Fitting a new stock to the Savage-Anschutz 10A

I I've never been entirely happy with the stock that came with my Savage Anschutz 10A, and so when I  saw that Boyds had a stock for the Anschutz 64 action, I ordered one. This wasn't a trivial swap, however,  as the Boyds stock is inletted for the sporter version of the 64, which has a magazine and a narrower, tapered, barrel.

First step was to widen the barrel channel, which I did with a set of scrapers I purchased many years ago, when I was fitting custom stocks to airguns I used in Field Target competition. That was the easy part. The trickier part was going to be filling the magazine well and finding some sort of escutcheon to retain the screw that holds the action in place.

I sawed and planed a filler strip of rosewood, as I had a strip of 1/8" stock on hand. This was glued in place and scraped to level it with the stock. The escutcheon was turned from a threaded brass insert, using my drill press and a dangerous looking setup involving holding a lathe tool in a vise. It was then epoxied in place, and the wood filler strip was stained black with a Sharpie, and finished with MiniWax Wipe-On Poly, as the stock is poly finished.

I didn't want to shorten the screw used with the original stock, in case I wanted to use that stock again, so I cut an M5 screw to length and turned down the head to fit in the escutcheon. I then blued it using Brownell's Oxpho-blue and dipped it in Brownell's Water Displacing Oil.


Last step was to shape the bulky, symmetrical, cheek piece to fit my head. This was done initially with a belt sander, and then with a random orbit sander, a scraper, and finally hand sanding with 320 grit paper. Boyds gives you plenty of material to work with; I probably could have started with a saw.

The result fits me well and looks decent, but the real test will be when I take it to the 50 yard range. As the current weather has been giving us temperatures in the teens and 20s, it may be a few months before I get around to that.

1980 High Standard Supermatic Citation, Part III: Mounting the LSP barrel

In my last post on this pistol, I noted that the new Lebanon Screw Products barrel I purchased for it wouldn't fit, as the frame was out of spec and the barrel that it came with had been somewhat crudely filed to fit. But then three weeks ago I stumbled across the premises of a really excellent custom gunsmith, just a mile from my home. Jason, at Atlas Custom Firearms in Berkley, Michigan, specializes in highly customized 1911s and ARs but he's very skilled in all manner of gunsmithing. He did an extremely precise job of milling a few thousandths of an inch off the LSP barrel, and now it fits on the frame like the two were made together. You can't even see evidence of where he milled it on the breech.  

Crosman Custom Shop 2300 CO2 Pistol: Part II

As I discussed in part I, the Custom Shop 2300 has adjustable sear tensioning, which allows to lighten the trigger pull but doesn't do anything about getting rid of the long, scratch trigger pull. My first attempt at fixing this was to smooth and polish the sear. To do that, you have to remove the right hand side grip panel, exposing the inner panel:

Place the safety in the FIRE position. (This important, if you don't want to go chasing tiny parts). Remove the three small screws, using a 3/32" hex wrench, and carefully lift off the plate.

If you carefully remove the spring under the sear, you can lift out and remove the sear. After doing that, I smoothed all the rough edges on the sear and polished all metal-to-metal contact points.

Result: Marginal improvement. The next step was to buy a replacement sear. Air guns of Arizona has a very nice adjustable one with hardened inserts for $30, but I cheated out and bought a $18.95 kit from Archer Airguns. This was a simple one piece sear that came with three additional washers for removing play from  the sear and trigger:

That's it on top. I inserted in the gun, along with the shims:

After reassembly, the long, scratchy, trigger pull was gone, and in its place was a solid, crisp, trigger with no take up at all. Not bad for less than $20. 

Unfortunately I did manage to pop out the safety spring and detent ball while doing this! I made a new spring from a Bic lighter spring, but the second time the ball popped out I lost it for good. I'm off to the hardware store tomorrow to look for 3/32" ball bearings.

(They didn't have them, so I bought a pack of 100 on eBay. I'm set for a while at least!)

Crosman Custom Shop 2300 CO2 Pistol: Part I

Michigan changed their laws regarding air pistols recently, no longer classifying air pistols as firearms. Crosman updated their policies to reflect that effective July 1st (previously they wouldn't ship direct to Michigan residents),  which meant that I could finally order a custom Crosman 2300, something I've long wanted to do. I've had (and customized) a few 2400s, but going straight to Crosman is a bit cheaper, and gets you options and parts you can't normally buy.

My pistol spec was as follows:

• 10" Lothar Walther 0.177" barrel
• Black muzzle brake
• Black trigger shoe 
• No sights
• Plastic grips

I skipped the sights as I meant to use my Swift pistol scope, or perhaps a red dot sight. I went with the plastic grips as wood grips would have added $45-60, and the gun was already over $170. I skipped the custom printing as I figured I would help speed up delivery. As it was, the gun arrived exactly four weeks after I ordered it.

First impression: This is a nice looking gun- much nicer than the stock $45 model. 

Second impression: This is the worst trigger of any gun I own, including my Russian Nagant revolver. 

Okay, maybe not THAT bad. But it's long, scratchy, and heavy.  There's an adjustable trigger stop, but even with the stop set for minimal travel, the pull is long. Luckily there's a fix for most of that, but curiously, it's not mentioned in the manual. 

If you take off one of the grip panels, you'll find a knurled adjustment wheel: 

Spin the wheel a few times and you can get the trigger pull down under two pounds. It's still long and scratchy, but it's manageable, although it means using a different technique than most of us have been taught. Just about everyone learns that you should take up the slack in a trigger and then slooowwwly squeeze until the gun fires. The idea is that the actual discharge should almost be a surprise, and will help prevent flinching. The technique has its origins in military shooting, with its heavy triggers and heavy recoiling cartridges.

It turns out that bullseye shooters often use a very different technique: They don't put any pressure on a trigger until they're ready to fire, and then they pull straight through. With low powered target ammunition, flinching is not an issue, and with light match triggers, squeezing is not practical. I've been practicing this technique with my Daisy 747 and with some of my my .22 target pistols, and I've found that it's a much better way to shoot with high accuracy than the old slow squeeze. When you're shooting offhand, your point of aim is wobbling all over the place, and it's only settling on the target for brief instants, you want the gun to fire when it's on target, not at some random moment.

While I ordered this gun thinking I'd use an optical sight to accommodate my aging eyes, lately I've been finding that with practice, and with techniques learned from Bullseye shooters, I can shoot as well, or better, with iron sights. And so I've decided to add iron sights to the gun, which gave me two straightforward choices, both from Crosman. One is a custom sight from Williams, here in Michigan, that clamps to the 11mm scope grooves. I've owned the peep version of that sight, and had it on my R7 for many years; it's an excellent sight, but in many ways it's overkill for this pistol. Crosman's other option is a simpler, smaller sight from LPA that fits in the dovetail slot. LPA has made a good name for themselves in recent years with their sights, and the LPA costs about half of what the Williams costs, so I ordered one last night. 

The sight arrived and I mounted it on the pistol. It's a very high quality sight, but it points out that the Crosman front sight is really too narrow.

Postscript: I ordered a replacement sear to see if I could get the trigger pull a bit smoother and crisper, but in the meantime I removed the stock sear lever, smoothed out the rough edges (it's a pretty crude stamping) and polished the surfaces. The result is much smoother. The replacement sear uses hardened steel engagement surfaces and has a screw to adjust the amount of engagement, so it should be an improvement over that. I'll write it up when it arrives in a week.