Mil-surp fire arms

[Rick]

You aren't so funny. I know where Chicago is.

[natertot]

You aren't so funny. I know where Chicago is.

I tried to rep you on that, but it said I needed to spread the love!

[Mannlicher]

I'll be honest, the glory days of milsurp guns have probably passed. If you are looking for a collector piece, or a nostalgia piece, sure they are out t here, but a shooter? Just little or no reason to get one for that purpose. Parts and ammo are always a problem.

[kyratshooter]

At this point in time parts and ammo for almost every milsurp rifle ever made is easier to find than ever before.

You just have to know where to look and what brand to ask for. If you are out of that loop and only entering the upper crust LGS down on Rodeo Drive in Hollywood it can seem impossible. Otherwise you can google about anything and find a source for it on the internet.

I was shooting a few weeks back and the person I was with, we will with hold the name of the party, came up with a beautifully made carbine of WW1 persuasion for which ammo has not been made in America ever! A great little company called Partrtizan is making new reloadable ammo for it now and we had a fine time shooting a gun that would have been a wall hanger a decade ago.

And if you buy the right MS rifle you will not be plagued with need for parts. About the only way you can need a part for most of them is to break it on purpose. The MN has about 7 moving parts and they are all made from track salvaged from the trans-Siberian railroad.

Now I did once have to replace the ejector spring on an Argintine Mauser, but some quick work with a bobby pin solved that problem.

http://www.aimsurplus.com/?Ammunition%20Webstore

Just scroll down the sidebar, they have more than the pictures show.

[natertot]

Hmmmm kyrat, that carbine sounds familiar.

Perhaps an Austrian Steyr Mannlicher M95 chambered in 8x56r which required the use of a hammer for sight adjustment is the rifle on the mind?

Picked up one or three when they were $59 each about three years ago. No one wanted them because the ammo was unobtainable. For the price I figured why not. All of a sudden Prvi Partizan started making ammo for them available and you can't find those rifles under $300. Talk about a smooth shooter. As far as surplus goes, I am starting to like it more than the MN!

Surplus stuff is still well and good. Just have to scrounge a bit more and keep a little more savvy. It is one of those things you keep a little cash on hand for and seize opportunities as they arrive.

[kyratshooter]

It is a better made rifle than the MN by several degrees. That thing has commercial metalwork and finish on it and the term "They don't make them like that anymore" comes to mind.

That is another thing you get with mil-surp rifles, a taste of how rifles used to be made back when skilled craftsmen forged, machined and then hand finished even military rifles to a level we don not see even on commercial guns today.

You can tell that the MN was made Russian factory workers for arming Russian peasants, and the Mannlicher was built by Austrian watchmakers to arm the citizens of the Austrian Empire.

Right now I have an SKS trigger group torn down in front of me and I can not figure out who made it and for what reason. Simonov was a sadist. All the good trigger designs that were available to him and he comes up with this Rubik's cube for firing the SKS.

[natertot]

Everything you just said is spot on!

The steyr is a smooth gun and is relatively light for what it is and the time period from which it came. The sights are simple and is one of those guns anyone can pick up and hit a target out to a hundred with relative ease. The only drawback to it is that the clips are required to load/hold ammo whereas many surpluses don't need the clips.

Simonov was indeed a sadist, and I don't think that was restricted to the trigger!