quote:

Originally posted by Fal Grunt:
That has not been my experience with older Mauser actions, nor with the Dumoulin action I have in the shop.

You mentioned in the other thread it was within tenths, I would be real curious to know what was in tenths, and how you set it up to measure it.

I'm not being argumentative at all... just curious. This action I have is garbage, maybe I got the turd and the rest of them are within tenths.

I keep a rough reference sheet on the mausers I have through the shop. On critical dimensions like the thread extension they have so far varied .005 in length and .003 in diameter (measured over wires). That is over several manufacturers and 40 years. Pretty damn incredible to me.

Before the ones I saw were brought to me I did a bit of home work and all of the press that I read on the Chinese made actions claimed that they were absolute junk. Poor machining, with chatter marks and not a true line on them. When I did get them I ran an indicator over the bolt bodies and the flats on the action to check for the usual deflection found after heat treatment and found none to speak of. No dimensions can be measurable after polishing but these were so close that they had to be next to nuts on before hitting the belts. I didn't bother to check run out on the threads as they were not interpolated so I expect they ran out as much as most Mausers usually do, which is quite a lot. When I measured them up to cut the thread extensions I found all of the measurements to be within a couple thousandths of one another. The polished surfaces were less than desirable. They kept the lines and didn't role the edges but they stopped at about a 240 finish which was ugly as hell. I expect they just rolled the exposed surfaces over a coarse belt to break the machine marks and left it at that. As far as Mausers go with their myriad of different machining cuts, they were as good as any. Slightly better than some slightly worse than others. But they were not the horrid pieces of crap that I had read about. I'm not what one might call excessively fussy about production made actions and it's sometimes hard to remain non-judgmental with import stuff. But after 35 years of doing this crap I will say for the record that they were more than acceptable.

On the same lines however. I remember the original M305s that were brought into the country years ago and they were indeed pretty junky. Well horrible actually. The stuff that I'm seeing today however is a completely different story and they seem to have gotten their poop-in-a-group. Sure I still see some with problems but I also see a lot of new Remingtons, Brownings and Marlins etc, coming through my shop suffering infant mortality too. So, I might have just had the good graces of playing with a more modern crop where those actions were concerned.