HW50S Rebuild, Part 2

Ok, 2+ months between installments, but at least I’m posting! This is boring anyway as all I really did was sand, sand, sand, and sand some more, trying to remove the worst of the rust pitting while not digging in or ruining the lines of the gun.

Starting to sand, I kept the strokes in line and used a variety of sanding blocks so as to not put flats on the tube.

Better. I gave up on the idea of eliminating the pits entirely, chances are I would have ended up sanding through the tube!

Sanded this as well. Those deep gouges will remain.

This is some deep pitting too. Not much can be done about it.

I found it curious that the breech face has those deep milling/sanding marks that look as though they are from the factory.

Still sanding. The barrel had some bad spots and again I didn’t want to make it look non-cylindrical. All told it was a month or so of sanding, usually for 5-15 minutes a day as it’s boring and I’m too darn busy these days.

Put back together for testing.

I still need to make a replacement screw for the trigger guard.
I blued the gun with Oxpho Blue from Brownells as it seemed to react best. I had washed the gun before that with Ospho, which is a phosphoric acid paint prep, in theory this converted the rust to iron phosphate and stemmed the worst of the rusting. We’ll see.

Depending on the angle of the lighting it looks grey to blue. Notice the vestiges of the old blue in the bottom left corner.

From a distance it doesn’t look bad though. I was able to use the new spring Derrick sent me even though it had more coils. I sparingly lubricated the gun and did a basic cleaning of the trigger unit.
Shooting 7.9 gr. CPL pellets over the chrony I got between 575 and 599 fps (599 was the first shot, a bit of dieseling) with it settling between 575 and 585. Not bad, I bet it will get a bit slower over time.
Now to work on repairing the stock, see you in another month or so!

HW50S Rebuild, Part 1

Yes I’ve been AWOL for a while, but life gets busy (kids, two businesses, several other hobbies) and I haven’t had much luck finding odd/rare and cheap airguns to work on lately. We’ve covered almost all of the common airguns and both Derrick and my airgun want lists consist mostly of unobtainable or expensive rarities.
Derrick managed to find me a suitably inexpensive and rough HW50S .177 caliber spring piston rifle at the Findlay airgun show. He thinks I need more German springers in my life and I agree.

Derrick shipped me the rifle, some extra seals and an extra mainspring.

The slot of the cocking lever is chewed up. I lost the pic, but the buttpad is loose and there's a big wallowed out hole for a rear sling screw that needs fixing as well.


Rust pitting that was improved by horrific scraping by the previous owner.

Thankfully the worst of it will be hidden by the stock.

Just minor pitting, freckles and dings on the top of the tube.

The barrel has a patina. An uneven patina.

It’s a Beeman import.

I always like German rifles.

The Rekord trigger unit.

Spares and the trigger guard.

Put it in the spring compressor.

Unscrewing…

There was no tension on it at all.

That spring looks somewhat canted…

I don’t like the look of the welds but they seem original.

This one is slightly better.

Yes, the spring is that canted.

Derrick had sent a synthetic seal that mounted via dovetail, but clearly this is an older gun. I like leather seals and will probably keep it original.

The seal is in good shape.

Some more pitting and scratches.

The pivot bolt.

I love the nut. The “lock washer” seems to have been scavenged from a coil spring. That will probably get replaced as I don’t think it’s original.

The new spring Derrick sent is longer.

It does have two more coils so I’m unsure if it will fit, but I’ll try it as is. We’ll see.

I formed a piece of aluminum around the tube, I’ll use this as a sanding block as I slowly sand all (most) of the pits out. It won’t be fun and will probably take a long while. I’ll then use a cold blue (probably Oxpho blue, limited testing on the gun showed it worked better than the Van’s blue, for this particular gun).