The Savage I tested has a detachable magazine, and in the past Savage Arms has had some problems with these types of magazines simply falling out of a gun. I believe that Savage got it right with the AXIS II XP that I tested for this article. I had no problems with the magazine falling out of the gun. However, you are comparing apples to oranges when you talk about the Savage rifles with the built-in magazine. I have never had a problem with any Savage rifle with a built-in magazine in loading all the rounds into it without any problems. If you are having problems with the “runners” being sharp, might I suggest taking a piece of steel wool or extra-fine emery paper and with a few swipes take the sharpness off the edges?
I don’t know of any “paid testers” that are on the Savage payroll, and if Savage employees are reporting everything is fine and dandy when they know there is a problem, they are doing an injustice to their employer. Quite honestly, when I first started writing about firearms, back in the early 1990s, I believed that gun writers were paid by the gun companies to say good things about their products. If that is the case, I missed the boat. No gun company has ever offered me any incentive to say good things about their firearms. It’s quite the contrary; I have been threatened with a lawsuit by a major gun company in the past because of an article I wrote on one of their firearms, and I did give them three tries to repair a gun I had. They failed. Obviously, I must have been correct in my findings. That gun hasn’t been in the line-up for many years now.
We can discuss the merits of the push-feed over the Mauser claw feed in bolt action guns until the cows come home. Both are proven methods, and if someone prefers one type of feed over another, I have no problem with that. If the push-feed wasn’t reliable, the gun makers wouldn’t produce them. I refuse to get into a debate over which method is more reliable. The debate has no end, and we are all entitled to our positions on these things.
I can only report on the guns that I test for my articles, and the Savage AXIS II XP had no serious flaws. If it did, I would have reported my findings. I have no vested interest in Savage Arms or any other gun maker; I simply report my testing results on one particular sample, and in this case, it was a gift. It wasn’t received from the factory, so I didn’t have a “ringer” of any sort.
According to the Savage Arms website, they have been building guns since 1894. If their guns had so many problems, they would have been out of business many years ago. To be sure, every gun maker eventually drops the ball on a new design. The Remington Model 710 comes to mind, and they make every attempt to correct any glaring design faults. When that can’t be done, the gun maker will drop that design and move on to a new and improved version. Some gun makers will make an attempt to deny there is a design flaw and will do everything in their power to hide it, to wit the Remington Model 700 and the trigger flaw that sometimes leads to the gun firing if dropped. It took a lot of years for Remington to admit this problem (after some law suits) and recall the guns for a fix. Other gun makers jump right on the bandwagon when there is a problem and readily admit it and correct it.
Thanks for taking the time to write…
Pat Cascio
You made the .300 sav. now I can’t find ammo. Why don’t you make affordable ammo