Hello Gents,

I've had this Norinco NHM-91 for 25 years and it's always performed beautifully, no matter what ammo I put in it, but lately I've noticed some problems. The gun was in storage (temp controlled, no humidity) from the end of 2007 until the end of 2016. Since 2016 I've had it out only two other times, and both of those times it's been having periodic failure to extract issues, both with cheapo steel case (Wolf, Hot Shot) and with brass case (Sellier and Bellot).

Basically, it doesn't fully extract the empty case from the chamber and obviously that leads to a jam when the action tries to close again. When I remove the magazine and close the action, I'm able to manually extract the spent case without much effort at all. The spent cases that have failed to extract do not show signs of stress or odd wear around the lip. In one or two cases the gun has properly ejected the spent case but then fails to feed a fresh cartridge properly, with the new round getting crammed against the inside of the receiver on its way to the breach. As a result, the bullet ends up getting shoved into the case and powder starts escaping around the edges of the bullet. Fun times. Lastly, at one point today the gun fired, ejected the case, grabbed a new round, and then the bolt assembly stopped moving forward about half way home, even though the cartridge was feeding properly into the breach. WTF?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Is my extractor going bad? Are the magazine springs just old and weak? Is the recoil spring old and weak? I've cleaned and lubricated the whole thing, but that didn't seem to make much difference.

Thanks!
Doc Blank

If you have this same issue with multiple brands of ammo and multiple magazines, replace your recoil spring and extractor spring.

Much appreciated!

Clean and lube...

Will do! Replacing the springs anyhow too, since they're old and I've never done so.