I haven't been on the .22 forum since I've been here, but I have a bunch of .22's.
One of my favorites is my Marlin 39A, I got it for $300 about a year and a half ago.
It was made in 1991 and is in pretty nice shape, and it had been shot very little.
I have been working on it refining it like I do with all my Marlin Rifles.
Really I just buy Marlin rifles so I can work on them.
Anyway I spent a considerable amount of time working the action and smoothing it out.
The .22 action works almost exactly the same way as the larger caliber guns do except for a few minor differences. Still I've got 6-8 hours in this one, and it runs pretty smooth.
I installed a Brownells spring kit, and de-burred everything. Today I installed a Lyman 66LA that I bought off Ebay last year. I also broke all the sharp edges on the lever and reblued it.
The sight was a big deal, and will help shooting at the .22 silhouettes.
One of the things I did that I had to back out of, was in dealing with the rebounding hammer. The rebounding hammer on this gun goes "boing" everytime you pull the trigger and it drives me nuts! Guns are not supposed to have an audible "boing" everytime you pull the trigger! I just should not be so!
I wisely bought an extra hammer spring strut, and modified it by removing the rebound side. This worked perfectly except for one minor problem.
The half cock part of the rebounding hammer is a step not a slot. As a result you can lower the hammer to half cock and pull the trigger which just slides off the step which fires the gun. Not a real safe safety!
So I put the original part back in the gun and left it. I have been looking for an early pre-safety hammer and trigger kind of half heartedly so I wouldn't have to modify the existing parts. I may just mod the existing parts and be done with it.
The last thing to do with this gun is to refinish the stocks and cut down the fore-end.
These guns have had way too generous forends for ever ! I will remove a considerable amount of wood from the fore-end to make the shape more pleasing, and then refinish it with a nice oil finish replacing the Marshield goo they put on the stocks from the factory.
These stocks should come out rather nice as the pistol grip has some interesting figure in it, and it looks like there may be some hiding in the fore end as well. We'll see.
More to come.
Randy