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Next up- Spring, follower and feed tests
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CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE ON AMAZON

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That’s all for now. One of my fellow Cali gun enthusiasts who reloads his own rounds was nice enough to load up some powderless dummy shells for me to use for feed testing so I’m waiting for those to come in the mail before I can move forward. Wish me luck!
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I forgot to take a pic, but I also made a tiny funnel thing out of some thin sheetmetal and vise-gripped them to the tubes and the aluminum poured right in with hardly any spillage.
After the aluminum hardened, I cooled them in a tub of water and tapped the aluminum rods out with a steel punch. They actually slid right out with hardly any pressure. After that, I clamped them in the vise with my rubber-jaw protectors and gave them a quick sand with a piece of 220 grit, shoeshine-style and did a test-fit. Perfect!

These parts cleaned up with only a few second’s work but after I give them a better sanding later, the surfaces with be completely smooth and even.

Ok that’s all for now. Back to the Dat-cave for me. More soon (same Dat time, same Dat….channel?).
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Now, there are a few quirks with the M44 barrel and drawbacks to removing the bayonet. First, the actual process of removing the bayonet “lug” (seen painted red in above pic) attached to the barrel is usually a hellish experience, requiring you to bang out rusty pins that were put in place by a 5-ton press and then given about 70 years to get comfortable there. 4 Broken chisels and 2 sledgehammers later, you’ll have to go look for a gunsmith to finish it for you, which can be pricey. Second, even if you get it off, the front steel sight is attached to it, so you lose that as well and have to find a way to put some aftermarket sights on the barrel again, calibrate and tweak them for accuracy, etc. Third, when you remove the bayonet lug, it leaves a 3-4 inch long, skinny, “stepped” area on the end of the barrel which looks goofy. You can chop the barrel short where the step starts, but then you have to get the barrel recrowned (rifles aren’t like shotguns where you can just lop them off and call it done. You have to get the tip of the barrel cut at very specific angles to control the gas escape from around the base of the bullet as it first “pops” out of the barrel). Most people end up just leaving the lug shaft attached but grind off the legs of the lug, but that usually leaves you with either a ring around your barrel for no reason, or if you want to get the entire lug smooth again, it takes a LOT of grinding and finish sanding. For what started out as a $100 rifle, it’s usually not worth it.

Aaaaaanywho, that’s the really long way of telling you that removing it sucks, so I figured I’d try and do something cool with it, so I turned it into a bracket that holds a red laser targeting sight.

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The laser sight I’m using is a cheapo, $8-15 unit that is for sale everywhere all of the sudden. It’s basically a laser pointer, except someone figured out how to put X and Y adjustments in the lens. It was perfect for this mod mostly due to the small size and the fact that it’s so cheap that if it breaks on me eventually, who cares? I’ll just slide another one in there. First I clamped up the barrel in my vise and started boring out a round opening in the bayo lug legs. I had originally tried to rig this up in my drill press, but as it turned out, none of my drill bits were long enough to bypass the barrel without it catching on the chuck, so I ended up just doing it freehand with a Dremel, some Dremel sanding drums, and a grinding stone or two.

Once I made the hole large enough (but still had a snug fit), I started grinding the rest of the lug away by following the inside curve I had just made, which was tricky. I tried to make the “walls” of the laser mount about 1/16″ all the way around and got it pretty close.

After that, I backtaped the holes in the bracket and filled them with Mighty Putty (amazing stuff, that), sanded it smooth, dusted a tiny bit of primer on it, sanded that, then painted the entire bracket. Here’s the final result (please excuse the crappy photos. My camera hates this thing for some reason).

And that’s just about it. I still have to zip a set screw in the bottom (maybe one on top too. We’ll see how it handles that legendary Mosin recoil), and then I’ll be done with it.
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It’s a stubby little thing, and although it’s fun to slam with an upward strike of your palm after the bolt sticks after 30 rounds or so, I decided to replace it with something that gives me a bit more leverage and fits the more modern look of the aftermarket stock.

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I started by marking a line across the bolt body and chopping off the original bolt with a hacksaw.

Unfortunately after that, I was whipped into a frenzy of inspiration and forgot to document most of the process, but I basically followed the method which is outlined in great detail on Steve and Sandra Wagner’s site here: www.gswagner.com/mosin-nagant/bolt/mnbolt.html, except that I put a sharp bend in my bolt and went straight into the bolt body instead of angling it like Steve did. I sliced off the rest of the original bolt nub from the original ball, drilled a hole in the ball, and silver-soldered the ball onto my new bolt handle. I never quite liked the plain old round shaft on the sniper bolts (the home-made ones I’ve seen, the aftermarkets you can buy, OR the original issued sniper bolts), so I decided to add a little flare to mine and cut a sort of tombstone, diamond-facet effect into the metal with a combination of belt/disk sander, hand files, a steady hand, and a lot of patience.

The subtle ramp/transition leading up to the bolt where it meets the body (remember that used to be a round construction bolt with a 90 degree bend, stuck into a flat surface) was achieved by building it up with silver solder, then filing it down and smoothing it out with a thin smear of JB Weld, which was later used like Bondo and sanded smoother. What you’re seeing here isn’t the 100% finished product, though. I just dusted a little black paint on the bolt so I could even-out the surface visually and see any areas that still needed sanding. I still have a few nicks to even out.
Another pic-

And there you have it. A custom rifle bolt made using only your original parts, some solder and a 10 cent bolt.

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Finished product (still needs to be painted black though)

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More cool stuff coming soon!
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Mostly disassembled…

And after the installation in the new stock…

The ATI stock actually has a pretty nice fit, considering that it’s a generic, mold-injected, “drop-in” stock that will accept every Mosin variant. I had to just barely file one or two small areas for clearance, but then I was able to get it to pop right in by squeezing it gently with my vise (and rubber vise jaws, of course). With the Monte Carlo handgrip and integrated cheekrest, it certainly makes the Mosin a more comfortable and ergonomic rifle. The most drastic change is actually to the overall “personality” of the rifle. It feels completely different- less chunky and utilitarian, more sleek and mean…or as my fiancee Kim said, “it looks like some kind of badass cyberninja gun or something now!”
OK, that’s all for now. More soon.
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Japanese Arisaka Type 99 (pictured below Russian Mosin-Nagant M-44 for size comparison)

These characters, “kyuu-kyuu, shiki”, or “Type 99″ which means that it takes the larger 7.7×58mm round as opposed to the Type 38’s smaller 6.5×50mm round. The Type99 is noted as being one of the most powerful bolt-action rifles ever made. This rifle has the ground-off Chrysanthemum on the receiver but you can still see the faint outline of it. The “mum” was the symbol of the Japanese Imperial Army and most of the mums were ground off so that the symbol of the empire would not be made to suffer falling into enemy hands. Intact mums are somewhat rare and usually imply that it was a captured rifle taken from a dead Japanese combatant. According to the serial number on the left side of the receiver, this gun was made in the Nagoya arsenal (which dates it between 1923 and 1945 and is a Series 6 (which refines the date down to between 1939 to 1945). One interesting thing is that it is missing the top and bottom wood on the barrel but I’m not certain if that was a “last ditch” (late-war production) exception or a later customization. If anyone out there has more information about this rifle, or can help me date it a little more accurately, I’d love to hear your input.
Thanks,
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