Mosin Nagant 91/30 markings and questions

I decided to go through my Soviet weapons next and first on the bench is a 91/30, soviet made and finnish captured Mosin Nagant. My first question (tongue in cheek, of course) is just how many characters can you stamp in the bottom of a barrell before the peening effect starts to bow the barrell? (image below) I counted at least 25 individual characters. Is it normal for one of these to look like every armorer and inspector in Russia took a whack at it?

It's mostly a Tula production as the receiver is marked Tula 35 and the barrell is Tula 1936. The bolt was mostly Izhevsk but what I found interesting is that it had a Tula bolt head on it. Kind of wondering if they kept the matching bolt head to maintain headspacing when they changed the bolt? Not sure on the stock, there is remnants of a cartouche with another smaller marking nearby but haven't matched them to anything yet. The buttplate has a Tula star on it so perhaps it could be the right stock.....except the serial number is off by 100k.

Shows several signs of being a Finnish captured weapon, such as the boxed SA on the barrell shank; the serial number on the replaced bolt lined out with the matching number stamped in the handle; the D stamped by the barrell serial number along with the counterbored muzzle; and a sanded down stock, which is why I can't quite make out the cartouche.

It has the concentric double O stamp; is this common, or does it indicate better than average accuracy during production tests? There is also the mystic 41 stamped in the barrell next to a quality control mark. I haven't read anything yet that explains it exactly. The barrell is in decent shape, still has groove left but the landings are rounding

Oh, yeah...I hate cosmoline. Is Finnish cosmoline thicker and stickier than British cosmoline?

Too bad that stock got sanded. Looks like it's still a pretty decent example of a pre-war issue though. Still shoots straight I take it?

I will try to answer that question this weekend. In the process of setting up a decent range on my property, just need to find the direction that contains the least amount of neighbors in the background :D then put a big pile of dirt there.

I think I have a weak trigger spring and/or a worn sear. I fired five rounds, three of these had a nice short trigger drag with a slight catch before it fired while the other two fired as soon as I put a little pressure on the trigger. As the attached image shows, 3 rounds made one nice slightly enlarged hole while two strayed a bit. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this thing does, indeed, shoot straight. The two strays were a result of the unexpectedly short trigger pulls. This was with surplus ammunition fired at 100' just to make sure I was at least somewhere on the paper.

I'd say a little trigger work and you have a good shooter to work with. You shouldn't have any problems finding parts either. I'd go hunt some down for you but I'm at work and that severely limits the gun/parts shopping I can do. :banghead:

That is an unusual amout of proofmark stampings but then again i have seen a few mosin's with stampings all over the place; my guess is VODKA was being passed around during this process...

You should see my '42. Parts all mismatched, gotta be at least 30 seemingly random stamps all over the gun. It's like they were throwing stamps from 20 feet and scored a point if it made the right mark.