Hello,
Im new to the forum and wanted to introduce myself before I asked for suggestions. I'm from Fairbanks, Alaska and spend most of my time fishing, hunting, and trapping up here.

I've always been fascinated by European rifles, everything from Mauser commercials, mauser customs, Mannlichers and so on.

I recently acquired a 98 that had been sporterized at some point in its life and fitted with claw mounts and spoon bolt. Its rough and still in 8X57 so I figured it would be a good project gun. I hadn't done my research before on the claw mounts and just assumed that you could get replacement rings. Now, I have done my research and found the cost to be around $800 on rings, fitting, etc. Well obviously a run of the mill sporterized mauser will never be worth spending that kind of money to fit rings. I am capable of metal work and such but have never done much gunsmithing. I have a 12x36 lathe and other tools to help me along in my amateur "smithing" conquests.

One I idea I've toyed with was making a blank and replacing the front mount, another idea was to buy a ring blank and dovetail it to fit the existing dovetail, the last idea was to buy a set of used rings with mounts on ebay and install them in the place of the existing set. I need some foresight on this, Im sure Im not the only person that's run into this and while researching answers on the net I haven't come up with anything satisfying yet. Well,thanks a lot in advance and I'd like to thank everyone for their posts that I've been pouring over, there are some beautiful rifles on here. Jess