My dad's 20 gauge Savage Fox Model B doesn't stay open far enough on its own to allow loading or unloading. You need to give it just a little extra downward pressure to allow you to pluck the fired and extracted shells out without their rims hanging up on the action fences. Likewise, when you load it, you need that same extra little bit of pressure beyond where the barrels "hang" by themselves when the action is opened.
It was like that from day one, when my dad bought it new in the 1980s. It is still like that now.
I kind of thought that maybe it was designed that way on purpose. The way it is, when you're chasing chukars over really nasty terrain, and want to render your gun safe for the kind of hard scrabble rock hopping that I sometimes do in my chukar chasing, you can just open the action and leave the rounds in the chambers, but they can fall out because the barrels don't droop down enough with their own weight to allow the cartridge rims to clear the action fences.
If it is defective, it has been a cool and useful defect to me.
My old Parker Hale / Ugartechea 20 bore had the same issue, too. There again, I thought it was neat because the rounds couldn't come out of the chambers when I had the action open while boulder hopping.
I have no idea how to "fix" this. I really only chimed in to let the OP know that at least one Savage Fox B was like he described from new.
-JP
