Milsurp After Hours

I won a Finn M91 at an auction sometime back and recently gave it a good going over. I noticed that the top of the receiver is marked with "AZT". Can anyone fill me in on what that marking means and how rare it is?





The Finn came without a handguard. Anyone know of a source for finnish M91 handguards?

Thanks, Steve

The receiver used to build the Tikka barreled M91 was likely purchased by Finland from Austria in the 1920's or 1930's as the AZF stamp indicated Austria put the Russian M91 that the AZF receiver was original to into their own arms inventory after Austrian troops took said rifle from a Russian.
Got that?
Russian lost it to Austria. Austria later sold it to Finland. Finland used components to assemble new Tikka M91.
Finland sold it on surplus market.

Thanks, OIS. Are the "AZF" markings rare or particularly desirable?

One other thing--I notice that there is no "D" stamped on the barrel, as there is on most of my other Finn Mosins. Does the lack of a "D" stamp indicate that this rifle is not safe for use with the "D" ball round? Should I use caution shooting surplus ammo in this rifle?

I was goofing off last night and decided to use my CMP .30 caliber muzzle gauge on all my Mosins. I've done this with my Swiss rifles. They ran the gamut from "swallowing the gauge" , as I would expect for a nominal .311-.312 bore to being tight enough that the gauge would not insert far enough to reach the "0". As you might expect the "gauge swallowers" were my Russian Mosins and the tightest were the Finns.