C96 Bolo refurbished

[wlewisiii]

Some of you may recall that last winter, I picked up a shooter C96 Bolo. All matching but pretty rough condition and a totally shot out barrel.



Fast forward to 7 months later, I've scrounged the coin, sent the firearm out and today received back my C96. Rather a different looking beastie, eh?











Barrel relined (still .30 Mauser), springs refreshed, polished, re-blued & test fired at The Broom Closet for $200. New grips are from SARCO while the holster & cleaning rod are from Pacific Canvass & Leather. I've been very happy with PC&L's reproductions.

It's no mint collectable - you can still see some of the pits they couldn't polish out - but I'm still only into it for $600 and shooters like this regularly go for a fair bit more at the auction sites so I'm a happy little camper tonight. Hopefully I can get over to the range on Wednesday and see if I can hit anything

And just to round out the German engineering haul today, I also received today the Rolleicord III Twin-Lens Reflex camera I traded for. Post war medium format goodness.

 

[Jaymo]

Damn, that's purty. I'm a big fan of the Broomhandle and Bolo Mausers.
I have a friend who has a couple of rough ones he got cheap from somewhere.
I'm trying to talk him into selling one to me so I can get the same thing done to it.
I want a Mauser that's a shooter. It's just such a cool range toy.

 

[Dr.Rob]

Very cool. Great to see one of those old warhorses still shooting.

 

[Certaindeaf]

I'd get me a starwars trooper getup just for the blasting goodness.

 

[Lone Star]

How's the muzzle blast on that 7.63mm with a short barrel?

What brand of ammo are you shooting?

Nice looking restoration!

 

[wlewisiii]

Lone Star, I shoot Prvi Partisan right now & gather up my brass to start reloading. The muzzle blast is quite mild, rather like a 4" .38 Special.

 

[Shear_stress]

Awesome!

 

[Pilot]

Very nice. I have a refurbed Red Nine, that I may have converted back to .30 Mauser, as I think it was made 9MM.

 

[j1]

Pretty pistol I hope that it shoots as good as it looks.

 

[Kyle M.]

Very nice I had a pretty rough one about five years ago that I was going to send to the broom closet to get sleeved and refinished. Unfortunately I never got around to it and ended up selling it to my grandfather, he made a shadowbox for it and has it on his office wall.

 

[jonnyc]

I had The Broom Closet reline my Bolo about 2 years ago. I didn't go for the whole refinish, just replaced the springs. Very happy with the resulting shooter.

 

[bannockburn]

wlewisiii

Thanks for the info. I have often though about getting a Broomhandle (especially like the look of the Bolo model), but was concerned about how I could get it refurbished. I will definitely check out The Broom Closet.

 

[wojownik]

Very nice. The C96 is definitely one of my collection aspirations.

 

[browningguy]

Very nice rig.

 

[wlewisiii]

Well, I made it out to the range today.









It took a bit of puttering at first as, it turned out, the magazine wasn't quite assembled correctly and it's needing some wear in on the newly blued parts. Once the follower was sliding reasonably like it should, I could rattle off strings of ten with no problem.

Hitting anything, that's a different issue... :banghead: The lowest tick on the sights is 50 meters (!) and it shoots somewhere between 6" & 10" at 25 yards. Towards the end of my time out there, I started aiming at the bottom and walking it up towards the target and actually got the one on the plate by accident The two beneath the plate are from me as well. If the plate is COM. I was aiming at the groin of a human sized target for that hit. OTOH, what hits there are are close enough on left/right to make me happy for today's test shooting. Since this isn't a collectible to begin with, I must admit to pondering how to mod the front sight for aiming at 25 meters.

 

[JellyJar]

When you say it shoots

between 6" & 10 at 25 yards"

do you mean it shoots high or it groups that big?

 

[Certaindeaf]

Yea, I didn't catch if it hits high or low either. If it groups 10" off sandbags, that's pretty terrible.

 

[Trebor]

Nice looking gun.

The only Broomhandle I got to shoot was horribly inaccurate. The owner said the bore looked like a smoothbore and he never was able to hit much with it either. I don't know if it was high or low but none of my shots were on a plate sized target at 25 yards either.

 

[wlewisiii]

Sorry, shoots that high. Can't say about grouping yet as I didn't get enough hits at one aim point to tell.