Sorry I didn't see this message. Too much work @ work, then home to put all the rifles into their travel socks.
I hope y'all liked the shoot. Most of the rifles seemed to be hitting their targets. Lots of steel got punished! It's always tricky getting the right mix of stories & shooting but we got it done .
Thanks to everyone that helped get the range tore down and the rifles back into the SUV!
Glad to help and it was a really good day. I loved both today and the 1 day Carbine I did with the Bedford folks two years ago. I would say they're both about tied for my favorite gun day ever.
Well crap guys. My gunsmith didn't reassemble the Swede Mauser bolt correctly. There are 3 rectangular slots in the end of the firing pin that were not fully seated into the cocking piece. Only two got inserted which didn't allow the firing pin to travel forward past the face of the bolt. It's an easy thing to do wrong. You just need to really compress the spring to get the cocking piece fully seated.
I thought I had dropped a plastic stick into everything and dry fire tested everything myself before packing them into the SUV. I probably skipped the guns he checked for me. This would have been a simple disassembly, check & reassembly to get it running again. I thought it may have broken the firing pin so didn't even bother to check.
My bad. Test everything your self before an event.
Yea, as I'm going through everything and putting it away, I'm just trying to figure out what happened.
Rethinking the geometry on that firing pin... maybe it didn't compress the firing pin spring far enough to get a good primer strike. There were no marks on the primer. Appears to be working now though.
Next one to disassemble is the SKS that would not cycle. 13 out of 15 ain't bad I guess when you are talking rifles up to 120 years old.
This was a very interesting event. I hope you will have one again next year. Dan is definitely interested. Hopefully I won't be battered and broken and can get on the line a bit myself.