So I took the 1888 Commission rifle out to the range this morning, using a box of factory hunting ammo for the test. Saw the price sticker on that box of Winchester 8mm and wanted to cry: $7.00.
Yeah, I've had that ammo around for a while. Gee, it'd be nice to pay $7.00 for a box of American-made factory ammo again. It's about triple that these days, if you can find any.
But the rifle shoots, and it extracts and ejects just fine. No deformity to the brass noted, and everything works as it should. The downside: It prints about a foot and a half high at 100M.
Now this is probably a throwback to the old "volley firing" days, when soldiers were taught to aim at an opponent's belt buckle with the expectation that the round would produce some sort of upper-body hit from point-blank out to near maximum range, but it makes for some aggravating target practice when your only "opponent" is a paper plate stapled to a backer. Windage looks pretty good though--if I hold under the plate right, the rounds smack it pretty much dead center. (Good thing, too. There's no windage adjustment on the sights other than the old standard of taking a hammer to the front blade.)
The rifle's a pleasure to shoot otherwise, though. Nice trigger pull and no overly-harsh recoil. Hopefully that shooting helps clean the bore up a bit. It'll probably never be a match rifle, but it balances well and fits the shoulder and I look forward to taking it out again just as soon as I can load some new ammo for it.
Showing posts with label 1888 Commission Rifle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1888 Commission Rifle. Show all posts
Monday, February 02, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Friday's follies
So this morning, I'm on the way out to the range for (yet another) test-firing of a problem AR-15 that has been vexing me, and as I'm walking out of my coffee shop, I see a guy with his wife walking in and I notice that we're both wearing basically the same shirt. 
Mine is a red sweatshirt while his was gray, and both had the same nifty logo on them, this Uzi does it" logo, as shown here. I got mine as a gift from Aaron over at The Shekel, and I like to wear it out to the range.
Now had we been chicks, this would have been a pretty awkward fashion faux pas. But us being guys, we congratulated each other on our respective sweatshirts and started talking guns. His name of Paul, and while Paul doesn't have an Uzi, he likes them. Me having one, I did what any decent American gun guy would do--I gave him my number and invited him to call me when he's free and we'll go out and shoot mine. We're gun guys, and that's how we roll.
Eventually, his wife pried him away (some chicks get awfully jealous when guys talk guns and tune them out) and I resumed my trip to the range. I wasn't holding out too much hope for today since I'd already had this rifle out here four times, each time with different parts swapped out in unsuccessful attempts to get it to work right, but this time it fired flawlessly and put 120 rounds downrange without a single hiccup. The apparent culprit: a recoil spring installed in the buffer tube by Rock River Arms which was a trifle longer than any other CAR-style spring in my parts bin. I'd been having no end of troubles with the bolt hanging up on the magazine, and I'd been attributing it to insufficient gas flow back to the carrier but when I replaced the spring with one of the others, the rifle fired fine. Apparently the over-length spring had been retarding the carrier and preventing the action from cycling properly. Thanks, Rock River!
This AR has been a project rifle of mine for a while. I'd purchased the lower receiver assembly a couple of years ago, and it had just been sitting in my safe unfinished until the election and the rise of Barack O'Gun Grabber. When that happened, I bought an upper receiver and mated it to a spare 14.5" heavy barrel with an AK-74-stle brake that I had lying around and mounted the Pentagon light to the fore-end. Eventually it'll have an Aimpoint ML2 holographic sight, but that's going to have to wait until I get a bit more money. Right now, it's fine with the ARMS back-up iron sight. And now that it's working, it can go back in the safe and I can concentrate on other projects, like the Model 1888 Mauser that I wrote about a few weeks back.
It's been cleaned up, and the new bolt arrived today. The BEFORE pictures show what I started with. Well in took many hours of cleaning with oil and steel wool to get the crud off of it, and considerable gentle finessing to get most of the screws and fittings loose--and I'm nowhere near done yet--but it's at least presentable and functional now. The new bolt has a bunch of Turkish crescent stamps all over it but it's otherwise fantastic.It slid right into place and the action seems to work. Next range trip, this one's coming out. But in the meantime, here are the latest pics.
As far as I can tell, the action functions and it'll chamber an 8mm cartridge. I guess we'll see if it still shoots the next time out. It's times like this that I wish I could find an illegal alien day laborer to take the first shot with it, just in case it does blow up. But absent any of them, maybe I can find a bench-rest shooter at the range and offer him the first shot. At least then if it blows up, we're only out a bench-rest shooter and that's not such a bad thing either.
Mine is a red sweatshirt while his was gray, and both had the same nifty logo on them, this Uzi does it" logo, as shown here. I got mine as a gift from Aaron over at The Shekel, and I like to wear it out to the range. Now had we been chicks, this would have been a pretty awkward fashion faux pas. But us being guys, we congratulated each other on our respective sweatshirts and started talking guns. His name of Paul, and while Paul doesn't have an Uzi, he likes them. Me having one, I did what any decent American gun guy would do--I gave him my number and invited him to call me when he's free and we'll go out and shoot mine. We're gun guys, and that's how we roll.
Eventually, his wife pried him away (some chicks get awfully jealous when guys talk guns and tune them out) and I resumed my trip to the range. I wasn't holding out too much hope for today since I'd already had this rifle out here four times, each time with different parts swapped out in unsuccessful attempts to get it to work right, but this time it fired flawlessly and put 120 rounds downrange without a single hiccup. The apparent culprit: a recoil spring installed in the buffer tube by Rock River Arms which was a trifle longer than any other CAR-style spring in my parts bin. I'd been having no end of troubles with the bolt hanging up on the magazine, and I'd been attributing it to insufficient gas flow back to the carrier but when I replaced the spring with one of the others, the rifle fired fine. Apparently the over-length spring had been retarding the carrier and preventing the action from cycling properly. Thanks, Rock River!
This AR has been a project rifle of mine for a while. I'd purchased the lower receiver assembly a couple of years ago, and it had just been sitting in my safe unfinished until the election and the rise of Barack O'Gun Grabber. When that happened, I bought an upper receiver and mated it to a spare 14.5" heavy barrel with an AK-74-stle brake that I had lying around and mounted the Pentagon light to the fore-end. Eventually it'll have an Aimpoint ML2 holographic sight, but that's going to have to wait until I get a bit more money. Right now, it's fine with the ARMS back-up iron sight. And now that it's working, it can go back in the safe and I can concentrate on other projects, like the Model 1888 Mauser that I wrote about a few weeks back.It's been cleaned up, and the new bolt arrived today. The BEFORE pictures show what I started with. Well in took many hours of cleaning with oil and steel wool to get the crud off of it, and considerable gentle finessing to get most of the screws and fittings loose--and I'm nowhere near done yet--but it's at least presentable and functional now. The new bolt has a bunch of Turkish crescent stamps all over it but it's otherwise fantastic.It slid right into place and the action seems to work. Next range trip, this one's coming out. But in the meantime, here are the latest pics.
As far as I can tell, the action functions and it'll chamber an 8mm cartridge. I guess we'll see if it still shoots the next time out. It's times like this that I wish I could find an illegal alien day laborer to take the first shot with it, just in case it does blow up. But absent any of them, maybe I can find a bench-rest shooter at the range and offer him the first shot. At least then if it blows up, we're only out a bench-rest shooter and that's not such a bad thing either.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
A pleasant surprise
I stopped by an elderly neighbor's house today to see how he's doing and we got to be talking guns and hunting. As we talked, he showed me some of his gun collection, most of which were scattered about the house. (His house makes mine look neat. I must show Aaron of The Shekel's wife some day so she stops commenting on mine.) As we talked, he grabbed an old rifle out of the corner and said "here. You can have this one. I bought three of them at a flea market once for ten bucks each. It's just junk now."
Under all of the crud and grime, I recognized the vague outline of an 1888 Commission Rifle. Owing to the darkness in his house, I really couldn't see it that well. A cursory attempt to open the bolt showed me that it was frozen solid. It probably is junk, I figured. But to refuse it would be rude. After a while I came home and checked it out. It looked even worse in clear light.
Yeah, it's pretty bad. I can't even make out the manufacturer and date. It looks like Spandau, Germany but the date's still covered with dried gunk. I know that the first two numbers are 18. It's old.
It's clearly pretty far gone. I was about to relegate it to the junk pile but as usually happens, I got to be looking at it and speculating as to it's history and the stories that it could tell.
The 1888 Commission rifle was Germany's first cartridge rifle designed around the then-new smokeless-propellant cartridge that had been developed. It got it's name because it was the result of a program undertaken by a commission of military experts. A five-shot repeater, like many other rifles of it's day it required special clips to hold the ammunition. These clips dropped free from the bottom of the rifle when the last round was fired. In later days, many of these rifles were modified to feed from traditional stripper clips and the hole on the bottom was sealed. This one is not one of those modified rifles. It's still clip-fed. These rifles were still front-line weapons used by the Germans and their Turkish allies in World War One and the Turks continued to use them until and through world War Two.
Once I started to work on it, the bolt eventually yielded to the subtle persuasion of a block of wood and a hammer. (Fortunately it was empty.) It's now off of the rifle. As expected, the bolt head is missing. This was a common problem with this design, as the bolt head was way too easy to remove from the bolt and frequently became lost. But the mainspring still functions and the bolt might be salvageable.
The bore is full of crud but still has some distinct rifling left. It's going to take a lot of scrubbing before I can tell how bad it is, but the preliminary evaluation looks promising.
The neighbor who gave me this doesn't even remember how long ago that he bought this rifle. He just knows that it was a long, long time ago. The sad thing is, other than the bolt head and a few minor parts, it looks complete and probably worked.
It didn't take long before I made the decision: I'm going to save and restore this rifle. I'm going to make it presentable, and I'm going to make it shoot again.
Right now it's caked in a dried substance which I think--and hope--is a type of preservative grease. But it's rock solid and I haven't quite figured out how to remove it without damaging whatever finish is left. My first job is going to be to disassemble the rifle completely and then clean the parts, both wood and metal. Then I'll look at the finish and decide whether or not to apply a new one or just try to preserve what's left. Eventually I hope to get it back together, replacing any missing or broken parts, and get it out to the range for a trial. It's going to take a while and a lot of elbow grease, but with old veterans like this, it's a labor of love. This will probably be the toughest restoration I've done thus far, but I'm confident that I can save this rifle.
Scratch that. I WILL save this rifle.
Under all of the crud and grime, I recognized the vague outline of an 1888 Commission Rifle. Owing to the darkness in his house, I really couldn't see it that well. A cursory attempt to open the bolt showed me that it was frozen solid. It probably is junk, I figured. But to refuse it would be rude. After a while I came home and checked it out. It looked even worse in clear light.
Yeah, it's pretty bad. I can't even make out the manufacturer and date. It looks like Spandau, Germany but the date's still covered with dried gunk. I know that the first two numbers are 18. It's old.
It's clearly pretty far gone. I was about to relegate it to the junk pile but as usually happens, I got to be looking at it and speculating as to it's history and the stories that it could tell.
The 1888 Commission rifle was Germany's first cartridge rifle designed around the then-new smokeless-propellant cartridge that had been developed. It got it's name because it was the result of a program undertaken by a commission of military experts. A five-shot repeater, like many other rifles of it's day it required special clips to hold the ammunition. These clips dropped free from the bottom of the rifle when the last round was fired. In later days, many of these rifles were modified to feed from traditional stripper clips and the hole on the bottom was sealed. This one is not one of those modified rifles. It's still clip-fed. These rifles were still front-line weapons used by the Germans and their Turkish allies in World War One and the Turks continued to use them until and through world War Two.
Once I started to work on it, the bolt eventually yielded to the subtle persuasion of a block of wood and a hammer. (Fortunately it was empty.) It's now off of the rifle. As expected, the bolt head is missing. This was a common problem with this design, as the bolt head was way too easy to remove from the bolt and frequently became lost. But the mainspring still functions and the bolt might be salvageable.
The bore is full of crud but still has some distinct rifling left. It's going to take a lot of scrubbing before I can tell how bad it is, but the preliminary evaluation looks promising.
The neighbor who gave me this doesn't even remember how long ago that he bought this rifle. He just knows that it was a long, long time ago. The sad thing is, other than the bolt head and a few minor parts, it looks complete and probably worked.
It didn't take long before I made the decision: I'm going to save and restore this rifle. I'm going to make it presentable, and I'm going to make it shoot again.
Right now it's caked in a dried substance which I think--and hope--is a type of preservative grease. But it's rock solid and I haven't quite figured out how to remove it without damaging whatever finish is left. My first job is going to be to disassemble the rifle completely and then clean the parts, both wood and metal. Then I'll look at the finish and decide whether or not to apply a new one or just try to preserve what's left. Eventually I hope to get it back together, replacing any missing or broken parts, and get it out to the range for a trial. It's going to take a while and a lot of elbow grease, but with old veterans like this, it's a labor of love. This will probably be the toughest restoration I've done thus far, but I'm confident that I can save this rifle.
Scratch that. I WILL save this rifle.
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