Little resto project, aka polishing a turd

joelomunro · Post by **joelomunro** » Sun Oct 28, 2018 4:08 pm

I decided to pick up a little winter project a while back, something to work on in front of the fire, and wound up with this Sportco Hornet. I picked it up pretty cheap, knowing that it was in fairly ugly condition, with an obviously rough repair to a crack through the wrist of the stock as the main known issue. When I picked it up through the transferring dealer I was actually surprised that it was worse than I was expecting, with a good 50 years of baked crud on the bolt and in the action, not a lot of bluing left and that very average stock repair. Anyhow, undaunted, I gave it a clean (read extensive picking of shit out of the action and a good scrub of the barrel), finding that there is some pitting ahead of the chamber but otherwise the bore wasn't too bad. I knocked up a few test loads with Lil Gun and 40gr Sierra #1385 HPs and got some 50m groups around an inch or a bit over. I noticed while doing this that I could feel the stock flexing through the wrist so I decided that whatever repair had been done by the old cockie that had owned this would have to have a more permanent fix.

I began by stripping the stock with Citragel and when once clean I started steaming out some of the dings that it had acquired over the years. Picking out the epoxy in the repair I found that the stock was held together with a dirty big, coarse threaded wood screw which I removed and replaced with two dowels held in with Acraglas, a short 10mm dowel running cross wise where the screw had been and a 13mm one diagonally through the wrist to give it some strength. The stock was that dry and brittle that when I drilled out the hole for the dowel some of the timber chipped out, however I was able to epoxy it back in place with the Acraglas. I then started sanding the dowel and blended it in with the rest of the stock and proceeded to spend a fair amount of time sanding and smoothing the whole thing. I made an aluminium bedding block for the rear action screw as it was previously screwed into a floating steel block that was a few mm too short and bedded it into the rear of the stock recess with JB Weld. I was missing the bottom screw which held the rear of the trigger guard into the bedding block so I found a counter sunk allen head bolt which I then turned down to the right head diameter to fit the counter sunk hole in the back of the trigger guard.

The original buttplate was chipped and the rear of the stock along with it, so I docked the chipped section with the drop saw and fitted a Pachmayr pad to the stock which I'd had for a previous project that I'd changed my mind on. I ground down the pad with a belt sander to get the shape right and it now fits nicely and looks like it was always meant to be there.

I found that some additional cracks had started in the wrist of the stock after the two dowels had been installed, so I added a third 13mm dowel drilled and installed under the pistol grip cap, which has now tied the whole lot together and stopped the cracks from spreading any further.

After I'd got the stock into a decent shape I thought I might give it a light walnut stain to try and blend in the doweled repair, which in the end I wasn't fussed on so I sanded out the stain and began to finish the stock with Fine Buffing Oil and various grades of wet and dry paper. It's now had somewhere around 15 or so coats and is pretty smooth, so I've also given it some Tung Oil and it's at the point where it isn't soaking up the oil like it was to start with.

I was tossing up the idea of giving the metal work a makeover with Duracoat however in the end I decided to give it a run with Tetra Cold Blue, this was a quick job as it was the Thursday night before Missathon so I didn't end up putting in as much time on metal prep as I should have, the bluing is a little speckly, but overall it's fairly presentable.

I had picked up an old Weaver K4 60B scope with a dual cross hair reticle which I put on, however I have now replaced this with a Zeiss Diatal 6x42 with no.1 reticle. The Zeiss sits a little high but comes to the eye pretty well and it's nice and clear and should be pretty good in low light.

Now the answer to the $64k question, so far I haven't found a load that'll shoot consistently under an inch at 50m and I'm wondering if bedding the block that is dovetailed into the barrel which the front screw secures into will help this, as the hole for the block is a bit oversize and I'm thinking that there is some potential for movement there. I played around today with a few more loads to see if it prefers heavier or lighter projectiles without any real conclusive results, however the surprise was that 50gr Nosler Shots with 12.0gr of Lil Gun gave an average velocity of 2750fps, but the cases were pretty tight and didn't want to extract easily. Anyhow, I'll play around with some more loads, backing the speed off a bit to see if it'll group better without wringing its neck.

Cheers

Joel