Done, and done.

I actually finished the Mosin a few months ago.  It's been sitting letting the oil finish cure since February.  To recap, it's a numbers matching, hex receiver, 1932 Mosin-Nagant 91/30.  I bought a cheap clamp on bipod for it and ground the ends to fin into the front sling slots.  You know what's really hard?  Photographing dark colored long guns on sunny days. 

New target

The problem with shooting long range is that without a really good scope or a separate spotting scope, it's hard to tell when you've hit the target.  Even then, after you've been shooting for awhile, you get to the "did I hit it, or is that an old hole" point.  There's a better way.  Enter the steel gong target.  It's basically a just plate of steel.  The most important part is that you can hear it ring when you hit it, no more guessing.  Sounds great, but wait!  There's a problem with that!  Regular mild steel like you'd find at the hardware store might seem strong, but when bullets are involved, it may as well be tin foil.  For example, here's what a 7.62x54R bullet like my Mosin uses does to 1/2" mild steel at 100 yards(not my picture):

Yeah, like butter.  Shooting through the plate is bad, but not as bad as leaving craters or divots in the metal.  Craters can actually act as a u-bend and send shrapnel flying back at the shooter.  Not good.  So, mild steel is out.  But, there is a perfect steel to use for targets, specially made to handle bullets: AR500 armor plate.  For what it is, it's surprisingly cheap and easy to come by.  I e-bayed up myself a 12"x12"x3/8" plate of genuine AR500 for around $50.  Then I made a stand for it.  I used a cheap sawhorse kit for the legs, knowing that the 2x4s would have to be replaced at some point.  To hang the plate, I used 3" baler belt because, unlike chain, you can put a whole lot of bullets through it before it needs to be replaced.  I hung it from a 3/4" steel bar, and attached everything with grade 8 bolts.  I used 5" bolts for the plate so that it hangs at an angle, not only reducing the impact on the plate, but also directing any shrapnel or ricochets into the ground.

I shot at it all day and hit it with nearly 100 rounds of 7.62x54R from the Mosin, and 100 rounds of 7.62x39 from the[project undisclosed], plus 75 .22 rounds(which is like hitting cement with a snowball).  The AR500 handled bullets like a champ. The paint is blasted off, but the plate it's self is still flat with hardly any marring at all.  Because of the angle of the plate, you can clearly see a line in the sand where the bullets and bullet pieces safely hit the ground.

To give you an idea of just how tough AR500 armor plate is, here's one of the grade 8 bolts holding the plate on.  You can see that the bullet left a big gouge in it.  The AR500 plate it's self though looks like new under the blasted paint.

This AR500 plate was well worth the price, and the "Ding" lets you know you've hit it from a long ways off :)

Boresighting

Since I made my own scope mount, I have no idea where the scope is actually pointing in relation to the barrel.  In theory, it should be right on but it's all dependent on where the stock sight mount pins are located.  The best way to get in the ballpark is with a laser boresighing tool.  There is one commercially available for the 7.62x54R round, but user reviews say that batteries only last a few minutes, and it's not really worth the cost. 

Fortunately for me, one of the things I've accumulated under the "hey, that's cool and looks useful" category are some laser modules.  These are basically just the guts of a laser pointer.  I decided to make one into a boresighter.  I first wrapped it in electrical tape to build up the diameter, then in teflon tape that will compress and stay concentric in the chamber.  Pretty simple really.  As it turns out, I had to shim up the front of the scope by the thickness of a strip of electrical tape.  Nice and easy, and close enough to get me on target for fine tuning.

Scope out the situation

Still working on stuff while the stock was drying... Since I'm going for long range, I need a scope.  That presents yet another a problem.  Like the Mausers, the bolt handle on the Mosin sticks straight out.  Because of this, with a standard scope the bolt handle would hit the scope so you wouldn't be able to get the bolt open.  One option there is to modify the bolt with a bent bolt handle to clear the scope.  I didn't want to do that. 

The other option is to use a scout or pistol scope.  While a standard scope is made to be positioned 3"-4" from the eye, scout scopes have an eye relief of 11"-13".  This lets the scope be mounted much further forward so bolt clearance isn't an issue.  They say that the rule of thumb for scopes is that your scope should cost about half what the rifle cost, so I ended up with an AIM Sports 2-7x42 Scout scope.  It's definitely an entry level scope, and the reviews are mixed, but there's no way I'm spending $200+ for a scope on a $130 gun.  The scope will get mounted ahead of the bolt area.

I like iron sights, and want to keep mine, so the scope will be mounted above the stock sight, using the stock sight attachment points.  There is a mount like this available, but it's just stamped steel and quite frankly I think it looks chintzy.  It also uses a picatinny rail and standard scope rings, so it mounts the scope way too far above the barrel.  With a rifle this powerful, having the scope and barrel centerlines so far apart can lead to accuracy problems, ie. low at 75 yards, on at 100, and high at 125.  Here's a picture off the internet showing what I mean.  You can see how the higher the scope is, the worse the problem is.

So, with all that out of the way, I decided to make my own scope mount.  As much as I like grinding, filing, and sanding, there's a better way...BAM!

Conveniently, I know a guy...that guy being me.  After I finished the model, I got a chunk of aluminum and had at it.  I let the machine do the the work while I kicked back and relaxed.  After a few hours, my solid block of aluminum was looking much lighter.

The shiny aluminum wouldn't look right on the mostly dark colored gun, and while I know how to anodize at home, I'm not set up to do it, so it got painted.  The scope sits nice and low, and I can still use the stock iron sight up to 400 yards.

This'll really trip your trigger

Since I had a lot of time with the gun apart while refinishing the stock, I took the opportunity to do some other work.  The Mosin is a military gun.  In Russia, that translates as "lets build them as fast as we can."  This is especially obvious in the trigger.  The stock trigger falls into the "It works" category.  The pull was so high that you could lift the gun by the trigger and it wouldn't go off.  It didn't feel very smooth either.  The solution is a trigger job.  It basically entails polishing all the contact points in the trigger system.  After polishing, I also shimmed the sear to lighten the pull.  It's still a bit heavy, but is lighter than stock, and feels much smoother.  Pictures won't do much good, there's not much to see, so I swiped a picture off the internet. 

The Finish is in sight.

With the terrible finish stripped off, the wood on the Mosin is actually in very good shape.  I used my iron and a rag to steam out the few dents that were there.  I've got my wood stripped, sanded, clean, and ready for stain.

As I mentioned previously, I don't like wood.  I also don't like the color brown.  It's my least favorite color.  That left me with a problem since these guns come with brown wood stocks.  I couldn't go with red either, because I'm colorblind and unless it's a bright red, it looks brown to me, which I don't like.  I considered bleaching the wood to a light blond, but it's discolored enough that I wasn't sure how well it would bleach.  So I decided to go dark.  Ebony dark.  I used a Min-Wax oil-based stain.  I chose oil based because this stock will still weep cosmoline for years to come and it shouldn't affect an oil based stain. Only after starting to stain did I discover that Min-Wax has a reputation as the worst stain on the market.  Consequently, my stock is dark brown instead of black.  If I were to do it again, I'd use a better brand.  It's a bit lighter in the pic than real life because of the flash.

To finish my finish, I chose Birchwood-Casey's Tru-oil.  It's mostly boiled linseed oil with some other additives, and is about the most popular gun stock finish on the planet.  It takes a day or so to dry well enough to sand and over the course of a month or so, I did the oil, let dry, sand, repeat routine.  This fills the grain, leaving a nice smooth surface.

After many many coats of Tru-Oil, I decided that I had enough build up(since most of it got sanded off between coats it's not very thick).  I did my final sanding wet with 1500 grit paper, then polished with regular automotive polishing compound.  The Tru-Oil buffs up very easily.  I know what you're thinking, battle rifles shouldn't be shiny.  But you know who's rifle this is?  Mine.  :)

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.

Strip tease

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a woodworker.  Generally speaking, I don't like wood as a building, or decorative, material.  So, I don't really do much with it.  I decided from the get go that the Mosin would get refinished, and since I don't do it much, I was looking forward to it.  For future reference, when planning to strip the varnish off a vintage Russian rifle, do NOT enter search terms that include the phrase "stripping old Russian." Most of the results have nothing to do with firearms...

If you're not familiar with Cosmoline, it is both the most wonderful, and most evil product used on surplus firearms(and surplus material in general).  It's a mixture of oil, grease, and wax that melts at around 130°F.  When putting guns in long term storage, they get a big vat of it melted, and dunk the whole rifle in.  It soaks into everything and penetrates all the cracks and crevices, completely protecting the gun from the elements, and preserving it indefinitely for future use(that's good).  That future use being me, I had to remove it all(that's bad).  It meant taking everything completely apart because Cosmoline will gum up the action.  Since the whole rifle was dunked in it, it also soaked into the stock.  The problem is that on a warm day, it will start to weep out of the stock, leaving you with Cosmo covered hands and a messy gun case.  It could also cause problems with the new finish.  Before I even got started refinishing the stock, I spent two weeks using a heat lamp to sweat Cosmoline out of it.

As shown a few posts ago, the varnish on the stock looked terrible.  It was peeling in places, and not very even.  It was definitely applied by a Russian peasant, not a master craftsman.  I decided to use Citri-Strip brand stripper.  I don't care about fumes or being environmentally conscious or any nonsense like that.  I chose the Citri-Strip for one big reason: it won't remove bluing from the steel parts left in the stock.  Other strippers could.  I slathered it on, and the varnish practically melted off as I was putting it on.

It mostly came off in just one coat, but I used two coats with the hope that it might pull more Cosmo out of the wood.  Here's how it looked after two coats of stripper.  The wood is still discolored in some areas, but it'll be restained anyway(it's still wet here too, so it looks darker than it really is).

Spam Spam Spam! I don't like Spam!

Most of it anyway.  There are some varieties that are acceptable.  For instance, this Soviet stuff:

The Soviets didn't put questionable meat products in their Spam cans though, it's bullets.  Military surplus bullets.  Lots of military surplus bullets.  This particular Spam can contains 440 rounds of 7.62x54R for the Mosin, and is dated '89.  The best parts is that the whole thing was just over $100 shipped to my door.  The only ammo cheaper is .22, and these day's it's not too far off.  The only downside to the surplus ammo is that they still use corrosive primers.  Cleaning the gun with one of the many water based gun cleaners will neutralize the salts and doing it the same day as shooting it will keep any rust from developing though, so it's not as big a deal as people make it out to be.

From Russia, with love

After my recent purchase of a .22 dressed as an EBR(Evil Black Rifle as the anti-gun media hype would have you believe), I decided I wanted a gun to shoot long range.  Very long range.  I decided my target goal would be 450-500 yards.  I have an 03A3 30-06, but 30-06 rounds are expensive, and the rifle it's self is in great shape and worth too much to modify.  I stared kicking around the idea of another military surplus gun, the Russian Mosin-Nagant.  Designed in 1891, it was the standard Russian service rifle up through WWII.  Consequently, there were millions of them made.  By some reports, including all variants, they made 50 million of them.  Every gun shop in the country has got to have at least a dozen on hand at any one time.  It uses the 7.62x54R cartridge, a round that has been in constant military use for 120 years.  This means bullets are cheap, really cheap.  440 rounds of mil-surp for under $90 cheap.  The only thing cheaper is a .22.

Cheap gun, check.  Cheap ammo, check.  Long range capable, check.  Common enough I don't have any qualms modifying it, check.  The Mosin fit the bill.  A few days before Christmas, I stopped down to the local Gander Mountain just to see what there was to see with no intention of buying anything.  I walked out with a new used gun. 

On the shelf, they had a relatively rare Tula Armory all serial numbers matching 1932 hex receiver M91/30.  It was the only hex receiver they had(later ones have a round receiver, and the war time guns were poorly machined).  What really sealed the deal was that they had a rebate on them, so it only cost $130(including bayonet and original Mosin cleaning/tool set).

Given it's age, and the state of the Soviet Union in WWII, there is nearly a 100% chance this rifle has been fired at real, actual Nazis.  The bore is acceptable for a Mosin-Nagant(the corrosive military primers typically do a number on them), and the bluing is in great shape.  The shellac that the Russians used is in pretty bad shape, discolored and peeling in places, but the wood it's self is great and I plan on refinishing it from the get go anyway.