Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors OT - BSA magazine project

Really impressive job Gene.

Not quite done but far enough to do one last post. I was working on followers & scrapped the first attempt - I am self taught on a milling machine and I now appears I am not a very good teacher! I used some cold rolled mild steel & should have heated it & cooled it slow to relieve some of the stress, it did not get real hot form the machining but still warped enough during one operation that it became unusable, I will use a different procedure on the next attempt.

With a temporary follower made of bent sheetmetal I was still able to load 7 round & cycle them but the 5th gets hard to load and the 6th & 7th are a really difficult.


I did do some test shooting with 4 & 5 rounds loaded & after some minor adjusting it cycled quite well. One of the problems is with the gun, the firing pin is used to eject the cases and it's missing a screw that pushes on it, right now it just hits the rear of the action and moves just enough to eject, if it is pumped firmly enough. The closest I can come to measurements for the screw size is that it's a 5/32-40 (or maybe a #7-40) and is not something that is available anywhere. A #6-40 goes in very lose and since it would be getting slammed by the firing pin I don't think that would work for long, and re-tapping to an #8-40 would not work because the clearance hole in the rear of the bolt is to small.

Here is a video of it being test fired - BSA test firing

Hi Gene
The threads on a BSA
are British association BA
Check the charts
BA Pitch is 47.5 Deg
http://www.motalia.com/Html/Charts/ba_chart.html
Hope this may help
Cheers Graham