Saturday, January 25, 2014

Bedding the Russian

My goal is to make the Mosin as accurate as possible.  To that end, I decided to bed the action.  Basically, it comes down to this: every time you fire the gun, the action moves around in the stock.  This leads to inconsistent shots.  On something like the Mosin, there are huge gaps between the wood and the metal, so it's all over the place.  The solution is to bed the action.  The basic idea is to fill the gaps in some key areas between the stock and the action so that they move as one piece.  They sell special bedding resins, but they're not much more than expensive epoxies.  I decided to use tried and true JB Weld.  The areas I'm going to bed are the recoil lug and rear tang, both are the areas where the action screws go through the stock.  I decided to do the bedding before finishing the stock in case I spilled and had to resand anything.  Here I've got the wood cleaned and prepped in the areas I'm going to bed.

I sprayed the action with silicone, and put some heavy coats of wax to keep the JB Weld from sticking to it, mixed up the JB Weld, and screwed everything together.  24 hours later, I pried the action back out of the stock.

After bedding, the action fits like a glove.  You can see just how much gap there was between the stock and the rear tang.  Now it's good and solid.

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