A friend of my shop manager had a Nagant and he wanted it sporterized. Now he did not have much money but he is a ward working farm boy. I had about 4 State of Main cords of wood that needed to be split. He id it all by hand along with bunch of heavy landscape work that needed to be done that I had no time to do.
It started out as a bone stock nagant.
I thought about it and realized anybody he would talk to about it would say that I/EA had worked on it.
He wanted a scope mounted and the barrel cleaned up as much as possible from the machine marks and re-blued.
Well for one thing there is only one proper way to mount a scope on a nagant, not the easy way of course. Now since I had no need to the sight bases both front and rear had to go. I also cut off the un-rifled bayonet mount section of the barrel and match crowned it.
Barrel looks short but is within 1/4 of it's normal rifled length. Man it handles wicked fast and will still love milisurp ammo.
Now with a proper scope it needed a proper bolt handle. Also I added my custom treatment of the safety. The safety works better and is much less nagant. Tweaked the heck out of the trigger.
I also had the action cerakoted, including internals to tighten it up and make it look better. Of course I could not just re-blue the rifle since it just would not look nice. So I went in another direction. Keeping in mind he now lives in AZ and would be hunting in that terrain I went with this.
Since I went down that road it only made sense to match the scope and mounts to the rifle also.
