Does any a know good place to send bolts to be bent or welded without paying a fortune?

Where do you live? There are a few different ways of bending bolts, it just depends on what you want, but IMHO the best place to do it is the gunsmith located within driving distance from you.

IMHO, cheap bolt work is rarely worth your time. Pay to have it done right or just buy one of the many inexpensive commercial bolts available on Gunbroker.

I am in rural Alaska.

Mail it to a decent gunsmith and pay him $100 to weld on a new bolt handle. I have several forged handles - the welding option is well worth the expense.

I know there has to be one closer to you, however TIP BURNS in Canyon Lake Texas can do that sort of work.

i know scott king has a guy in anchorage he uses, try a PM to scott

Harms, would taht be Dennis Harms? The master guide?

I can do it for you if you want to ship it here.

Thanks guys.

Go to this thread and scroll down to the bottom. This is one that Dan Armstrong did for me and he lives in Fairbanks.
http://forums.accuratereloadin.../9411043/m/970108128

Jim Kobe has done one for me and did a good job also.
Butch

My brother had been taking all day to get a bolt bent, and I was determined to get things organized.

My brother and I had about 50 Mauser bolts to bend one day [BIG5 had all those sales in the early 90s], mostly 1903 Turks and VZ24s.
We made a buttress thread heat sink from a rod of brass.
We bought an Oxyacetylene set up for ~$500.
We bought a can of heat paste from a welding shop.
We bought a bolt forging block set $50 at brownells.
http://www.brownells.com/aspx/...T%20FORGING%20BLOCKS


We put a big vise in the center of the shop.
We both wore #4 welding goggles.
We both wore big gloves.
We put a notch in the side of the bolt handle.
We put in the heat sink and bore paste.
My brother held the torch flame to the bolt body.
I held the Brownells punch in one hand and hit it with a small sledge hammer held in my other hand.
When the bolt handle was bent, we lowered the bolt body into water, but allowed the bolt handle to cool slower. A big goal for us was getting the bolt bent without going past straw color on the cocking cam of the bolt body [per Kuhnhausen's horrible book]


We got it down to a bolt bend per every 20 minutes, and it was good, but when I tried once to get it down to 10 minutes, I had a problem.

The one I did in 10 minutes would not fit with the firing pin assembly. When the bolt was bend over, the strike toward center of the bolt body to square the corner was too hard. The female buttressing threads were deformed. It took me a couple hours to fix those female threads.

Then I read some posts by Z1R about TIG welding Mauser bolts with low scope clearance, over at the sporterizing forum. So my brother spent $2k on a TIG welder set up and spends all day welding a bolt. Then I spent $2k on a TIG welder for my shop, but I have only put in a few minutes of learning, and my TIG welding sucks.

Then I paid a real gunsmith $60 each to weld ~ 40 Mauser handles for me [Century Arms had a sale]. They came back rough, and I had to make a fixture to spin them on the lathe about the handle axis. I also had to fixture up to mill cut the flat stop the ends rotation in the receiver. Z1R pics had notched receivers, but that would be a problem for me with dozens of Mausers, I need interchangeable bolts. Also, the cocking cams came back blue color from heat.

What I want to do next is bend the bolt handle, then cut it off at the knob, and then weld an extension. The bent bolt handles are a little short and that way I could make them longer. I think that the bent bolt is stronger than welded, but both are probably strong enough for pounding out a stuck case with a rock, unlike the Rem700 bolt handles that are held with solder.

harms, I too live in "stick" Ak. and have used Jim Kobe a couple of times. Send your bolt to him-he'll take good care of you. You will find sending out work is going to work out much better than waiting for a good one that are few and far between in Ak. and.....you generally get the work done right the first time plus in a timely manner.