HW50S Rebuild, Part 2

Ok, 2+ months between installments, but at least I’m posting! This is boring anyway as all I really did was sand, sand, sand, and sand some more, trying to remove the worst of the rust pitting while not digging in or ruining the lines of the gun.

Starting to sand, I kept the strokes in line and used a variety of sanding blocks so as to not put flats on the tube.

Better. I gave up on the idea of eliminating the pits entirely, chances are I would have ended up sanding through the tube!

Sanded this as well. Those deep gouges will remain.

This is some deep pitting too. Not much can be done about it.

I found it curious that the breech face has those deep milling/sanding marks that look as though they are from the factory.

Still sanding. The barrel had some bad spots and again I didn’t want to make it look non-cylindrical. All told it was a month or so of sanding, usually for 5-15 minutes a day as it’s boring and I’m too darn busy these days.

Put back together for testing.

I still need to make a replacement screw for the trigger guard.
I blued the gun with Oxpho Blue from Brownells as it seemed to react best. I had washed the gun before that with Ospho, which is a phosphoric acid paint prep, in theory this converted the rust to iron phosphate and stemmed the worst of the rusting. We’ll see.

Depending on the angle of the lighting it looks grey to blue. Notice the vestiges of the old blue in the bottom left corner.

From a distance it doesn’t look bad though. I was able to use the new spring Derrick sent me even though it had more coils. I sparingly lubricated the gun and did a basic cleaning of the trigger unit.
Shooting 7.9 gr. CPL pellets over the chrony I got between 575 and 599 fps (599 was the first shot, a bit of dieseling) with it settling between 575 and 585. Not bad, I bet it will get a bit slower over time.
Now to work on repairing the stock, see you in another month or so!