When I disassembled my 1896 Krag action, a small square flat piece of metal came out of the door. (Not sure what this part is called) What it was doing I doing not know but it fell out when I removed the hinge pin and door. It must have just been sitting in there and the follower would come up against it.  :-/

A photo would help, but, I imagine it is a piece of a broken part.

If all straight edges, likely part of the gate & follower spring. ("R")

If curved and notched, likely part of the 'cover' of the hinge-pin. ("P")

---

I took a pic of the piece. It was laying in the Gate door behind the follower.

---

It looks like the one edge, from this picture, is irregular by having rusted or having been broken. I don't recognize this as any part of the Krag action at all. Must just have fallen in there or been placed in the action for some reason.

Does everything else work? Anything seem out of place?

Maybe someone else has an idea.

If not sure, take a variety of pictures of the action and we'll see what might be wrong or different, if anything.

Nice little mystery.

Good! It looks like an unrelated piece of scrap-metal.

Maybe it was wedged in place, to limit follower travel & magazine capacity, for some irrational reason?

The magazine box is just a handy place to put things.  A friend let me work on his Krag rfle, I bent the trigger pin somehow and got him another.  The new one stayed in the magazine for about 10yrs until I got around to working on the rifle again.

I haven't reassembled the rifle as I'm cleaning it up. Nothing that I can see would have cause to have this piece in there. This rifle came from a Grandfather that  BUBBA'd this gun for a deer rifle, back when the gun wasn't that old. It must have been a heck of a good idea to add this piece of metal at the time. LOL

Possibly, someone used that flat piece of steel to lift or lever the Krag "extractor-hook" upward for bolt removal.

Some individuals have difficulty and find the process painful to their thumb. This could be an 'improvised tool' that, as 'Madsenshooter' stated, was stored inside the Magazine-Gate.

As they say in Scotland .... "Whatever For"?
(Why would you do that)?

I have seen bits of metal used to act as spacers around the mag box door spring to create extra tension or to keep the spring from moving left/right after the hinge pin was installed when the spring was broken.

Just judging by the picture next to the steel tape that piece looks king of large though. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding where the metal bit came from exactly.

One possibility I thought of, some localities have limits on magazine capacity when deer hunting. Could it have been a makeshift plug as used in shotguns when hunting migratory birds?