This wasn’t me, but I did do this at school

M71 covers do not fit smartly on the M18 and vice versa. As far as I know they were not issued for the non-matching helmet. M18 covers are just older and rarer and thus harder to find.

The only exception is the first pattern M18 covers with a drawstring, which were issued with M18s, M48s and M71s interchangeably.

She’s in Japan, the car is right-hand drive. Where am I taking her tho?

‘PAK rounds are blanks’ is not wholly correct. 9mm PAK is a calibre, and you can get all sorts of ammunition types as with, say, 9mm Parabellum or 9mm short. Most 9mm PAK guns are blank firers, and blank ammunition is the most common for the calibre, but it’s not the only option.

Food down rear sight, engage safety catch, remove magazine, cycle bolt, check winter trigger, check loaded chamber indicator, disengage safety, fire off action, reengage safety catch, insert white magazine, slide grenade over muzzle, twist to ensure proper fit, depress magazine button and cycle bolt, disengage safety, build firing position, unfold winter trigger, fire.

Sorry, you said ‘achtung, panzer!’, it’s subconscious at this point….

Almost! The design requirements for the Stgw 57 said that the Lmg 25 magazine had to fit in the Stgw 57, not that it actually had to work. The interfaces are the same but because the 57 is double-feed and the 25 only single, they don’t really work with each other.

Happy to help! I have a Model 4 and a Model 5, and the Model 1 isn’t too hard to find but one day I dream of having a Model 3!

Yep, I said in my other comment that it was for San Marco, they had a similar gun (also with bayonet) but yes, this version is for Arditi.

Postwar Beretta Model 3. These were made for the San Marco marines and are a derivative of the MAB 38/42.

EDIT: San Marco had a similar gun but this one is actually for the Arditi

They made a fair bit, but there is no surplus. All production is to meet current army and public shooting club needs in Switzerland, and there is no current plan to overproduce to make stockpiles or export it commercially. If it was exported, it wouldn’t be at surplus prices and would be no cheaper than PPU.

No more is going to be imported, there isn’t any more left in Switzerland to be imported. They had to start up RUAG production of 7.5x55mm again recently because all of the surplus stocks had been sold abroad. New production GP11 is still pretty good, but it’s not exactly the same as the old stuff. There will never be any more ‘true’ GP11.

Perhaps the AK and shotgun were the pseudo-prize? Who knows what treasures lurk further down?

Ahhhhh Varusteleka had these in but they sold out before they had a chance to buy one, I’ve wanted a second one for ages now

Cons:

Heavy, bulky, inaccurate, temperamental, badly balanced, picky with ammo, limited aftermarket support, outdated and outclassed

Pros:

They look cool and they’re fun

If you like it, and you aren’t planning on being a serious competition shooter chasing long range precision, you can have fun with it.

One could do that, but you’d be playing a dangerous game because you lose barrel wall thickness and there isn’t much to play with in a Mosin to start with. Most people also don’t have rifling machines lying around in their workshop, and they aren’t exactly cheap or easy to use correctly.

Realistically, this barrel was beyond being salvaged.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=l43a1+ammunition&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari

As a google search would show you, it’s a British L43A1 7.62x51mm blank round, made by Radway Green in 2023.

That used to be standard practice for the Italians, known as the ‘Salerno Method’ after its inventor. It was commonly done on Carcanons and Vetterli.

I think you could do this, but to me a Bren-gun style buffer would achieve the same thing in a less convoluted way.

No, the F1 can use standard NATO rounds as well. See here.

The G2 uses NATO magazines, and has an extended trigger guard.

Nah this isn’t communist, it’s got the crown, must be a monarchy

Your guess was correct, an F1 to be precise.

Ahhh that makes sense then. If I were in your place I’d probably want to build this back up into an analogue of the Danish Gevaer M53/17, as used by the Sirius Sled Patrol.

Looks like someone stripped this of parts, perhaps to restore a different sporter….

My preferred brand of general purpose gun oil is Parker-Hale, a lot of the specific products recommended in American sources aren’t available this side of the pond sadly.

These rifles had very long and hard service lives. They were sold to Chile in 1891, and came too late to see much service in the civil war. After that, though, they were kept around as training rifles, or for parades, and were used and abused for over a Century (the Chilean military still sometimes issues fresh recruits with obsolete bolt actions without the bolts for early training to this day, to get them used to carrying a rifle in the field without risking them breaking anything nice), and nobody really cared about them in that time. World Wide Arms, sadly now defunct, bought out the remaining stocks of rifles as they were in about 2015 (I remember getting the catalogue in the post with them listed), and sold off the nicer ones first, as you might expect. As I recall it was something like £450 for a B-grade (but of several thousand rifles on a series of palettes, only 25 or so were nice enough to qualify as such), £350 for a C-grade, and £250 for a ‘project gun’ (with bolt but very bad condition and missing parts). The ‘wall-hanger grade’ guns with missing bolts were £110 to begin with but once the better ones were sold they went down to £80. They also bought a large stock of parts, and broke down some of the absolute worst examples to get parts for the nicer guns, and, when they went out of business, most of what was left was sold to an antiques wholesaler who supplied them to small antique shops.

I’m assuming you’re on the UK, and that’s one of World Wide Arms’ ex-Chilean M86s. If so, they aren’t deactivated, but a lot were supplied without bolts so WWA made a simple dummy bolt from solid metal to complete the look for a wallhanger.

I’ll second the recommendation to watch Mark Novak’s videos, he has some good stuff, as does Backyard Ballistics (but his techniques can be a bit more advanced).

The wood and metal will need to be treated in different ways, which means you’ll want to strip this down - on mine, some of the screws were royally fucked, and so I couldn’t get the stock and action apart without needing new ones, which I’m never going to find. The ideal next step would be to boil the metalwork in distilled/deionised water - this converts the active rust to hard black rust, and can reduce further decay. The length of these does mean that can be pretty difficult to achieve, though. At a minimum, to conserve, you want to wiping down the corroded areas with a rag and a lot of oil - proper gun oils are good as they leave a slight film on the surface, which things like 3-in-1 don’t.

I’m not an expert on stock restoration, so I’ll wait for someone else to comment advice there!