The Mosin-Nagant M44 is unique among the Mosin variants due to the fact that it has an attached, folding bayonet. It’s a really cool feature and a clever piece of engineering, but it didn’t quite fit the aesthetic of my scout mod.
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.
Click “Read More” for in-progress pics and more details
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.
-~D~-