The Russian Mosin Nagant Forum

hey folks! have a mosin i bought a few years ago. cleaned it well when i first bought it. shoots well with the surplus ammo i bought with it. shot probably 50-75 rounds thru it. the last time i shot it , i noticed the bolt was very hard to disengage. so much so that i literally had to slap it up with a lot of force to get it vertical so i could extract the cartridge. this was with a clean rifle. the empty cartridges seem fine and loading isn't hard. i haven't made any adjustments to the bolt at all either. just cleaned a reassembled . any ideas what might cause this?

You have sticky bolt. Very common. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=29477

millman wrote:You have sticky bolt. Very common. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=29477

+1 And welcome to the Forum.

The last time you had it out, you must have got it "hot" and heated up the baked grease in the locking lugs. That's probably what made the bolt stick.

yeah. my boy was home from the Marines and we shot a lot of ammo out of it. come to think of it, it did get worse the hotter the rifle got. thanks for the welcomes. love this old rifle!

i tore it down and cleaned it very well to get the cosmoline out of it. cleaned it old school army style! put all the parts in boiling water 2xs. then reassembled with a light coat of break free.

You put the entire barreled action in boiling water? The problem of sticky bolt is with the chamber, not the bolt. The chamber walls have a micro layer of shit accumulated from the commies use of lacquered steel case ammo compounded by ancient dried lubricants. When the chamber heats up the crud becomes like a thick glue trapping the fired case in the chamber. Ordinary chamber cleaning methods don't cut it. 20 gauge shotgun bore brush mounted on a section of shotgun cleaning rod chucked into a power drill. Wrap the brush with 0000 size steel wool and slather it with JB bore paste. Drill it into the chamber ( but never the rifling) for a minute or two, clean, test, repeat if necessary right there at the range with the chamber still hot. Crude...yes, but this is how things got done in mother Russia, crude but effective.

[bbvideo=560,315]https://youtu.be/yRKSjtVFeJA[/bbvideo]

Junk Yard Dog wrote:You put the entire barreled action in boiling water? The problem of sticky bolt is with the chamber, not the bolt. The chamber walls have a micro layer of shit accumulated from the commies use of lacquered steel case ammo compounded by ancient dried lubricants. When the chamber heats up the crud becomes like a thick glue trapping the fired case in the chamber. Ordinary chamber cleaning methods don't cut it. 20 gauge shotgun bore brush mounted on a section of shotgun cleaning rod chucked into a power drill. Wrap the brush with 0000 size steel wool and slather it with JB bore paste. Drill it into the chamber ( but never the rifling) for a minute or two, clean, test, repeat if necessary right there at the range with the chamber still hot. Crude...yes, but this is how things got done in mother Russia, crude but effective.

[bbvideo=560,315]https://youtu.be/yRKSjtVFeJA[/bbvideo]

yes i put the entire disassembled rifle in boiling water 2xs. used a 30cal. breech brush i acquired as a armorer in the Army. used the pumice laced rem. bore cleaner and it cleaned a lot of shit out but apparently not enough. we did shoot near 50 ends out of it over a 60 min. period but would let her cool down between clips. must of recoated it pretty good! from now on its brass ammo for her! thanks for the help guys! Happy shooting!

No problem. The commie ammo was cheap, dirt cheap until recently, that was it's advantage, but commercial quality it wasn't. Except for the Yugo stuff, that was commercial quality, and still is selling under the PPU brand name. The rest was good plinking ammo but you had to put up with crap like the lacquer thing, occasionally the powder burned kinda filthy. For what we were paying it was OK, today .22 is more expensive than some of the 7.62x54 I bought back then. Albanian was brass case, but crude, some of it looked hand made without a press but it shot OK, there was one lot of Bulgarian that was also brass but tended to have corrosion issues. The bulk of the rest was copper washed or lacquered steel case with steel core bullets. Uncle never issued ammo of that class, the best of theirs was still only as good as the ordinary of ours, but it worked good enough to get the job done.