HI Calfed, Hope this will be helpful for anyone who thinks they have done a complete job bending the bolt handle of a M96 to accomodate a scope: Your post turned out to be very helpful for me although at the time I wrote back to you I had no idea how helpful. I spent several frustrating hours trying to get a horribly abused M96 sporter fixed up just because it has such a great barrel and even tho' I had bought it initially as a parts rifle. A few days ago I replaced the broken firing pin and bent the bolt handle, did the final polishing etc and believed I was all set to reassemble the action........nope! Hour after hour of disaasembly and reassembly with a bit of grinding here, a bit there and I could not get the bolt shround to screw in properly and thus could not fire the trigger or work the safety properly. I did some searches and found a similar set of problems described on The FiringLine and pretty well had given up until I had another look at one of your pics showing the rear of the bolt. I was having issues with not being able to set the safety nor fire the action and it seemed that the bolt shroud was either too far forward or too far back and the problems described above were constant. I fiddled around for two days, even trying the old broken firing pin and last night after reading this thread just figured my M96 was headed for the parts heap. This morning, however, I tried again after viewing one of your pics, this time with the trigger removed from the frame and immediately could see that the half moon recess in the bolt into which the male counterpart on the trigger fits was about 1/32" off center.....meaning that the bolt was rotating to the right fully........tada! The inside of the bolt handle was hitting the right side of the receiver too early! Solution found and just reheated the bolt and bent it outwards slightly and all is resolved.....the safety works properly and the trigger too, shroud screws in easily and all is set to continue making this into a shooter. Live and learn.....k