I did my first take-down field strip of my M1A today (I rarely get to shoot it, so aside of barrel and bore cleaning, including anything else I can reach, I have never taken it down and cleaned it out, greased it [bad I know], etc).
Everything went flawless until the very end. After I did my extreme cleaning of everything, and applied my own grease in the sweet spots, I reassembled the rifle.
During my function test, everything goes well except:
Moving the op rod back, is very smooth and perfect, as it always has been. Upon doing a dry fire afterward, and then pulling the op rod back again, I have a large amount of tension and have to put a small amount of force to get it to lock the bolt back and charge the rifle for another fire.
I can observe on the side the action part of the trigger group that strikes and rear of the bolt, and it is what seems to be giving the tension when pulling the op rod back, after it is fired. Once I pull it back and it is locked back into its pre-fire place, there is no tension whatsoever and the op-rod and bolt move smoothly again.
I took down the rifle again and observed for anything out of the ordinary, or at least what I know to be ordinary, and I could see nothing. Upon reassembly, I ran into the same issue again.
Apologies if some of my nomenclature is off, but I hope I described it to the point that you can tell me what is wrong, if anything.
To my knowledge, I'm 99.9% sure the rifle never had that kind of tension before, when I charged it after a dry fire, but I could be wrong as it was not something I did often.
*edit*
I went back and repeated the above a few times, charge, dry fire, etc, and it seems to not be as tense as I originally thought. So is this the norm for the rifle after you dry fire? I honestly do not remember how it was in the past as I did it maybe two times in the past year.