Browning T-bolt .22lr

[RandallZ]

On the "personal holy grail" topic, I mentioned I had found one of my own long-sought rifles...a 1967 Browning T-bolt, and promised I'd post here on long guns once I got it shooting.

If you're not familiar with teh T-bolt, it's a bit of a strange duck. It looks like a conventional bolt action but it isn't. Instead of rotating the bolt to unlock/lock the bolt, there's a crafty internal mechanism that makes the bolt a straight pull bolt action. To operate, the bolt is pulled straight back, and pushed straight forward. Modern Olympic biathlon rifle actions work like this, but this rifle was designed in the early 1960s.

Even though this little beauty was made by FN in Belgium, it does have a huge drawback (which is why I got it so cheap). In the mid-sixties, some idiot at Browning was sold on the idea of using packed salt to dry walnut for stocks. Normally, the wood air dries for about 5 years before it's shaped, but packing salt around the wood draws the moisture out of the wood in only a year, or so.

Salted wood was used by Browning--especially in their high end stocks--for about five years starting around 1966. After a few years, people started noticing salt leaching from the wood and the beginnings of corrosion wherever the wood touched steel. I was told that by the mid-Seventies, Browning nearly went under doing "lifetime warranty" repairs on their Pigeon grade and above shotguns because of the salted wood problem.

My little gun had a salt problem. Not a huge one, but visible none-the-less. It took enough heat to free the screw which held the trigger guard to the wood, that the stock ended up charred black--normally not good, but in this case that stock is firewood anyway.

I had bad pitting beneath the barrel that I sanded, polished, and re-blued. A bit of other clean-up here and there, and I fitted the business into a Boyds "Hunter" style stock. A couple of Warne rings mounting a Nikon Prostaff Rimfire 3-9x40, plus a couple of magazines from Numrich and the gun is good to go.

Good to go, sort-of. As it turns out, the Boyds stock fit to action isn't optimal and the barrel is free to move a bit. That makes accuracy iffy at best (3/4" to 1 1/4" at 50 yards). When I get a few free minutes, I need to bed the action and try again. Otherwise, it's a really fun gun to shoot with that wacky action.