The bore was pretty dirty, but cleaned up nicely. I picked a good Marble's tang sight from my stash to put on the rifle. It was not drilled and tapped for a tang sight, in fact it had "CANADIAN CENTENNIAL" stamped boldly down the length of the tang. Well, I didn't buy it for "pretty", I bought it to shoot, so now instead of a "D" there is a neatly drilled and tapped tang sight screw hole in the rifle's tang. The new tang sight covers all that text anyway.
I took a box of my favorite cast lead hand loads and headed to the range to see how it would shoot. I loaded the magazine and proceeded to lever one into the chamber. When I tried to fire the rifle, well, she's a no go bang! Hmmm.... a quick check revealed that the lever was not quite tripping the safety behind the trigger. An extra squeeze on the lever took care of it and the rifle shot fine, as long as I squeezed that lever hard. But why was it doing that? One round refused to chamber completely, and after extracting it I saw that the bullet had distinct rifling marks around its circumference. None of my other three Winchester .30-30s had any problem with this ammo. I checked a few more loaded rounds, and each showed at least some rifling marks upon extraction. This rifle obviously had a short throat in the chamber. Here is a pic of a dummy round showing the rifling marks on the bullet:
A little reaming on the throat should take care of that, so I took the rifle back to where I bought it as they have a good gunsmith working there. I explained the problem and left him the rifle with a few dummy rounds. I didn't ask for a cost estimate as the reaming needed to be done in order for me to shoot my cast bullet loads. Three weeks later during my regular Friday visit, I asked one of the guys working the counter if my rifle was done yet. He said yes, he had seen the 'smith working on it and it was ready. He went in back and brought it out, the paperwork flapping merrily from a tie on the lever. I was a little worried at how steep the bill might be, as I had not asked for a quote. The counter man pulled off the paperwork, looked at it and said, "I hope you have this much money on you!"
The bill showed that the 'smith had disassembled the rifle, removed the barrel, reamed the throat, reassembled it and tested the sample dummy rounds. My jaw dropped a little when I looked down at the price and saw....
N/C - meaning "No Charge"
I guess it pays to be a steady customer! They wanted to make that rifle right for me. I haven't taken it back out yet, but I will soon, and I'm sure everything will be fine!
SHASTA
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