Rifle Repair

It was a 1938 Mossberg 44M(b); a WWII training rifle. It belonged to my grandfather but in my youth I got to shoot it a lot. Being 73 years old, it wasn't in the best aesthetic condition, but mechanically it worked great (the rifle not grand-dad!). I recently had the opportunity to 'restore' the rifle. I use the term loosely because I didn't do much other than clean it up, paint a few parts, do some repair, and re-stain the wood.

In this shot you can see a lot of the scratches in the wood and the general condition of the rifle.

In this one you can see the surface rust on the metal pretty clearly as well as a crack in the stock. This crack goes completely through. I had a previous repair that held it in place for at least the last 20 years which is about when I first saw the rifle. But the glue was starting to rot and it was pivoting around the bolt that held it together.

On the bottom side here, you can again see the crack in the stock as well as the crack in the trigger guard which is probably just from expansion and shrinkage over age of the plastic.

So, I started by taking everything apart and documenting how it all goes together. Then I sanded down the finish on the wood and tried to get out all the scratches. I also split the stock on the crack and reglued everything with some leftover titebond wood glue I had lying around. I knew from building guitars that titebond holds excellently under stressful conditions.

I took all the metal parts to Tom's and sandblasted the rust off. Talk about saving time vs sanding. I was able to get the rust off in about 20 minutes. This would have taken days to manually sand in all the cracks and crevices. The only drawback was some grit in some of the moving parts that had to be cleaned out.

Here it is reassembled. I tried to repair the trigger guard because that is the only place on the rifle that has the date (1938). But it had shrunk so much that it didn't fit correctly anymore - hence the crack. I found a website that sales old Mossberg parts. http://www.havlinsales.com/. From him I ordered a new 15 round mag, and a new poly trigger guard. The saying 'they didn't make em like they used to' came to mind. The new trigger guard wasn't an exact match and I had to trim it and shim it a bit to get it to fit without a gap between the guard and the wood.

I pretty much left the barrel as it was. I sanded down a little of the patina using a wet sanding technique and wd-40 with 2000 grit sandpaper. Then I coated it with a few coats of clear. This way it still looks original but has a protective coat. I tried to restore the leather strap, but my leather products couldn't do much to revive that.

This was definitely a fun project. I always enjoy learning how something new works and I LOVE mechanical devices (as opposed to electrical), so taking this apart and reassembling it was a great learning experience.