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).