Ok I am looking to pickup a nice sporterized 1903. All looks good and the receiver is a rock island with 380k serial so it should be good to go receiver wise as its I think nickel steel and above the 280k where they were known to have bad heat treating. Anyhow it looks to be in good shape with nice walnut stock, beuhler low safety, forged bolt handle. Also has been drilled/tapped and wears weaver bases. I can't see where it had sights so it may be a replacement barrel or someone did a good job before blueing it. It is currently a 308 norma mag and owner currently says it was bought from an old woman who's husband had been gone for sometime and she found it in his closet. Bore looks great and he says it feeds fine and he has 3 fired brass for me to look at as well. He doesn't reload but got the rifle with brass and dies with 3 rounds of live ammo left so he fired it to see how it worked. Said it went without a hitch but he didn't fire for groups. So for all you older fellers who played with these rifles what do I need to look for or check out other than normal stuff like headspace? I plan to do a chamber cast, also bed the wood stock with devcon or another tuff epoxy. For reloading I'm not going to push the limits with hot loads just gonna run published data that I have in a few manuals. Seems 1 says 52k psi and another says no limit was ever set by norma and it pushes 65k psi. The speer manual has it loaded to just over 30-06 but well under 300 win mag. The hornady manual shows it duplicating 300 win mag. Anyway what say the old timers who know these rifles and this particular conversion? Should I keep it and hunt with it? I know she's nearly 100 but that's a lot of history and character that I do like.