Question of restoring swiss rifles

[gunner]

Hello to all,

I`ve got a question for restoring the wood of an G 96/11. What did they use on the wood. Sometimes it looked like BLO and sometimes it seems to be a kind of glossy varnish. Any idea?

Best regards,

Gunner

Information

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[louthepou]

Well, I tried to find the answer on my own but didn't succeed!

Mind you here's a place where I found tons of great info about the S.Rubin rifles: ht tp://www.swissrifles.com/sr/

Maybe you can contact that guy, he could know?

Lou

[gunner]

Thank you Lou . BTW i like it to see your posts with this fine Gun stuff that you had restored.

Regards,

Gunner

[louthepou]

Thanks Gunner

Hope you will do the same with that S.Rubin of yours!

Lou

[Patrick Chadwick]

I have a G96/11, and it is the most accurate out-of-the-rack milsurp I have ever had in my hands. Sorry Enfield and Mauser, but I have to put a lot of effort in to tuning your products and their ammo to achieve what the G96/11 does with standard GP11 ammo.

As to finish - looks like a normal oil/BLO job to me. No trace of varnish. As a Swiss was often able to take over "his" rifle as private property, I would guess that any varnished finish was applied by the owner when the rifle was privatized. That's not offered as a fact, just as a plausible hypothesis based on what I have seen. Does your rifle have a lone capital P somewhere on the receiver?

Patrick

[gunner]

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for your helpful answer. Yes there is a P on the reciever. Do you know what the meaning is? I shot it on saturday and for a rifle build in 1906 it has a good accuracy. By using the GP11 you can hold 2" on 100 metres. The only thing that i must do is to scratch a little wood out of the forestock. There is contact between the barrel and the wood so when the barrel gets warmer the shotgroups move to the right.

Regards,

Gunner

[Patrick Chadwick]

The Swiss barrel should not touch the wood at any place from the end of the taper at the barrel root right up to the muzzle. There is a sleeve made of a kind of cupro nickel that sits in the front end of the woodwork to ensure that there is no barrel-stock contact. And if you get it just right, the barrel should even float within this ring. I.e. a free-floating barrel, and any barrel whip is taken up by the sleeve.

So check before carving - is the barrel really binding on the wood, or on the sleeve? On my G96/11 it rubbed on the sleeve to one side, so I simply loosened off the trigger guard screws, wedged a sliver of wood between barrel and stock to push it over a bit mode than necessary, tightened the screws again, removed the wood sliver, and voila! a free-floating barrel again. When I initially removed the handguard I found a piece of felt that had obviously been used by the previous owner for the same effect, but had come adrift, thus confirming my suspicion that it a free-floating barrel was intended.

And, of course:

P = Privatisiert (German) = Privatized (English) And it was the unknown P who probably applied the varnish.

Patrick

[Patrick Chadwick]

P.S. I should add, that the cupronickel sleeve on my G96/11 was not as free as it should have been, because it had become somewhat clogged with verdigris, from the corrosive action of grease on the cupronickel.

I cut a thin strip of cloth, fiddled it in between the sleeve and the barrel until it came though, then pulled it back and forth to clear out the verdigris. That gave me back the few tenths of a millimeter I needed to have the barrel floating again.

Must stop now, it's really long past grandpa's bedtime, and I see from the previous posting that my typing is becoming wobbly.

Patrick

[gunner]

Hello Patrick,

Hope you had a good night? Thank you for your good notes. Yesterday i took a look after the forestock and it seems that the wood is a bit warped between the ironsight and approximatly the middle of the forestock. It can be from wrong storage. Did you take the stock to a carpenter who can correct the stock by using steam?

Thank you in advance.

Best regards

Gunner

[Patrick Chadwick]

O dear, I never had to steam a stock, so I'm not going to pretend any expertise. At this point you have a choice: scrape out the stock until it fits, or steam it to straighten it. I have scraped out high spots before, to get a good clearance around the barrel. The ideal tool for this is the round form of the Stanley Surform, if that is still made. Difficult to describe, so if you don't know what I mean go to a professional tool stockist, not a supermarket. If you have one of the round Surform blades you can put wedges in the slot to adjust the diameter. The Surform blade is much longer than the channel routers used by gunsmiths (which are also very expensive) and I used it to take a touch out of the barrel channel of my 96/11 to optimize the clearance so that even if the barrel was pushed hard over at the muzzle, until the cupronickel ring was clamped between barrel and fore-end wood, there was no contact in the barrel channel.

Maybe that treament would be enough for your rifle too. I am wary of upsetting the moisture level of wood that has had nearly a century to settle to it's present condition. It might not only warp some more, but actually twist, which really FUBARs the stock.

So if you think it could/should be steamed straight, please go to someone who knows how to do it, as you could easily make things much worse! That would mean a real gun restorer, not the local carpenter.

Patrick