What I could see at the gunshow was that the magazine hanger and the end of the magazine tube were mangled. There are also various deep gouges in the metal work here and there and of course buggered screw heads. But the bubba that bludgeoned this rifle wasn't your average bubba! The reason the magazine hanger was mangled is because Bubba drove it out of the slot sideways. The hanger is supposed to twist in and out. I guess when he reassembled it he had to hammer the tube back in and mangled the front end of that too. OK, I saw that when I bought it. What I didn't see was that for some reason he tried to weld the back end of the magazine tube and ended up cleaning up the burned and melted metal with a grinder. Also the forend was cracked in two places and was chipped under the nose cap and the tenon that fits into the front of the receiver had been attacked with a rasp. The butt stock was badly cracked around the tang. I didn't see the cracks. The dim neon lights at the gun show are a sellers best friend!
That was all a little discouraging so the rifle got stuck in the back of the safe for a while. I repaired the magazine tube first. The serial number indicates the rifle was made in 1939 and the barrel is stamped 35. The rifle has most of the bluing and it has gained a greyish patina that I find quite attractive. Since I wanted to keep the patina I repaired the old tube instead of buying a new one. What I did was swap ends on the tube because the bluing under the forend was still in good shape and I wanted that part to show. I cut the welded and ground back end off, squared it up and drilled a new hole for the nose plug. Then I cut the old mangled front end off and turned a taper on the outside. I got another piece of magazine tube and turned a taper on the inside. Then I tinned the two tapers, fit the two pieces together and soldered it. Cut it to length and that took care of the tube.
Cleaning up the dovetail for the magazine hanger wasn't to bad. Bubba had filed the dovetail out so it would be easier to hammer the hanger back in. Luckily there was enough metal left to peen the slot back into shape. A little cold blue took care of the shiny metal there. A little judicious blacksmithing on the hanger got it back into shape. A little peening got rid of most of the vise grip marks on the magazine plug. That was last summer. Then the rifle sat again.
I finally decided to repair the stock a couple weeks ago and you may recall my posting about that. That turned out well so I started cleaning and reassembling. But Bubba never rests! He may pass out when he's had to much beer but he gets after it when he comes to! He had also done a trigger job on this poor innocent rifle. He ground the sear to an uneven knife edge. Then he attacked the hammer! He must have been trying to narrow the sear notch but he also ground most of the half cock notch away while he was at it. I wanted to shoot it so I put it back together. Luckily there is still enough half cock notch left for it to do its job. The next day I found an extra sear I had bought some time ago and forgot I had so I installed it.
I got the rifle to the range last week. I couldn't tell much about accuracy because the rear sight was driven way to the left and by the time I got it rezeroed I was out of ammo. There was a lot of vertical dispersion while I was moving the sight over so that didn't look real good. I don't do well with the issue sights though so I decided to mount a Marbles tang sight I have laying around. I couldn't find a long enough tang screw so I took the receiver sight off another rifle and put it on. Did I tell you Bubba never rests? The tang screw isn't correct. The threads have been ground off the end and only about 3 threads catch. Why do that anyway? Well you do that when you put a 12-30 screw into a hole threaded for a 12-28 screw!
Anyway I got back to the range this morning with the receiver sight mounted and two different loads. The first group I shot was with a load using H322. It went about 1-3/4" at 50 yards. Not to good! The other load used RL-7. What do you think? Three shots at 50 yards.
And the rifle:
That's a beauty! Thanks for sharing...Tom
