Everyone has mentioned the low price.
They come shipped to my door - no FFL - and the UPS guy now insists on staying around for the opening ceremony after I told him to stick around the first time I received one. I think he's buying them now .....
I haven't shot them that much lately because I'm focused on handguns and reloading, yet in the last action rifle shoot I hit the 200 and 150-yard plates with the first shot.
Twenty years of studying and using Russian, quite a bit of time spent in the Soviet Union and its former constituent republics (was nice to sit in Stalin's chair on his special WWII railroad car), and a lifelong near-obsessive interest in WWII history, kinda makes them of special interest to me.
I fixed the too-short post on two of my sights with coffee stirrers and some automotive glue - sighted them in at the range, used scissors to clip down the "posts" til they were correct - and now elevation is fine.
Pulled one of my classics one day last year, spent an hour loading up for the range, when I got to the firing line, realized I'd forgotten to bring my bolts ..... !!!!! .... no problem, young guy at the next table (sort of a character, had about 10 wildly diverse rifles) happened to be shooting a pristine Romanian M44 - I asked if I could borrow his bolt. Checked with my Okie headspace guage, of course it was fine, and I proceeded to shoot off $25 worth of ammo - that's a few hours - with the borrowed bolt.
Not a hunter, but know some, and they love them, especially the carbines, for pig hunting. My carbine is valued because of the concussion that always causes a pause at the firing line ("oh - one of those ....."), and of course the fireballs. And of course I am permitted to imagine that the M38 in the hands of the Soviet soldier raising the red flag on the Reichstag in May 1945, in the famous photo, is actually the one sitting back in the spare bedroom .......
Measured by pounds of fun per dollar, it's hard to think of a better value than the Mosin - just depends on one's sense of "fun".
