Hello all. I inherited a Remington made Springfield 1903A3 rifle from my grandfather that has been sporterized and am working to get it back in to firing condition. The first thing I found was that the rifle was missing the bolt assembly, so I bought a surplus bolt, installed it and checked the head space with a head space gauge, and the bolt passed both the go and no-go tests. This past week I purchased 4 A-Zoom snap caps, to practice with the rifle. The dummy rounds seem to load in the magazine fine, granted I'm not quite sure how they are supposed to be loaded, but the bolt picks them up fine. The issue comes when I am pulling the bolt back on the second to last round. I pull the bolt back and the second to last round ejects fine, but the last round also pops out at the same time, which obviously shouldn't happen. I made a short 30 second movie of me loading the snap caps and the chambering and ejecting them with the final round popping out. The video can be found here: YouTube - 1903 Springfield Reload and Ejection Thoughts on what might be causing this?
As I mentioned, the rifle has been sporterized with a new stock and a modern scope fitted on the rifle. So far, I had been practicing with the scope off so I could see what I was doing, but when I put the scope back on, I discovered the rear eye piece was too large and prevents me from moving the bolt into the vertical position. See picture below:
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...DSCN1430-1.jpg
I also noticed that the bolt lever rubs slightly on the slot where the lever sits in the stock as seen in these pictures:
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...DSCN1425-1.jpg
https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...DSCN1428-1.jpg
In the second picture you can see where the wood has rubbed off on the lever a bit. This leaves me with two options; I can either replace the bolt, or replace the scope. I'd really like to return the rifle to a WWII spec, or as close as I can get. To do that it looks like all I'd need are the front and rear sights, which I'd like to know what kind I should be looking for, and where the best place to find them would be. I looked through the "for sale" section and found one person selling both the front and rear sight. I'm also planning on skipping the front sight hood since it seems it doesn't serve a functional purpose. One last, kind of silly question, I can't seem to rotate the safety on the bolt from "ready" to "safe." Is there any trick to it, or could it just be really stuck from sitting around to 50 years?
If you like to see any more pictures that could help with my issues, let me know and I can take them for you. Thanks a lot!