Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Broken scope base screw extraction

Which screw is it? If it is a blind hole......forget everything shy of a lh bit or end mill. If it is a through hole.....you have hope. Use nothing but a sharp prick punch to get a center mark......them you can try to spin it out. The center mark will get buggered, but you can find it again if you mark it.....good luck. Sounds like $25 to the local smith.

Get 'er done all by myself. Here's how it went down.

I hemmed and hawed and mulled things over for a couple of days reading the posts here. Some said NFW doing yourself and some said no prob.

Did the cost-benefit analysis. $80-90 r/t insured to ship to a smith in the Lesser 48 + smith charges, so about $110. If I fupped duck, I'd have send it down for a d&t oversized screw hole. One gent here did offer his services for free (tip of the hat to Jim Kobe.)

I started with a 5/64" drill hole freehanded and fairly well centered. Then a 3/32" hole down same hole. Tried super gluing the 3/32" into the hole and torquing on that assembly. No go as the glue bond broke. Thought about drilling the next hole size up, but recalled someone mentioning the LH drill bit. Light bulb went off - extractor!

Went to local hardware store and bought a spiral extractor for $2.50. Worked like a champ - mission accomplished. I will say that I was siding with folks that said once the screw snapped, there should remaind screw head would have no tension on it and be and easy out. Not the case. It should a fair amount of torque the entire way of backing it out - and it was a blind hole.

Sometimes you just get lucky.

This tends to work for me. I center punch the screw and use a set of reverse drill bits. Normally while drilling the screw will back out. Glad it worked out for you though.

Working with a hand drill I'd say so. But all's well that ends well.

best way I found doing this is mount the action in my forester jig line up the bushing and drill away no worries about anything, drill wont walk and perfect hole everytime when done drilling run a tap down the hole to remove the threads from the screw you drilled out