18-20 weeks later the White Oak service rifle upper I ordered has arrived. It will be a couple weeks until I get it built however I am already impressed with its quality clearly a lot of care was taken in building it. Hopefully I’ll get it together in time for a high power match before the end of the year. Of course I will have to man up and learn to shoot sitting.
And here she is all built. Just waiting on a new turner sling.
I’ve been struggling with my sling and cheek weld in the past few matches. So I did a little dry fire practice in the hotel (I’m sure my neighbors loved that).
I made my sling a little longer so that the upper frog is now in the “10” holes and switched my keepers back to a more traditional set up. One above and one below the upper frog. I had it set up with both keeps below the upper frog.
I feel pretty good about this set up. Now if I screwed up my point of impact… Well I’ll find out tomorrow but the poor cheek weld and sling slack are letting me develop bad habits that lead to inconsistent position and hurting my slow prone.
In case you are interested I use a Turner Saddlery 1907 national match sling. I highly recommend them. I even have one on my hunting rifle.
In an ongoing effort to restore my rack grade Winchester that I’ve nicknamed my “Winchester Grenadier” I picked up a M15 Grenade Launcher sight and disk.
I installed the sight disk after repairing the holes one of which was a ripped up a bit.
The “Sight, Grenade Launcher, M15” is a simple stamped contraption used to aim grenades fired from a M7 Gernade Laucher suck on the end of a Garand.
Seen here with an M7 launcher and an M31 inert practice grenade (not explosive no one panic)
The top of the M15 sight. Note the level and the front sight post on the left and the rear peep sight on the right.
The bottom of the M15 is marked PRL which per Bill Ricca’s site means it was made by Pressure Lube Inc in NYC between March 44 and March 45.
Since the holes in my Winchesters stock have seen better days I modified the tabs on the M15 sight by filing down the tabs a bit so that it doesn’t require as much torque to rotate the sight on the disk. The file on my Leatherman Wave fit nicely between the tab and the body.
I was able to successfully fix the ejection problems my M1917 was having with a flex hone, I posted about it here
While my initial “less than a minute” wasn’t enough, I honed it again for longer maybe 3 minutes in and out slowly (that’s what she said?) After I was done the shoulders were “white” so there was probably a lot of build up from years of shooting blanks.
HXP ejected like butter, some of my reloads still needed some extra force but that could be related to me poorly sizing the brass, mentioned back in may
I may touch it up just a bit more but I am excited that I finally found a solution!
I forgot to take a picture of my 1917 so instead here is one of my Winchester Grenadier while being test fired for the first time. (worked pretty well, 4 MOE, for an ME=3 rifle)
The Winchester rack grade I picked up at the North Store has holes in it for a M15 grenade sight. In my effort to attach the sight disk I discovered the top hole is stripped out.
First I unsuccessfully tried Teflon tape. So I moved on to the toothpick method.
You will need. Toothpicks, wood glue, sandpaper, and either a box cutter or a heavy scissors.
First shove some toothpicks In the hole so they are nice and tight.
Break off the toothpicks on just one side. Put some glue on the “broken side” I used another toothpick to help get more glue between the toothpicks. Then let it dry for awhile. Position the stock so that gravity will help the glue work down into the hole.
Carefully tape the stock up with painters tape and filed/sanded the toothpicks to be even with the sock.
Use either a scissors or a box cutter to cut the toothpicks off on the other side and repeat the above process.
The tricky part is re-drilling the hole. This is probably a better job for a drill press as it is very tricky to keep the drill centered on the toothpicks. The idea is to drill a pilot hole only in the toothpicks so what is left just tightens up the hole. I hit a little stock which cause much cussing but it still worked out.
My “Winchester Grenadier” with the sight disk for a M15 grenade sight installed.
UPDATE:
So I was not happy with the results of the above process. It became lose pretty quickly. I picked up some JB-weld. Put some painters tape inside the stock so it didn’t leak out.
Put a bit of JB-Weld in the holes. A little more in the hole that was stripped. I used a razor to scrape off any excess.
Then I screwed the disk on then clamped it all together with a shim and some scrap wood while it dried.
After an hour I took the tape and shims off so they wouldn’t get glued to the stock and let it sit overnight.
The disk is now much more solid. And is able to accept the M15 sight without twisting the disk.
