nstead of using the side of your cheek as your touch reference as with other rifles, you have to use the point of your chin touching the top of the stock.


Everything else in your very good report gets my blood pumping. That just sounds really hard.
The SKS rear sight is close enough to the front that I can choose which one is fuzzy or both kinda fuzzy, but, front sight,, I really wanna see that.
I've stopped shooting for fun..watching accuracy go down with practice isn't much fun.
The pistols, ehh, not much difference between now and a coupla years ago,, but some..

Gun shot well, two shots touching at 50 yards is enough to promote the next stage of development -- shorten the stock and re-bed the barrel.

Mausers are clamp bedded with wood out at the end of the forearm.   It was cheap, easy to do and fairly accurate.   Mauser accuratizing people are split between full bedding and free floating the barrel, with each camp getting varying results on a gun by gun basis.  

They are old war guns after all, and asking them to do a single minute of angle is a little bit much to ask, really.   My best cast mauser (so far anyway) was hard pressed to do six minutes at 100 yards, reliably.   8 minutes was more common, but that was with 6 cavity mold dropped cast bullets which simply are not as repeatable as jacketed bullets generally speaking.

I decided to use a silicone bedding method on the entire thin part of the stock out at the end after I cut it off and rounded it a bit.   I left a tiny portion of the original compressed wood bedding saddle to act as an alignment feature, since my stock is apparently warped a bit and the clamp saddle zone was off to one side a little tiny bit.  

Silicon sealant bedding is noted for dampening vibrations pretty well and it can be mechanically strong enough to hold a front end together without requiring reusing the old forend clamping band arrangement (ie cutting on the steel).   This seemed very doable to me.

      of course you ain't taking it apart, ever again, neither ......

Heat cured both the loctite on the barrel clamp mount and heat cured the silicon adhesive inside the front end with the same steady application of hot air gun air until the barrel got quite warm.

When I had let it all cool down to room temperature, I found that all liquid loctite was now solid and the RTV inside the front end was completely hard cured.  

So I unwound the rope, oiled & steel wooled the wooden front end to remove the mild rope marks in the varnish and then I bore sighted the new "lowered" red dot installation.   It was so close it only took 8 clicks on the vertical (recovering from the too tall installation I suspect) and I was all done.

Gun points and finds the dot very naturally now and because it is so short and light it will be a very handy cast bullet carry gun in the woods.  

I have ordered a carry sling for it, the sling will be here in a few days .....

And let's not forget the 8x57 Mauser, it needed a sling too.

Yeah, in NC you are lucky to see something 60-80 yards away and you need a sighting system that is licky-split fast to get a shot off before it walks out of view.