Tweaking the Magazine Release

It appears on my first go, that I removed too much material at the magazine release lever.

Why did I do this?  Because the Hesse receiver has incorrectly placed trunion holes.  I my fitting of the trunion, it was placed such that the magazines seat too tightly into the magazine well, due to the fact that they are pressing against the bottom of the rails too tightly.  To fix this, I removed some material from the magazine release lever.  It appears I removed too much.

Test firing at the range confirmed this - when I would either pull back on the magazine (toward my body) or press the magazine forward against the bench, feeding would happen as expected with no problems.  When the magazine was not held and left only to the retaining lever, feed problems happened quite frequently, almost every other round.

Pics of the problem.  Note the location of the bolt in relation to the back of the cartridge.  The wiggle of the cartridge allows the bolt to completely glide over the back of the cartridge without ever actually touching the cartridge:

I have read where others had a similar problem, due to the safety stop being in the way of the magazine, where it was set too far forward.  I confirmed this is not the case here:

Notice the orientation of the magazine lever.  The one on the right is when I was pressing the magazine backwards toward the trigger, when it feeds correctly.  The one on the left is with no pressure on the magazine, when the misfeeds occur.

Update - a recent discussion on akfiles.com sparked an idea - the problem is that the mag release is too far away from the receiver.  I had planned to shorten this distance by replacement of the mag release with a new one that was longer, since I dremelled this one down. 

Rethinking the problem, another way to shorten this distance is to trim the safety stop - (slaps forehead) - this will keep me from the arduous task of replacing the mag release.  So I did some testing (lucky for me this is a screw build).

First, I removed the safety stop and replaced it with shims made from 16 gauge sheet metal.  It turns out the gap is two 16-gauge sheet metal thicknesses.  This allows the magazine to seat properly, with a snug fit.  This should be what I need!

Measuring gap:     Compared to the safety selector:   

Time to start filing...

    Looks like it is completed:     

Now it hand-feeds properly from both sides of the mag.  Just hand-feed 3 mags full, not a single misfeed. 

Next stop - the range... going to be a few weeks before I can get there.

Stay tuned...