that were not even remotely priorities for your lever action even if all you ever do with your ar is use it to put holes in paper and wood chucks the design it's based on has been tested and refined many times over so that it'll go thousands and thousands of rounds without any need for attention from an armorer or a gunsmith it was designed to be disassembled in the field with just a cartridge for a tool it's been tested in every extreme weather condition imaginable it's expected to maintain a certain level of accuracy even if the barrel heats up from continuous firing there is a whole industry of aftermarket ar parts that has been made possible because parts interchangeability was a mandatory requirement of the military none of that's true of a lever action if you try to buy a replacement part for your lever action you might run into that dreaded phrase hand fitting may be required they don't tend to work that well if they get dirty you can't do much to fix them if you don't have a toolbox accuracy can go out the window just by resting the mag tube on something when you fire the very first lever actions that popped up around the time of the civil war they were made with military use in mind sometimes or even referred to as the original assault rifles but even back then a lot of people believed they were too fragile to be used in that role they've gotten better and better over time but we haven't exactly had 160 years of continuous evolution and improvement and lever action design most of today's lever actions are still based on those models that came out in the late 1800s and that's okay because today's lever actions are made with hunting and plinking in mind and they are really good at those things we just have to have realistic expectations if we decide to start treating these guns the way we would an ar i want to finish up today with a story that i heard recently that i think summarizes all this pretty well this comes from morgan atwood he said quote i have two non-functional winchesters a 94 and an 1886 that were my grandfather's they became his sometime in the 1940s because he did gunsmithing for one of the large ranching concerns in the area which issued rifles the practice was to bring him all the broken ones and take back the best of the fixed ones he retained the others for parts that he couldn't make which were few in that world at that time those rifles were ubiquitous and still required a skilled gunsmith and machinist to fix with only some percentage being easy fixes almost everyone who is into ars has more parts for him just by the nature of the hobby than my grandfather ever stopped for any gun in his gunsmithing days and they're easier to replace and get back into service by far i wish survival oriented topics were not entrenched in this nostalgia for the better times that never actually existed couldn't have said it better myself lever actions are tons of fun still useful for lots of things but when it's finally time to emerge from your nuclear fallout shelter and help rebuild society you're probably going to want an ar-15 [Music] you

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 205,396

Rating: 4.880167 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Ime09uh01-k

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mr_J_Browning]

If you short stroke it they will jam because the cartridge will not travel far enough to seat properly on the lifter. They you gotta take it apart and pull it out etc.

[u/SecureNarwhal]

I have a buddy who works for an outfitter and I asked him if he carries a lever action when he's on horseback. He just kind of laughed at me and now I know why.

[u/Beretta_errata]

"do the maintenance" - Mark Novak on youtube

[u/JeffinCalgary2]

My Savage 99C has Failure to Eject issues (with surplus ammo).

Hickok45 (of YouTube fame) had some problems with a BLR misfiring on a recent episode.

[u/wronggdrecroom]

Does anybody think lever actions are reliable? I love them, but that ain't why.

[u/scooterplugs]

There’s a soft spot in my heart for them, and I will always have one, but not my first choice for getting into a hairy situation with.