Mauser conversion to 35 Remington

In this newsletter we will chronicle our conversion of a Mauser to 35 Remington as well as some reloads using .357 and 9mm leadcast bullets at subsonic speeds. We chose the 35 Remington as there are a great many of the Spanish Mausers hitting the market that require a very low pressure round and there is not much that is lower pressure than a 35 Remington, add in a pistol powder and it’s a match made in tinker heaven. After some research we found that at least one manufacture used 1-12 twist so we thought our blanks at 1-10 and a .357 bore should work fine.  The picture above and list below shows what we are starting with.
  1. Mauser 1916 small ring action from the Florida Auction
  2. Rhineland Arms- 35 Remington barrel and linear compensator
  3. Ruger m77 extractor for 223
  4. Rhineland Arms Leopard stock for a Remington 700
  5. Accuracy Int 308 magazine
  6. Remington brass, Winchester Primers, AA7 powder and some other goodies the wife does not know about..yet.
  7. Swamp Popper .357 158grain leads and 9mm 115 leads, just the name alone and I had to have it.
The stock is a leftover from another project and gave us the capability to use detachable magazines. It did require a bit of modification to convert it from a Remington 700 to the Mauser, but with a milling machine it was quick work (not really, I was a bit hung over when attempting that and may have goofed, but you can’t see it), good thing we have several of these on hand. We first milled the internal aluminum chassis for the Mauser action and then made sure is was fitting nicely, as can be seen below. The next step was to replace the Mauser extractor with the Ruger M77. This is a nice upgrade that helps make the conversion to the 35 Remington much easier. This is where is gets interesting. This action had never been good at ejecting, so I started by trying to fit a Rhineland extended ejector into the slot and noticed that took a bit of modifying on the belt sander to get it to fit fine. That’s when I noticed the Mauser factory ejector was installed in reverse. I hate to think of how long and how many soldiers had to put up with that. Simply installing the Mauser ejector correctly, solved all those issues.  With the Ruger extractor, it really kicks the 35 Remington brass out well-not like an HK G3 that puts them into orbit, but still pretty nice. Once past that, it was time to fit the Accuracy Int. magazine. This required a bit of milling to the bottom of the Mauser receiver and mostly up front. We  milled into the receiver a height of about 1/16″ and about 1/32″ off the wall. We have a lot of goodies just laying around so we pulled from our inventory of parts a catch assembly.  Pic below of the work up to the point where it’s feeding and ejecting nicely. Once we got the action seated in the chassis and working the way we wanted, it was time to headspace the barrel. The Spanish 1916 Mauser did require me to set the barrel back a bit more than usual. I noticed that our standard locking ring would not allow for proper head spacing so we will be running more locking rings next week. Headspacing was pretty easy with the lock nut set up-and that we have all the tools for this thing. I was not able to get this finished, but did have just enough time left over today to work on some reloads. We are blessed with a really great reloading shop here in Houston called 10ring.com on the north side, the shop is way better than their web site and they had several Muasers for sale, too. It was time for a trip there today and I noticed some lead cast bullets called Swamp Poppers, with a name like that I could not stay away, with some things like that it’s worse than a….Anyways while there, I called out for some AA7 and the owner came out and made me a deal on 8 pounds of it as he could not sell that much. That went a nice ways on my prepping strategy and hopefully it works out as it would be great to get to shooting again.  The first load attempt seated the bullet too deep, as can be seen on the left. The result was that this round did not feed very well. Simply moving the bullet forward and the round feeds great. We will work up a couple loads with these bullets and try to load some of the 9mm 115 grain bullets tomorrow, I just wish they had some .357 bullets in a 200 grain weight. We still have a bit of work on the stock as well as load development. Will update as we get it all together and hopefully range time on Friday.