Great garage/estate sale by me last weekend. Guy was selling off stuff his brother had, who apparently had been something of an accomplished amateur gunsmith:



As you would imagine, being rather obscure gunsmithing tools, this stuff does NOT come up used very often. Brownells barrel vise for $70 (usually about $150 new), action wench for $25 (usually a hundred more), no name on it other than "action wrench 1". The #6 bushings were in it, got #4, #5, and #11 aluminum bushings for $15 each.

After years of reading about rifle designs, I really love the 98 Mauser action.  And, I have two of them to experiment on, a VZ 24 I mean to make into a thutty-aught-six (that's an extended mag box, to take the longer round):



And a Yugo 24/47 that, since it's a bit shorter than a standard 98 action, I mean to make into a .308:



Thing is, I've never done this before, and some 50,000 PSI a couple of inches from your face is not the place I want to do the job badly.  Got both thutty-aught and .308 go & no-go headspace gauges, .308 finishing reamer, still need thutty-aught reamers.  I assume that you lathe off a bit of material from the shoulder on the back of the barrel until it indexes correctly (calculating thread pitch to get you in the neighborhood), but just how tight do you crank it?  Tight as you can, or is there some torque rating?  Then, do you ream to make headspace once it's cranked, or before you torque it down?  Read a description of the process in the first Brownell's Gunsmith Kinks, but it didn't touch on a lot of issues.  Got Jerry Kuhnhausens' book on the Mauser actions, but I expect that'll just have info on the various models, not how to gunsmith them.  Any pointers?  Any books you can recommend on the subject?

Also posted this over in General Discussion.

No one?  This looks like a good book on the subject; anyone know if it is?  Got any other recs?

Ask over in the gunsmithing forum.

Ah, thank you!  We have so many forums, it's hard to tell where to put stuff sometimes!