C P

He said one to three months. Stay tuned!

Finally ordered a new stock for my de-sporter project from Murray's gun stocks. Cost for just the stock with no forend was 900. Amazing how expensive these items are getting.

I saw this at a place called Wild west guns about a month back, actually held it in my hands. Pretty awkward feeling thing.

I used a propane torch to melt the silver solder holding down the front sight on mine. Then it was pretty simple to tap it off with a hammer. watch out for the alignment pin though.

Last year I got a quote from Murray's for just the butt stock and he told me about 550. I decided to hold off at the time because it would have come with no spring tube hole drilled. apparently he sends it to a friend in Texas who does that part, but at the time his friend couldn't do it for one reason or another. Maybe I'll try again now. Matconcrete, I saw you mentioned that you may have blueprints for the stock. If you were willing to share that with me I may go the rout of building it instead; I have resorted to building parts for my desporterization in the past.

Thanks Eb! this might be the way to go.

Hello gentlemen. I recently purchased a sporterized 1941 Johnson from my local Cabelas gun library and am now working on restoring it to it's original type design. Before I just start building parts I thought it would be worth asking if any of you know where I can find these items: Butt plate rear sight bayonet lug At this point I have already removed the sporter ramp sight, and am in the process of pinning on the original style one. there was also a problem with the recoil spring tube where it's recoil stop was never properly secured on both sides with screws. In fact, all they did was put the stop in, and smoothed out wood putty on top of it. the result was that the spring tube was no longer secure and got shoved too far back for the spring to engage the locking cam, resulting in a failure to fire. have a look at my progress!

You all probably noticed those scope mount drill holes on the top of the receiver in previous photos. Any ideas for filling those in, short of hot work? I was thinking plug screws ground off and peened flush then sanded with 500 grit or something. I wonder if I could take it to a jeweler to restore the stamping too, hmm.

Picture wouldn't load the first time. Sight broke the same way as the second one, though for a different reason. I may have figured out the problem I had with brazing, I may have been using a flux meant for aluminum soldering instead of proper brazing flux.

So I finally got around to building a third sight, but for some reason this one went terribly! No matter what I did I couldn't get the braze to take. After repeated attempts of fluxing and heating the metal just started to crumble apart. I can't figure out what went wrong, after the second one came together perfectly I thought I had the process down. guess not. Fortunately I did find a rear sight on Ebay and decided to buy it. It sort of feels like admitting defeat, but now that I have the blue prints I guess I could try again sometime.

So recently I decided to finally take my rifle out and do some test firing with it to see how it functions with some hand loads I made for it, as well as see if the dimensions on my rear sight were close enough to zero. I'm pleased to say that the sight did it;s job pretty well in the context of lining up the shot properly. I did however come across two glaring issues that I will need to address in the 3rd build. The first problem is that I don't like the way the original rear sight aperture is designed, It's basically a wall with a little peep hole in the middle, effectively obscuring most of my peripheral vision. I'll improve this with my own more low profile design, maybe something more like an M1 Gerand or AR-15 rear sight. The second problem was in my own design, The leaf spring part of the sight didn't have enough pre bend and thusly didn't put enough down force on the sight ladder, which caused the sight to actually climb up the ladder during firing recoil. I removed the sight and attempted to add more bend by hand, but unfortunately broke the sight. Oh well, I still learned a lot from this sight and I have in mind some improvements for the next.

In answer to Whitpusmc's question I used a #45 drill bit, but since the original standard was a larger hole apparently, I think I'll size it up.

After finishing the prototype sight and learning some lessons and revising dimensions from that one I built a second one out of tool steel. The first sight was made out of low carbon steel and just wouldn't take heat treatment, so I couldn't make it springy enough. For the second tool steel sight I tried some different welding techniques like resistance welding and brazing. If and when I build a third sight I think I'll use brazing exclusively since that worked really well.

I don't have anything precise enough to make those markings unfortunately. I would need either a proprietary stamp or some form of etching.

Progress.

Thanks! That answers my question.

Got another question: Does the windage screw knob have spring detents? Or is it kept from drifting by friction?

I'll heat treat a test piece then and see how it turns out. Thanks.

rosette weld, or spot weld so yeah. I'm not sure if I should heat treat this part or just leave it as is. Does anyone know if the original sights were heat treated?

Progress on the rear sight. If anyone want's to use my measurements, feel free!

Does anyone know if the dovetail slot for the real sight corresponds to a standard dovetail size? Or is it proprietary?

Barrel complete! now for the rear sight and stock.

Ground fully to dimension, hardened and tempered.

I found that gluing the part down to a fixture made cutting it out much easier.