Thread: All things BSA

I've just wandered through this thread over several nights & much enjoyed it, learnt some stuff too. I've long been a BSA fan, at one stage I had 4 of them, all "hunters" as I always knew them, I'm going to have to bone up on the corrects names. The long action one was a .270 Win, barrel was pretty good & it came with the "all range adapter" as I was told it was called, still got that I think. The only time I ever shot it was with this on & I'm guessing the not insignificant lump of steel at the end helped with muzzle flip but OMG, what a bloody awful thing to shoot it was, skinny little tooth pick stock, someone had slimmed it even further because it was almost impossible to get onto the scope, let alone use the open sights. It was marked for reselling pretty quick. I think I picked it up in Gore, there was a good gunshop off the main drag that I visited on most of my coach tours, morning & afternoon tea stops & lunches were invariably adjacent to a gunshop if I could work it, there were more of them back in the 80s. On the other end was a short action 22 Hornet, a nice little rifle, but even though the barel was pretty good, it shot like shit, the chamber was way oversized & not concentric to the bore afaics, fired cases were bulged & lopsided, no wonder it was quite cheap for its day, bought that one in Ashburton, a hardware/sports shop across the railway line from the main drag from memory. These two went into the local buy sell swap at the same time, both listed for about twice what I paid for them & as soon as the phone jumped off the cradle I knew I'd under priced them, the first guy had cash, there were two more chasing him down the drive. What I've got left now are two medium actioned jobs, a .308 that I had the barrel shortened to 22" & turned down slightly, original diameter at muzzle & straight taper to beginning of chamber reinforce so lost the rear sight mount. Not shot it much, same stock as the one on page 10 & not that comfortable imho, a bit scruffy where it had been bedded, the barrel turning left gaps. The last of the four has become my go to rifle, originally a 7x57 with a very tired barrel. Din Collings put a ,257 Roberts barrel on it, throated so I could seat 115-120 grain pills out to maximum mag length, 3", on a pretty skinny 22" Douglas barrel with the chamber reinforce styled after the original BSA profile. Possibly too skinny as it is adequately accurate rather than a tack driver. I'd like to get it shortened an inch or four & screw a can on the end. I really like this job. Other BSAs I have had/have include a open sighted .22 LR, unfortunately with an evil 15 shot tube mag & even though it was pretty average looking, shot OK, a grateful Govt gave me 2 1/2 times what I'd paid for it, for me doing my civic duty. My other one I still have is a P-14 Enfield actioned .303 Brit, it is the better quality one with the shortened mag, streamlined bolt & decent walnut stock. The rear bridge has had the great big hole filled with a soldered in bit of steel which is stamped with the BSA markings, in a Remington 700 contour. Before I got it, someone had taken a bloody great scallop out of the comb, so I finished the job off & gave it a nice straight classic style comb, it still needs the wrist grip checkering restored but in every other sense is a handsome beast, it has a pretty good barrel about 25" from memory & shoots OK. A bit of Info I haven't seen mentioned that I saw, is that the medium & long actions at least had surplus Enfield M-17 Mauser type non rotating extractors. I've long wondered if it was the supply of these drying up which forced the change to the next model, Majestic/Monarch?