Sunday, July 21, 2013

HW50S Rebuild, Part 2

Ok, 2+ months between installments, but at least I’m posting! This is boring anyway as all I really did was sand, sand, sand, and sand some more, trying to remove the worst of the rust pitting while not digging in or ruining the lines of the gun.
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Starting to sand, I kept the strokes in line and used a variety of sanding blocks so as to not put flats on the tube.
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Better. I gave up on the idea of eliminating the pits entirely, chances are I would have ended up sanding through the tube!
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Sanded this as well. Those deep gouges will remain.
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This is some deep pitting too. Not much can be done about it.
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I found it curious that the breech face has those deep milling/sanding marks that look as though they are from the factory.
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Still sanding. The barrel had some bad spots and again I didn’t want to make it look non-cylindrical. All told it was a month or so of sanding, usually for 5-15 minutes a day as it’s boring and I’m too darn busy these days.
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Put back together for testing.
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I still need to make a replacement screw for the trigger guard.DSC03394
I blued the gun with Oxpho Blue from Brownells as it seemed to react best. I had washed the gun before that with Ospho, which is a phosphoric acid paint prep, in theory this converted the rust to iron phosphate and stemmed the worst of the rusting. We’ll see.
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Depending on the angle of the lighting it looks grey to blue. Notice the vestiges of the old blue in the bottom left corner.
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From a distance it doesn’t look bad though. I was able to use the new spring Derrick sent me even though it had more coils. I sparingly lubricated the gun and did a basic cleaning of the trigger unit.
Shooting 7.9 gr. CPL pellets over the chrony I got between 575 and 599 fps (599 was the first shot, a bit of dieseling) with it settling between 575 and 585. Not bad, I bet it will get a bit slower over time.
Now to work on repairing the stock, see you in another month or so!

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