The One Hour Gunsmith makes a score

Well my friends, the one hour gunsmith has another low budget project gun to play with. After many many years of being shotgun only, the state of new york has decided we can be trusted to hunt big game in certain areas of the southern zone with centerfire rifles. While I have a very nice Mannlicher style Interarms Mark X mauser in 7x57 to hunt with. I find myself shying away from taking it out in incliment weather. You see I was too young to purchase one when I first fell in love with that picture in the 1977 interarms catalog. So when one popped up on a local dealers shelf a couple years ago I grabbed it. The date code of 0477 stamped on the reciever sealed the deal for me. So after waiting so long to get it I don't want to abuse it. Add the fact that now the sidekick wants a rifle after shooting mine. And Pelenaka has decided she wants to hunt. So, we find ourselves needing a second rifle. A rifle I don't have to worry about. A gun that can be taken out in the rain, carried and possibly dropped by beginers. I set out calling around for a Handi Gun by New England Firearms. I found a few, but, with one exception all I found were in calibers more suited to varmints than big game. The one and only 30/30 I found was pretty overpriced for a second hand gun. On one call to my favorite dealer he suggested a cheap surplus mauser rifle. So, off to gunbroker.com to look around. Didn't find much for a reasonable price after adding shipping and FFL fees. Then I got an email. The dealer that suggested a surplus gun picked up a collection of them. In the lot was a poorly sporterized BRNO VZ24 in 8mm mauser. Well friends we did some haggling and did some trading. In the end he got some non gun stuff of mine and I walked away with the ugliest gun I've ever owned. When this gun was captured and put away after the war the guy doing the cosmoline held her about 3" from the end of the barrel. How do I know? Because the marks of his fingers are still there lightly rusted to the finish. But, he did a good job with that cosmoline job. The inside of the barrel and action are in near mint condition. So my friends we have a gun project. More to come!

Woods

Feedback please

Looking at the stats page it seems my most popular posts are the ones about amature gunsmithing. My most popular post is over two years old and is still visited daily. I've started the one hour gunsmith label and I am wondering how many of my followers would like it to become a regular feature. I intend to make these projects low budget is in under $100. Also as the title implies projects will be able to be completed in one hour, or be able to be broken down into one hour or less stages.

I will still continue my regular "How to's" and homestead life posts. I will just use the "One hour gunsmith" as a means of keeping the blog posts more frequent.

Also, go recrute me some followers people. I intend to do give aways at the 50 and 100 follower marks.

Woods

Six hour canoes and chamber inserts.

Recently the book "Building the Six Hour Canoe" arrived at my local library. As promised I checked it out. It seems to be a viable project, however the instructions call for 4x16 sheets of marine plywood, not your average home center stuff. There is instructions on how to use 2 4x8 sheets with a seem in the middle. Also the completed canoe has a strict load limit of 250lbs. The 250lb weight limit rules out this project for me. I'm in the mid 240's on a good day and don't have room for something that can't at least carry one of my daughters with me. I also doubt the six hours in the title. A week of 2-3 hour sessions would probably be more like it. And I consider myself a moderately fast wood worker. The $65.00 project gun is in semi limbo until after either I buy supplies at this weekends gun show, or my Gun Parts Corp order arrives. I have already owned a 2.5" 410 adapter for 12 gage chambers. I have never used it due to 2.5" 410's costing twice what 12 ga shells cost. I may one of these days come accross some cheap 410's. Or I may get around to converting my stash of .444 marlin brass into brass 410's. Until then it will probably remain unfired. I did two weeks ago order a 12 ga to 9mm converter on ebay. It arrived within a few days. Made from aluminum by an outfit called Dina Arms. I was skeptical at first. Reviews I could find on the web weren't promising. Most claimed extreme inaccuracy. Because this project is meant to show that a practical survival gun could be built on a budget I ordered one anyways. Yesterday I grabbed a partial box of cast bullet mystery reloads. The thing functioned as promised, and at first the reviews seemed right about accuracy. First ten rounds were minute of garbage can lid at 25 yards. Shooting at a 3x5 index card with no markings everything went into a 12" area starting about 3" above the target. On the 11th shot I hit the target almost dead center. Carefully I opened the gun and noted that the 9mm stamping on the converters head faced down. This time I carefully reloaded the insert into the gun and made sure it went in exactly in the position it came out. This shot cut the edge of the previous one, the next two shots brought the group up to 2". I should add at this point it was raining a steady drizzle and my glasses were getting foggy. This calls for more tinkering. I am watching wear on the inserts rifling. I have a ton of cast bullet reloads to shoot, I am very skeptical about shooting jacketed ammo. Copper is much harder than aluminum and I suspect the adapter would wear out quite quickly. One other thing, I expected the report to be less due to the length of the shotguns barrel, it was actually quite loud. And, you'd be amazed at the amount of crud that goes out the end of a pistol barrel and stays in the shotgun barrel. In a few weeks I will order an all steel adapter from MCA and see how it shoots. I'm leaning towards a 32 H&R magnum adapter this time. I have a bunch of 32 S&W and 32 Longs kicking around. The other option might be .30 carbine, I have several hundred rounds of those. The other idea I'm toying with is .311 round balls meant for my muzzleloader thumb pressed into any of the above casings over a bunch of black powder. I've also considered and ruled out 30/30 or 45/70 adapters. I am leary of pushing the pressure in my guns frame as I'm pretty sure it's ductile iron like most cheap shotguns. Woods

Installing sights on the $65.00 project shotgun

The first step to making the project shotgun a practical gun we need sights. Here we have a set of TruGlo brand fiber optic sights meant for a Knight brand muzzleloader. I aquired these last summer at a garage sale for $2.00. Also in the photo is a tube of Loctite 380 Black Max cement. This cement is formulated to be used in applications where shock is a factor. I couldn't find this locally, but, was able to special order it from my local Lowes store, which can special order through W.W.Grainger, the industrial supply company. Shipped to my door it was around $7.00. In addition you will need a flat surface to work on, a vice with padded jaws if possible, a square a drill press or a second square,a scriber, some rubber cement, an abrasive of some sort, and alcohol or hot water & detergent to degrease everything.

The weather has turned cold again and my workshop has no heat. Lucky for me an old friend offered me the use of his engineering lab at work. While I suddenly found myself in a high tech setting, the environment we were in was overkill, so don't let it intimidate you. The important thing was having a warm place to work so the cement could bond properlyHere's the gun set in the vice. Careful adjustment was made to make sure the gun was vertical. The fore end had been removed and we clamped on the barrel lump. Had this vice had padded jaws we could have clamped on the reciever itself. After clamping the gun in the vice we moved it around unti it was vertical. To do this we placed a square on our smooth surface and checked it against the sides of the reciever. This gun has an investment cast reciever, the right side of the gun was milled true during manufacture, the left side however was anything but flat. The right side is what we used to put our square against. The next step is to find the very top of the gun barrel. This is done by placing the second square against the first or by placing a piece of rod in your drill press. This is gently brought down on top of the barrel where it touches the top of the radius, which you then mark with your scriber.

Here the barrel has been marked and using the scribe marks to center the sights I have rubber cemented the sights in place. This allowed me to make sure of where I wanted the sights on the barrel. Having decided the permanant location of the sights I'm scribing around thier bases. After this step I removed the sights and used the scribe marks as a guide in removing the bluing and roughing the barrel surface beneath the sights. I didn't try to remove the bluing all the way to my scribe lines, I needed them to use as a reference when finally cementing the sights in place. While I was at it, I used my abrasive to remove the anodizing from the bottom of the sights themselves. I then degreased the barrel with alcohol and applied a bead of black max to the barrel where the bluing was removed.
Here is the finished job. All we have to due is put the fore end back on. I'm going to wait a few days before trying to shoot it. This should give the cement time to fully cure. You may think the sight locations look a little funny. There was a method to my madness. The rear sight was located in front of rather than on top of the chamber. When a gun fires the barrel actually expands slightly in the chamber area. A microscopic and temporary stretch of the metal for sure, but, why risk the cement bond eventually breaking because of it. Also being in the over 40 crowd my eyes are starting to feel thier age. The farther away that rear sight is, the easier it is to see. And yes there is 3/4 of an inch between the end of the barrel and the front sight. I mentioned in the first post about this gun that it might get screw in chokes. There has been another development on that front. A recent talk with a gunsmith friend put me on another track. Back in the days before screw in chokes, add on choke devices were popular. Sold under the names of polychoke, cutts compensator, etc. It was popular to take older shotguns with very tight chokes and convert them to these adjustable systems. When these devices were installed, it destroyed any collector value these guns might have had. Well, now it's popular to take those old often worn out shotguns and make coach style guns for cowboy action shooting. This has left my gunsmith friend with a huge parts box full of old style choke devices. And that box is mine to pick through with whatever I select costing between $5.00 and $15.00 depending on what I pick. These devices mount to the outside of the barrel, so we'll need that 3/4" to mount one.

Next time we'll either pick and install a choke device, or we will make our cast lead butt plate.

Oh! BTW, when we were finished my friend passed along 14 boxes of cast bullet 9mm handgun reloads. Can anybody guess what our first chamber insert will be? THANKS Jeff!

Woods