54r Aluminum Mauser Stock Project

[Holescreek]

The paint job is great !!
Did anyone else notice the reflection of the bolt handle ?

You have a good eye!

All the parts had to be polished to a reflective finish before getting the red tinted clearcoat. I used Duplicolor Metalcast paint which is designed to be sprayed over chrome.



I've shot it a couple of times since that pic was taken and replaced the scope and rings to get everything where I needed it.

 

[barnett]

What made you go with the Nagant calibre ? Modified bolt head ?I'm not real familiar with the Mauser action.
That is one awesome shooter !!

 

[Holescreek]

I love the 54r because surplus ammo is cheap to shoot. Where else can you get a high powered rifle round for about .22 cents a shot? I belong to a couple of gun builders forums and lots of questions and answers get tossed back and forth and building rifles to answer those questions is what drives me. The PSL is where it started for me, trying to discover what causes the barrel to physically whip when a shot is fired. I already had a standard PSL so I needed to build one with a heavier barrel and an adjustable gas block (among other mods) to see if it affected whip (and accuracy). After the whip question was answered "accuracy" questions and improvements were bantered about so I built all of the ideas into the Space PSL in the pic above. The Space PSL has a heavy .308 barrel (squeeze bore ), a cantilever scope mount attached to the barrel only, adjustable gas block etc. Next came the "bolt actions are more accurate" line and this Mauser was born. Now it's the "Mausers are more accurate than Mosins" thing and I'm now building a similar rifle using a Mosin action. I use a high speed camera to capture slow motion video to study the effects of the changes I make.

I have a series of videos on youtube showing the effects of various projects.

 

[Holescreek]

Someone mentioned posting targets earlier but I got wrapped up in the current Mosin project and forgot. The Mauser is a good shooter as long as I don't shoot more than 3 or 4 shots before stopping to let the barrel cool down, and that's driving me nuts because I was raised on 5 shot groups.

I've shot half a dozen types of factory ammo and some I disassembled and rebuilt to closely match each other. A typical "good" group will start out with 3 shots under 1" then the 4th shot will wander a little and the 5th will be an inch away from the group.





To date this has been my best 5 shot group and I probably flinched it closer than it would have been:



I bought some Sierra Match Kings and will be reloading for both the Mauser and Mosin soon in hopes f finding a solution.

 

[Holescreek]

 

[Holescreek]

After taking some time to work on the Mosin project I finally loaded up a 20 round box of Match Kings. I pulled the Millett TRS1 off the Mosin and set it up on the Mauser yesterday and it took 5 shots of silvertip to get it back on target. While the barrel was warm I fired 3 match kings into one long hole before getting interrupted for about 20 minutes (and the barrel cooled back down). I shot two more rounds for a 5 shot group and ended up with a .69" group.



It was getting late and I had 10 rounds of MK left so I shot the last two groups very quickly (5 shots/minute) to see how heat would affect the heavy barrel. Shots 6, 7 & 8 were touching then #9 went a tad high. I was kind of ticked about that then bucked #10 (I knew I was the problem).



The last 5 of the day went out through a very hot barrel and came out right about 1". I'm sure if I'd slowed down a bit it would've been much better.



I've never loaded or shot Match Kings before, I gotta say after seeing their performance and having shot at least 6 different types 7.62x54r ammunition that they are definitely worth the cost. I hadn't even worked up the load for the rifle, just kind of copied something someone posted on a forum for their rifle as a starting point.