Replace Barrel on Mosin Nagant
Can anyone tell me how to go about changing out a barrel on an MN 91/30? The stock and externals look beautiful, but the bore is shot.
How difficult is this? Do I need special tools? Or will a strap wrench work?
thanks
How difficult is this? Do I need special tools? Or will a strap wrench work?
thanks
0
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brockkl,
Welcome to the Gunbroker Forums!
"How difficult is this?"
It depends on how handy you are and how many tools you have.
"Do I need special tools?"
Usually a barrel vise and wrench designed for this type of work is preferable although I'm sure that some of the basement cobbles will state otherwise. You also need a headspace gauge, chamber reamer and possibly a lathe to set the headspace on the newer barrel. It's never just switch out the barrel and go shoot. The barrel has to be indexed for the sights to come up to top dead center and the headspace will need adjusting usually.
It's easier and cheaper to take it to a gunsmith.
Best.0 -
Mosin Nagant 91/30s are a dime a dozen.
Why not find one with a beat-up stock, and a nice bore?
You could find one like that for $50 to $75.
Put the good barrel and action in your rifle.0 -
Thanks guys. you just saved me some money 0 -
Some of those ugly bores need to be seriously cleaned.They usually still look bad after all the work cleaning them,but will group much better.I use Sweets bore cleaner and JB paste and lots of time and patches.Someone on here may know a better process. 0 -
Good advice already given. I'll see what I can add here.
First of all, make sure your gun actually isn't grouping well before you go to an extreme of rebarreling it.
Many of these old guns will still shoot surprisingly well, even with pitted sewer-pipe like bores. If not, a recrown might help considerably, and that's cheaper than a new barrel (or gun).
Next thing, assuming you were set on rebarreling, apparently, it can be rather difficult to remove the barrel from a Mosin action. They tend to be stuck in there pretty good, and if you're not careful, you can actually damage the receiver removing one. Of course you can cut out the old barrel to help, but again, you need to know what you are doing, and that destroys the old barrel.
Also, assuming you had to do this, so far as I know, nobody is making new barrels for these guns. New condition Mosin barrels are actually hard to find, and if you can find one, there is a real chance you'd have to pay more for it than an entirely new gun.
I actually contacted one of the custom barrel makers about making me a Mosin barrel, explicitly saying I'd be willing to pay far more than the gun is worth to install a new match grade tube it, and they politely declined to make me one.
So I think Allen has this right. Mosin-nagant rifles are still cheap enough that by FAR the simplest/cheapest thing to do with a Mosin is just find one with a nice clean bore and either shoot that one, or drop the action into the stock you like.
Just yesterday, in fact, I won a barreled Mosin m44 action with supposedly excellent bore (we'll see. . .) on the auction site for $40. Even shipped and transferred, I should have this for under $100 total cost, and I'd say its pretty much impossible get ANY rifle rebarrelled for that amount.0 -
Thanks for all the good info guys. I got this piece from Southern Ohio Guns, advertised VG+ to excellent. I paid for dealer pick. The outside is as advertised. When I got it, after 1st cleaning, the lands looked like pencil tracings. I said uh oh... From now on I buy from shows [:I] where I can see the bore.
I went out and shot it, and couldn't hit anything. I'm not the greatest shot on earth, but come on. I took it home and cleaned some more, and got another big blob of cosmo ( I swear it was clean the 1st time) and some other gunk. I read about the electronic cleaner, and built one. OH. MY. GAWD. The crap that came out of there was incredible. It reminded me of one of those "snake" firecreackers, that expand out to a worm or snake shape when you light it. It was changing colors from copper, to lead/carbon, to rust. I can see most of the lands now, and an occasional shiny spot in the grooves. Still looks pretty pitted though. I haven't shot it since yet, so I'll do that this week on my day off. Maybe it won't need replacing, after a few more cycles of this.0 -
I don't believe it's possible to overstate the negative effects of corrosive ammunition on non chromed bores.
Because of porosity of the pits in pitted bores, they can't really be properly cleaned. They just get worse with corrosive surplus ammo.
If someone could do it cheaply, the barrels could be reamed and rerifled to a new wildcat caliber, "8mm Mosin Nagant" without removing them.0 -
If cleaned properly, corrosive ammo will not ruin a barrel.
I have a Swedish Mauser made in 1898.
No doubt, thousands of rounds of corrosive ammo were fired through this rifle.
The rifling is spotless, the bore is perfect.0 -
Well, I can't speak to that but I can speak about the thousands of M1 rifles, BARs, 1911s and 1919A4s that went through my hands in the 7th Div Ordnance shop in Korea.
I've never seen a 1911 barrel that had been fired with ww2 ammo as good as new and even proved it with an experiment.
I also have a 1911 Swede 6.5 with an original mint bore. Maybe they didn't shoot them or maybe their steel was more corrosion resistant.
I don't know what they used for priming compounds or for cleaning
but ordinary cleaning of US 30-06 CAL and 45 CAL guns using Army bore cleaner didn't do it.
I would be surprised to see an issued 98Mauser or Mosin Nagant that saw action with a bright and shiny bore.0 -
Man with how cheap these are ( or at least how cheap they were havnt looked for acouple months on the auction side) it wouldnt be worth rebarreling. 0
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