.22s from range day Updated

(Awright, awright, I admit it. The Western Field wasn't cleaned up for a guy; IT'S MINE. "Hi, I'm Firehand and I'm a gunaholic. I was at the flea market and I COULDN'T HELP MYSELF!!! It was hot, and it needed work, and he kept lowering the price...")

In the range day post I mentioned a couple of .22s that needed sighting in. Well, here's the first one.














It's a Western Field model 850A. This is one of the 'made by/made for' rifles you used to see a lot of. Sears and Montgomery Ward and other stores would have a rifle or shotgun made for them- in this case by Mossberg, I believe- with the stores' name and model number on it.
This one is a semi-auto that feeds from a box magazine. The mag holds seven, but loading the last one or two is a pain so I only loaded five. One of the interesting things about this is it's marked '22 SHV-L-LR' it's supposed to be able to function with high-velocity shorts and longs as well as long rifles. The stock is some kind of hardwood, birch I think, stained dark. It was in quite good shape, it just needed smoothing with steel wool and a coat of the linseed oil/mineral spirits mix to take care of it. I may use something like Tru-Oil on it later.

The metal was a different story. The bore is in fine shape, but the outside was worn shiny and had some fine pitting on the barrel and magazine. After figuring out how to disassemble the thing I cleaned the outside off, hit it lightly with a buffing wheel with 400-grit greaseless compound to clean it, then used Birchwood Casey cold blue on it. It worked very well, gave a nice, even blue.

The scope is a 4x Western Field, God knows who made it for them. It's got a horizontal crosshair and a vertical post that ends just above the horizontal. After I cleaned the dust off the lens, it proved to have a pretty good image, and a little adjusting made the reticle nice & sharp.

Happily, the guts, while showing no sign of lubrication, had no rust or gathering of dust(the bore had been really dusty from spending years in a closet). Cleaned and oiled, it all worked nicely. The one thing I don't like here is the trigger; it's a two-stage with a long takeup and heavy second stage. It breaks cleanly, but the curve of the trigger and the distance it pivots through seems to accentuate the pull weight and causes your finger to move into the bottom of the stock. If the curve were a lot less, it would feel better; it's also pretty narrow and has fairly sharp corners. I don't know about polishing, but I may either make a shoe or reshape the trigger to straighten and widen it.

More on that scope: the adjustments have no clicks(just reference marks) and they are not consistent. Turn it one way and it moves so much; turn it the other and it moves a lesser amount. Pain in the ass to zero. Good thing is when you make an adjustment, it does not wander around after a few shots.

With a better trigger design this would have been more fun to shoot but as it was I got pretty good results. With Federal Champion about 1.25 to 1.5" at 50 yards. Then, since I didn't have any shorts, I tried it with the Eley Sport, which is a subsonic target ammo and got about 1-1.25" groups and it functioned flawlessly; the empties didn't go far, landing about six or eight inches to the right, but they did eject and the new round chamber with no problems. I'd never seen an autoloader that would function with any kind of reliability with this ammo before.

Overall, it's a nice .22, that with a little trigger work would be even better.

The other rifle to sight in was that Remington model 34 I found at the flea market with a jammed bolt. I'd gotten the bolt out and figured out the problems; happily the couple of parts I needed, with two possible exceptions, were available from Gun Parts(more on those in a later post). It functioned nicely with one exception; the magazine spring seems to be a bit weak, and once did not push the cartridge all the way into the carrier. All it took was catching the rim with a punch and pulling it back a touch; I think I'll see if can stretch the spring a bit, if that doesn't work replacements are easy to find for it. Good clean trigger, and gave about 2" groups. Nothing to cheer about, but part of the problem is a tiny front bead; I may see if I can find or make a post to replace it with. I may clean up the crown, but I don't know if it really needs it, better sights(or eyes) would probably cut the group size down a bit.














The stock darkened nicely with a bit of oil; you find some nice walnut on some of these old rifles.

So that's the .22 report. Two(three counting the trainer) old ones that all worked out nicely.