Best mauser 98 for a refinishing project/shooter?

Are you going to rebarrel?

 Buying a surplus or obsolete military rifle to turn it into a sporter can be a fun project, and was done millions of times since WWI, and earlier, (in fact probably from the Revolutionary War....)

 But it really is kind of like buying a rusted-out '59 Ford pickup and trying to turn it into a convertable sports car.

Edited by RONK - May/30/2009 at 09:18

Yeah, I'm not planning on converting one into a sporter, I just wanted a fun summer project do work on. Probably going to try to clean up any rust spots etc and touch up the blue (if it has already been arsenal reblued), as well as remove that lacquer that tends to be on many milsurp 98s and restore the original oil finish. 

There's a wide variety of milsurp Mausers out there, and and a good one is always fun. Emphasis on GOOD. My own prize is a pre-WWI Erfurt 8x57 that is almost new.

You might also look at a Swiss K-31 7.5x55. They can be had in excellent condition for less than top-grade M98's, usually shoot very well, and brass and (especially) bullets are very available. Bullets are .30 caliber. I got one a couple of years ago in almost-new condition that shoots great (1-1/2" groups at 100 yards with iron sights) for $150. They are built like, ahem, a Swiss watch....

Haha, its funny you both mentioned that because just before reading your posts I was looking around and stumbled on some information about them...wow, what a gun. I think I may have to look into one of these first and I'll find a mauser to toy with eventually. I know the k98's and other battle rifles from this time period were not designed for scopes and the scoped or scope ready "sniper models" are often obscenely expensive. Is it possible to mount a scope on a K-31 without having to do any major alterations like drilling and tapping the receiver etc?  I think I may have read about a specific sniper model K-31 so I'm assuming that you can't just slap a mount and scope on the standard version without altering it right?

RONK, thanks for the congrats. I may check out that mount you mentioned. I also found another clamp on style mount that mounts onto where the front sight is situated. Its a frontier style scope mount-I dunno whether I like the idea of a forward mounted scope instead of a standard mount over the receiver but it sure looked cool in a picture I saw. Come to think of it a fast acquisition scope would work well for my purposes with this rifle...