Newbie to the board and the 03A3 fun

[mossy33oak]

Hey guys, just signed up (found this great site from google). I've been doing a lot of reading trying to answer many of the questions I have. I just got thrown into the fun times of this great rifle due to a very dear friend of the family. Long story short, the family friend heard about me collecting Mosin Nagants and said that he had a rifle he wanted me to have. I stopped over at his house and he has leaning in the corner a 1903A3 springfield in dusty but incredible shape. After a few hours of cleaning the gun looks almost like new. After researching on your site I found it's almost exactly like the gentleman's gun who started the thread "help with my 03A3" on here. Its green Parkerized and has a production date of 12/43 on the barrel. The one question I have is about the rifling. My friend when he gave it to me told me he bought it from the NRA, had never fired it and it just collected dust. So I ran a patch with Hoppes #9 down it and it came out brown with dust. Next patch came out clean. I put my bore light in the chamber and when I looked down the barrel it was a shiney as a brand new gun.....BUT there was not the rifling that Im used to seeing. In fact i could hardly see any at all. It didnt have the tradional lands and grooves etc. What i saw was basically a spiral line twisting down the barrel. Is this common? Please help!.

*If any of you are interested I can post pics of the gun, or try to take one down the barrel if that helps. Thanks guys.

Information

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[supercub]

Welcome Mossy. The barrel is a two groove and they are quite different looking from what you're probably used to. The grooves are fairly wide and they tend to look as you describe. Take a 150 gr 06 bullet and place it in muzzle, if it doesn't go past the ogive you can rest assured that it's probably fine.

Kurt

[mossy33oak]

thank you very much. That helps a lot. I just was really unsure what I was looking at.

[Rick the Librarian]

By all means post pictures. Our saying is "Post pictures or it never happened"

And welcome to the forum!

[1911Ron]

Pictures please and welcome, i'm fairly new also!

[mossy33oak]

Ok I finally got some pics taken. I need to get on an actually computer to host them to image shack or something I guess?

[mossy33oak]

---------- Post added at 02:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:21 AM ----------

[Chuckindenver]

nice rifle. has been through a rebuild, and someone has added a milled trigger guard..barrel is original...
should be a nice shooter, bit of oil would do wonders..

[mossy33oak]

Believe it or not I had just finished oiling the gun? Or do you mean the wood with some different kind of oil other than hoppes

[mossy33oak]

Also what does the 4 numbers in the circle, square, diamond and triangle mean?