By Jim
A customer brought in his rifle with a broken magazine latch. It is a bolt action rifle sold by Harrington and Richardson built on an FN Mauser action between 1965 and 1972. It’s a really nice rifle but the magazine latch for the floor plate was cast out of Zamak metal. The Zamak didn’t last and it was eventually cracked. The customer told me that he had hunted with the rifle with the floor plate duct taped shut, but after a while he had just put it in his gun safe for a few years untouched.
I checked online and couldn’t find a replacement for it anywhere. So I decided to make a new one instead. I took a piece of 1/4” steel plate and zipped off the corner of it with my plasma cutter. I wasn’t too worried about making the cut off piece very nice — I simply wanted a small corner to start with.
I took the broken part and used superglue to put it back together long enough to trace around the original part.
After quickly roughing shaping the new latch on the knee mill, I had a new latch. I left some of the dimensions a bit large so I could hand file it to fit the trigger guard.
After some file work I was able to fit the new latch in place before polishing it and removing the rough edges.
Once the part was polished, I cold blued it and put it back in the gun. I could have easily made the part from aluminum, but all of my aluminum scraps were too thick and would have required extra work to thin down a block to be used. The steel was closer to dimension. Now the replacement part is actually stronger than the original and the customer is happy that his old rifle can be taken out to the woods again.
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