Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Remington 742 to 760 Conversion

I have a couple of 742 semi's, and one was giving me problems with cycling and I couldn't see scrapping the old girl so I decided to try to convert it to pump action.I know some out there would say why bother if you want a pump action rifle just buy a pump action but I thought I would try to salvage a rifle that was questionable and tried to make it functional again.I did that and the conversion wasn't that difficult the hardest part was locating the necessary parts. I sourced out some of the parts needed for the conversion. I got an action slide and trigger group with a disconnector.
I picked up a 7600 stock set that had a damaged forend with a piece missing on the back side. I epoxied some stainless steel wire into the stock to act as ribs and filled the missing portion with some fiberglass resin and chop I then painted the glass with some paint that I tried to color match the wood as best as I could, I then spray varnished the stock to make it more durable.
I then sweated the gas block off of the barrel and welded the hole closed, this pooched the original bluing but I wanted to make sure the mod was going to work before I invested in refinishing the barrel and once I rough fitted the parts I tested the gun to make sure all functioned satisfactory and it did, I checked the headspace and all was well. I ended up have the barrel/receiver and action slide all finished in black oxide because it was more readily accessible for me. I then mounted a set of fiber optic sights I had laying around, I mounted the rear sight a little farther back on the receiver and I will see how that works but right now I looks like it might work fine. The only piece I still require is the plastic dust cover over the bolt. It looks a little weird with the slot in the receiver but I like the fact I'll get a little more life out of the old girl.
I haven't shot the gun since I put it together but I thought I would share the outcome here.
Here are a few pics of the setup.
here's the broken forend before the repair

here's the repair

I dare say the most interesting part of this conversion is not the forend repair.

Good on you. My local shop does a lot of those conversion. Now you can enjoy a great rifle for many more moons.

They charge about $200 also

Very interesting

Would that be Ahlmans? If so they're pretty good.

You are correct. How in the heck would you know about Ahlmans being way out there?

Didn't you know that everybody knows about Ahlman's.

I guess I do now. I'll just consider myself a lucky sob for living only 20 miles away.

That was ingenious! It would never have occurred to me to do that.

They've done work on several of my firearms. I've always been satisfied with their work. I've also recommended them to a friend of mine in Wisconsin with a really buggered up 742. Told him that they could salvage it as a pump. Haven't seen him in a while so don't know if he sent it to them or not. The 742/760 deal is pretty much like the 552/572 .22 cal deal. They've both got a lot of interchangeable parts and are pretty much easily converted back and forth.

This conversion was done a lot 30 years ago , when parts were much more plentiful !