Anyone own a Mosin Nagant?

I bought mine a few months ago and have had a great time improving it! I now have a proper sniper bolt, monte carlo stock from ATI, and the best improvement to it has to be the Timney trigger! That fixed both the creep of the trigger and the safety issue! Now it has a hair trigger that is extremely crisp and a thumb safety, the stock must be inlet for that, it improved the accuracy by inches! From 4-6 at 100 yards to touching holes at the same distance. Mosin-Nagants are perfect project guns or leave them stock for a good cheap day of fun!
 
I LOVE MY MOSIN-NAGANT!

I, probably like many others, do not have tons of money to spend on guns. I have a wife and 4 girls (8,6,3,and 1), and don't have a lot of spare cash at this point for my "hobby" (that is what the wife calls it). Well, cabela's was selling these things for 90 bucks on sale and I did not own a true rifle caliber (all i had was a marlin 1894 in .44 mag). I thought for 89 bucks what could I loose. Let me tell you, this thing is so much fun! It is in fact a very heavy gun but manageable from a bench or from a shooting stick. The Prvi Partizan ammo shoots well through mine but what really improved the accuracy was handloading. I slugged the bore and found that a .312 diameter bullet works really well. I also removed the rear ladder sight and exposed the 3/8" dovetail that it was attached to. I added an LER scope and now I am closer to 2" groups rather than 4 or 5 inch groups at 100 yards. The trigger does kind of suck but is workable once you get used to it. The timney trigger looks nice but I am not ready to drop 100 bucks on the gun at this point.

Go for it!!
 
Getting into this late, but I have one that is now in a synthetic stock and it lessens the weight quite a bit. The MN is a a tack driver at 50 yards with iron sights - shooting through the same hole in groups of 3. My eyes are not good using irons at 100 yards anymore, but I'm sure it can do sub MOA easily.
 
My eyes are not good using irons at 100 yards anymore, but I'm sure it can do sub MOA easily.
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Hmmmmm

The front sight isn't any farther from your eye at 100 yards then it is at 50 yards. Just put the fuzzy target on the front sight, it works if you are shooting 50 yards or 1000 yards.
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There appears to be a huge surplus of these old rifles along with a huge supply of old corrosive ammo for them. I reload my own ammo; therefore cheap surplus ammo is not so attractive to me.
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I reload, and the huge supply of cheap surplus ammo is still very attractive to me.

You can get surplus ammo for ~18¢ a round. I can't load them for that price, even if the brass was free. It is hard to even find bullets for that price, unless you use undersized .308 ones.
 
Potcha,
Did you end up getting one from AIM. If so, what did you think. I bought a 1926 model. I like it a lot, though I have only taken it out one time. Thats the problem with having 2 time consuming hobbies, 4 kids, and not having land to shoot on.
 
kraigwy

Quote:
My eyes are not good using irons at 100 yards anymore, but I'm sure it can do sub MOA easily.
Hmmmmm

The front sight isn't any farther from your eye at 100 yards then it is at 50 yards. Just put the fuzzy target on the front sight, it works if you are shooting 50 yards or 1000 yards.
Click to expand...

LOL! If that were only the case! It's kind of hard to hit the same fuzzy black spot when it's a complete blur! What I would give for 20/20 again. :(
 
I have several, I am looking for original configuration M91s made in the USA, France, and Czechoslovakia. I'll stop collecting them then.
 
I have three basic arsenal refurbished 91/30's, and I love them all.

Definitely not a state of the art rifle, big, heavy, crude, primitive, and quirky, but dirt simple, rock solid reliable, fairly accurate, inexpensive, dripping with history, and loads of fun to shoot.
 
I have ~ 75 Mausers in various states of sporterizing.
I have ~ 10 Nagants in various states of sporterizing.

Here is a pic of an M39, a 91/3, and a 91/59.
 

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I can imagine sporterizing a M91/30. You end up with a rifle worth about what you started with. However, sporterizing a M39 or a M91/59 gives you a rifle that is worth maybe half what you started with. I am curious why you would sporterize these rifles.
 
I got a Sako M39 for $90 at a gun show.
The 91/59 was free, I guess.
It is never going to get good groups with my old eyes, unless it has a scope.

I worked all those years designing defibrillators, cell towers, jet fighters, missiles, etc., don't I deserve a few years of wrecking old guns?
 
i got a MN for my first rifle about 6 months ago and i love it. being a southpaw the straight bolt on these rifles is relitively easy to use compared to bent bolts. mine is a 1938 m91/30 that i picked up for around $100 bucks and got to hand pick it out of a group of about 30 arsenal refurbished ones. ive put probably 200 rds through it no more than 40 a trip to the range otherwise my shoulder feels like its gunna fall off.if your looking for a good cheap and fun rifle theres nothing better, ill probably be picking up another one soon to go the sportsterized route with the stock and a red dot or scope on it.
 
In ten years you'll be kicking yourself when the price is $400 and they are hard to find.

I love mine. Shoots straight. Looks like a gun first made in 1891 should. A piece of history.
 
If anything it is a great rifle to learn "how to rifle". I got mine a few weeks ago and have been out a couple of times. Normally a pistol guy this rifle has almost converted me to rifles haha.
 
Nothing at all wrong with a surplus M91/30 excepting cleaning out the cosmoline! In seriousness, they shoot somewhere around 2-6" at 100yds, depending on condition, and can achieve just better than 1" if you modify them correctly. Of course, darn near $1,500 for upgrades* on a $100 rifle is more than most people will ever be willing to put out, especially when the final project is still less accurate than most $800 Remington M700s.

These things are utterly reliable, the only thing that can make one jam is defective ammo; by which I mean carry a broken shell extractor if you shoot surplus ammunition. They don't split too often, but the ammo is anywhere from 30 to 70 years old.

A note on surplus ammo; clean the gun (especially the bore) with an ammonia-based solvent such as Windex. This will neutralize the corrosive residue left in the gun. Otherwise, it will rust up!

I recommend cleaning excess cosmoline out of the hard-to-reach parts of the chamber by wiping out the gun after firing, and free-floating the barrel for better accuracy.

*The upgrades I'm talking about are a mount and POSP/PSO-1 (Dragunov or PSL-54) scope with gunsmith installation, bedding pillars for the receiver, a good bent bolt, and a Teludyne Straightjacket (which actually do work.)
$650 (PSO1)+ $200 (gunsmith at $50/hole drilled and tapped)+ $70 (good bent bolt)+ $10 (pillars)+ $550 (Straightjacket)= $1480 plus shipping on the scope and bolt handle or admission to a gun show. More if you buy a polymer stock, Mojo aperture sight, or match trigger. Add $60-$100 apiece for those upgrades.
All of that for .5 to 1.25 MOA at 100yds depending on you and the original condition of the rifle.
 
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I have had several dozen of these rifles come through my shop in the last 2 years and I have to say without any hesitation, that the ones with perfect bores shoot quite well. I am getting old, and I can't shoot as well as I could when I had younger eyes, but I have fired several groups at 75 yards and 100 yards that have proven to me that some of these rifles shoot better then most folks think they can. I own one with an octagon receiver with a great bore, and it's giving me 1.5" CONSISTANTELY at 100 yds.

Most of them with frosty bores shoot about 3 to 3.5 inch groups at 100, and some will only do 5-6 inches, but they are no different than any rifle. No rifle will shoot well if the bore is rusted out.
The trigger pulls are strange to the western shooter. They can be cleaned up to be glassy smooth, but they don’t “break”. They only compress until the rifle fires. I’d compare them to a well tuned Glock or Springfield XD pistol. With a bit of dry-fire practice, they work just fine and any one can learn to use them.
The safeties are a bit odd. You pull back about ¼’ on the cocking piece and turn the piece 45 degrees counter-clockwise. It takes some getting used to. However, it’s not all that hard to learn to use them.

All in all, they are a super good buy. I know a few men that think of them as a basis for a nice sporter. Why do we feel it’s necessary to spend larger amounts of money on an action than $70 when we don’t have to?
If we were to spend $600 on gunsmithing in addition to 600 on an action, is that somehow money better spent than putting the same $600 on gunsmithing in addition to a $70 action?
Here is a picture to illustrate what I am talking about. I didn’t build this rifle, but I have done 2 very much like it.
MosinNagantSporter.jpg

Now, I believe this is a better 'all around rifle" then a 30-30 lever gun. The price is close to the same. It’s more powerful, and in many cases more accurate. It can be had with the correct length of pull that the customer wants. It can be had in price ranges that fit budgets. It can be scoped with no more effort then scoping a military mauser. If the customer wants it can be had with a Timney trigger which has a conventional safety on it, just like those made for Remington M-700s.
And it can be had pretty inexpensively. Cheaper then a new "budget rifle"? NO But not much more either, and I think some men (including myself) think such a rifle is classier then a plastic stocked "modern American Budget rifle"
I have nothing at all against the Savage, Mossburg, Weatherbys, TCs and so on. But that's why we have more then one color of shirt too.
My point is simply this:
The MN rifles are very much worth the price and they can even be worth the money it would take to make something really nice out of them, or just hunt with one as it came from Russia and you'll probably be a happy camper.
 
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