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Old May 11, 2013, 04:50 PM   #23
Mike Irwin
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Join Date: April 13, 2000
Location: Northern Virginia
Posts: 41,374
When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they immediately defaulted on most Tsarist contracts.

That left many rifles (Winchester Model 95s as well as American-made Moisins) undelivered.

The US Army took many of the Moisins and used them for recruit training stateside. That freed up US service rifles to go overseas.

After the war, most were purchased by Francis Bannerman as surplus.

It's unclear what happened to most of them, but many were sold in the US for a few dollars.

Bannerman also was responsible for an extremely DANGEROUS modification to the Westinghouse Nagants.

His company "converted" some hundreds or thousands to fire US .30-06 ammo.

Basically they ran a chambering reamer in to lengthen the chamber to proper dimensions, and cut a half moon out of the receiver ring so that the longer US ammo would fit easily.

I'm not sure if they did anything to the magazines or whether they were just single shots.

Given that the 7.62 Russian round is significantly larger at the case head, these rifles got a reputation for occasionally blowing up.

Somewhere around here I have a Bannerman catalog reprint from the 1920s. I'll have to dig it out and see if there are Moisins offered for sale.
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