Steyr M95 Bolt Head Chipped

[cipherk98]

So I picked up a Steyr M95 carbine, mostly for the lot of ammo that came with it but was hoping to get the rifle running. So I really only glanced over it quickly. Boy was this a mistake. First the bore was a complete sewer pipe, as someone shot a lot of corrosive ammo and never cleaned it. Even the bolt head was coated in loose rust particles. 100 patches and some harsh bore cleaners later it's reasonably clean. Next was fixing the cracks in the stock, which was it's own adventure as remove the action revealed none of the cosmo was cleaned from the gun beyond wiping the exterior off, including a chamber(!) packed full of it.

Finally, after taking the bolt down to clean it (a pain when it won't stay cocked due to a worn extractor tail) I found the bolt head is chipped by one of the locking lugs, who knows when it happened.







Aside from the difficulty of getting a bolt head that will headspace, is it feasible to change it out in one of these, or is getting it to fit and function too difficult due to the machining variables? I will also eventually need an extractor, and even cleaned up I consider the bore to be poor so probably not much a shooter. If not no big deal, between the parts and ammo I'll be able to break even and just toss the receiver and barrel in my parts pile.

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[cipherk98]

Wanted to give this just one bump in case anyone had a solution, otherwise I'll hang it on the wall once I finish patching up the stock. I found a reference that said due to the nature of machining the cams/races the bolt head runs in, you can run into alignment issues when you start swapping bolt heads and bodies around... however, I found another tidbit elsewhere suggesting this issue is actually due to a mismatch in bolt head and bolt body length, as they came in three variations and people aren't often aware of the difference.