Had a beauty yesterday....................I have had a rifle build on the go for the past 18 months, ordered a McGowen barrel in a group buy with a bunch of other blokes over here, pretty good price at 400.00 or so landed and delivered to my door. That took over 10 months, mainly due to one of the others changing their order after they had started making the barrels, so the whole lot got put back to the end of the line, or that's what we were told. It turned up finally and was forwarded to the smith doing the job.
Finally got hold of a second hand Zastava M85 in 7.62x39 with a stuffed barrel after shooting shit loads of cheap chinese ex-military ammo and not cleaning properly, for rebarrelling to 22PPC Had it sent straight to the gunsmith doing the job, he checked it over and the action was good, barrel buggered and plastic black stock useless.
The waiting game continued for another 8 months before he got around to doing the job, but it was done and as he does excellent work, the wait was almost worth it. I had a call from him on Thursday last week, its ready, luckily I was going down that way for a weekend shoot/get together with some mate at the range down there, so I got to pick the barrelled action up. First little surprise was the front action screw, a lovely shiny brass piece of shit put there in place of the one lost by the previous owner, wouldn't matter too much as its not hard to make one, just would have been nice to know about it.
Now for that horrible moment when the world tilts, you feel sick in the guts and spend a few moments in quiet contemplation, mentally bashing yourself over the head with a blunt object.
After I got home on sunday night, put my gear away, then bright and early Monday morning, down to the shed to start putting the action and barrel together with the stock, I took the bolt out of the action and put it one the bench top, reached over the back of the bench to grab a cloth to wipe down the barrel and action, when my shirt sleeve got hooked onto the bolt handle and dragged it off the bench top onto the concrete floor, bang, ting, clunk, the bolt knob broke off and flew across the floor and hit the wall. :oh noes:
Attachment 31739
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Attachment 31741
Today I rang a mate and asked some advice about putting it back together again, we came up with a plan so it was off to the hardware to grab a 1/4x2 1/2 inch high tensile bolt, a quick trip and bit of measuring and some judicious cuts with a 4 inch grinder saw us putting the pieces in place. A couple of quick hits with the welder and we ended up with this.
Attachment 31742
Back at home, I ran a 1/4 x 20tpi die over the thread to clean it up, drilled out a spare aluminium bolt knob that I had in the desk, tapped the correct thread into it and measured and cut the threaded end of the shaft to the correct size, and screwed the new knob on.
Attachment 31743
Its now sitting on the bench in my gun room waiting for the bedding compound to set over night.
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Hopefully in the morning I will crack it out of the bedding and all will be well, but with my luck on this jinx rifle build, I will have glued it to the stock. :eyes on fire:
Wish me luck.
