M39 front sights.....redux

[mozark]

I had posted a question about M39 front sight heights awhile ago, which was apparently lost in the great ez fire.

The gist was that I had read that the armorer stamped the proper height of the front blade behind the front sight base when the rifle was zeroed. On my M39 the barrel is stamped 82 (8.2mm or .325) while the front blade bore 78 (7.8mm or .307") which is what is measures. I have read posts about other M39's with blades shorter than the number on their barrels too. With this combination my rifle shoots high, like 5" at 100 yards, and with the rear sight at 150m it should be around 1.5" high at 100. Well it seemed to me that with a 8.2mm front blade the rifle ought to shoot to where the rear sight says it should, since the .018" discrepancy represents about 3 MOA.

Well, I got a tall front blade from Tenn. Gun Parts and I got some of the Lapua D166 bullets which are the bullet the rifle was designed to fire. I finally got around to working on this over the weekend. I surmise that the Finn Military Ball must have run around 2350 FPS. After working up a load near that velocity I started working down the tall sight blade. The upshot of this evenings shooting is that with a blade matching the number on the barrel, and with a close (hopefully)approximation of the Finn ammunition, my M39 shoots about where should. That is +1.5" at 100 meters.

Just my not too scientific experiment with 1 rifle.

MM

[wh12725]

Scientific or not...it appears to work! Both my VKT and "B" shoot about 3" high at 100yds but as dead-on as my poor eyes can shoot at 200yds. I did a little adjusting from right to left several years ago when I purchased these rifles and haven't touched them since. Both rank in the top five in my collection as far as accuracy.

Nice work MM!

[dhtaxi]

Thats intresting Iv learnt something new Ill have to check my mosins and have a play. Cheers