Air Arms Owners Club

One of our club members has a S400 MPR sporter and when the bolt is closed the ball handle touches the stock. Mine has half inch clearance.
Simple question - is the handle located in one position relative to the bolt, eg on a square spigot or flat, or can it be tightened in any orientation?
Neither or us wants to unscrew it on brand new guns unless we have to!

Just pull the bolt back, slacken the Allen screw partially, turn bolt anticlockwise a bit and then tighten again. Repeat until satisfactory results are obtained

Magic, Thanks!

Right. The screw was very difficult to turn in the cocking handle but free turning in the bolt. The handle is therefore quite free turning on the bolt with the screw tight. By wiggling the screw back and forth it got looser in the handle but still binds up well before it locks the handle to the bolt.
I told him to take it off and see what the problem is but I reckon there's Loctite round the bolt head but should the handle be loctited to the bolt when assembling?

Some are loctited on and some aren't

eboswan wrote:Some are loctited on and some aren't

Thanks Brian I think thats what he needs. It may also be that the allen screw is bottoming out. Thats what it feels like. As a designer in the 1970s I used Loctite to fix sprockets to shafts on heavy cylinder block conveyors in the face of traditional practice and it needs to be between bolt and handle not handle and screw head!
This particular rifle has been back to the shop twice for misfiring problems in its first month but it was when the bolt kept blowing out on firing that I noticed the bolt was simply not engaging the locking slot.

I just found these instructions from Rowan that adds more detail.

http://rowanengineering.com/pdf/S400BoltHandle.pdf