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My late lamented gunsmith friend George Fullmer, a frequent contributor to Precision Shooting magazine on gunsmithing mattters, used to do a hardness test on every military action brought to him for rebarrelling. In his (emphatically expressed) opinion, only the German actions actually made by Mauser Werke were worth the expense of remodelling into sporting rifles. I don't know how much exposure he had to the Czech manufactured Mausers. I have a 7X57 on a G33/40 action with a featherweight barrel which is probably my favorite all round non-DG hunting rifle, but of course the 7X57 cartridge is the category of cartridge the M98 was designed to accomodate.

I would recommend George's hardness test precaution to anyone considering investing the amount of money necessary to convert a military Mauser to use a large high intensity cartridge. It's probably not necessary for an 8X57 class (.244 Remington, .257 Roberts, 6.5X57, 7X57, 9X57, 9.3X57 or 9.5X57)
cartridge, and all those cartridges have the advantage of being usable in an unaltered magazine.

When I started having sporting rifles built back in the 1950's, there were any number of articles in shooting publications, particularly The American Rifleman, about rebuilding military rifles into hunting or target rifles. I was certainly bitten by the bug, and consequently have more than my share of converted military rifles, mostly Springfields and Enfields, in my gun room. If I had it to do all over again, I would have opted for using the pre-64 Model 70 action for all those projects.

Even then, when you could buy a usable 98 Mauser action for $25.00, it made little sense to use one, when Model 70 Winchesters were easily available in the $75 to $100 range. The Mausers required bolt handle alteration, safety alteration, a new trigger and in the case of .30-'06 length cartridges, magazine alteration, none of which was needed in a Model 70.

Beat-up pre-64 Model 70's are still available in the $500.00 range, and IMHO make a much better basis for a really nice hunting rifle.

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