Feed question

I was wanting some info on feeding linked ammunition. I have a ORF semi. I am trying to familiarize myself with it as much as possible. I was working on head spacing and have found that the action will go full battery lock up with no round even when the barrel is screwed all the way in. It is not until the barrel is fairly tightly fully screwed in that it will fail to go full battery. I am figuring that for head spacing I am going to be about 3 clicks from barrel fully screwed in. I was also using the headspace gauge that came with it, and it seems reasonable from what I can tell. One thing that I have noticed however is that with a belt of linked ammo, the weapon will not feed reliably when cycled by hand. It seems that the extractor/ejector is not catching and pulling the rounds from the links. Once it has caught them, the bolt chambers and ejects rounds just fine. Please note that this is all with manually cycling everything with the top cover closed. Since my ORF failed to come with a barrel spring catch and now seems to have trouble feeding, I am starting to get a lil frustrated. I am hoping to get up to speed with this weapon quickly before I annoy everyone with all my posts/questions. I have had many transferrable MG's as well as a host of other pistols and rifles from many different eras, but this has been by far the most challenging.
Thanks for your continued patience