Thread: Zastava 7.62x39 Restoration

There seems to be a few fans of these M85 Zastavas so I thought Id share this little rebuild.



Technically this one is a Interarms MarkX but its just a Zastava in a prettier stock and apparently nicer machining.



Unfortunately this one had a crack in the walnut from the rear action screw right down the wrist top and bottom.





The crack was easy enough to repair by spreading it slightly with a wooden wedge just in front of the action screw and running some very thin epoxy resin into it before clamping it up and lightly sanding it while the epoxy was still wet. Its a good trick to hide the crack with walnut dust of the same colour. This works best if you scrape all the old stock finish back around the crack and remove as much of the action oil blackend wood that tends to leach in if it has been cracked for some time.







The heal had had a repair at some stage too so I tidied that one up while I was in a wood working mood.. (thats about never)





I bedded the action and epoxied in some steel pillars in to give some added strength to the repairs.



It came up pretty good. The entire stock was then scrubbed down with thinners to remove most of the factory oiled finish. A few good coats of Tru-oil and it was all sorted.









The barrel was well corroded in the grooves but it still had pronounced rifling so I was hopeful it might still shoot well enough to use as a bush basher. I picked up some lapua brass and some Hornady 123gr SSTs to give it a crack. I tried some loaded to full mag length and some crimped into the canlure.











After failing to hit the target board at 100m which was 3A4 pages high I moved closer to 50m.
I landed 5 shots on paper scattered about 30cm apart!
Plan B.. Re-barrel with a new MAB .308 bore barrel.

wow thats a piss poor pattern to be sure...lovely job on the stock.....might just have to do mine one day...maybe over winter,all your talk of pillars has got me thinking I should put some in mine.

You won't be disappointed they are excellent actions but that barrel is definitely gone.

Got a 308 off Brian,short barrel suppressed, lovely trigger and great to shoot, Brian has one in .223, another hunter has on in 7mm mag, all very accurate rifles nothing wrong with Zastava.

@nor-west be in quick and grab the M8 4X in buy sell NOW and put it on the 08....trust me the rifle will feel completely diferent and come up to eye soooo much quicker.

@Micky Duck has a lovely old Burris 2-8 courtesy of Brian, just fits the mauser action, good thick crosshairs low down for the bush, got the 257 Weatherby and 280 AI for that long range stuff.

Is it possible to button rifle or acid etch the rust out as an interim measure?

Before I got started on the new 7.62x39 barrel I had a .22 grendel itch I had to scratch..
I had a very short trueflite 1-8" twist .223Rem take off barrel that I wanted to test the .22 Grendel reamer on so I got to work on that one first.
Once the rooted barrel was off I gave the action a quick true up and lapped the lugs.
The finished grendel barrel came out at a short 13" but as a test rig thats all I needed.
I made up a few cartridges from some 6mm PPC brass (.220 Russian parent case) as all my 6.5 Grendel brass is currently loaded at the moment.





Like the 6.5 grendel that can get its max velocity from only 14.5" of barrel the .22 Grendel gave an impressive max load speed of 2800fps at the muzzle with 77gr TMKs and BM8208.



I havent spent any time developing a load but even at the
max charge I was comfortable with it grouped very well.



More on this cartridge later but the barrel was stripped off again and shelved while I made a start on the 7.62x39 barrel blank.

Originally Posted by Russian 22.

Is it possible to button rifle or acid etch the rust out as an interim measure?

Nah it was propper fuct.. I gave it a good scrub and bore lap but the grooves have receded from the original groove dimension of .311/.310" to .323"
so it may have shot 8mm projectiles ok..

So the MAB barrel blank I selected is a 25" long 4140 CM 1-10" twist light Sako contour in a .308" bore diameter. The profile was a fraction lighter than the Zastava barrel but I am planning to my this bushy as light weight as I can while still keeping with the classic look.
It was to be cut to 15.5" long which puts the over barrel suppressor just off the stock to keep it as compact as possible.



I have gone away from the std .310" 7.62x39 bore for a couple of reasons, one being the availability of a wide range of projectiles for the .308 over the .310 and secondly as a bush basher I like to have a few subsonic loads handy for goats which is why I stayed with the fast 1-10" twist over a more suitable 1-14" for 125gr bullets.
I will mostly use 125gr TMKs and Nosler 125gr balistic tips but would like to try some of Hornadys new 190gr SubX in it too.

For these reasons I have also chosen to use the 7.62x39 Lapua spec reamer which has no freebore to speak of but has a gradual taper from the case mouth down to .300" at the top of the rifling. This reamer is listed as being suitable for the heavier 150gr X39 loadings and also for the American made .308" bores. This tapering of the lands is also a fail safe insurance that it wont over pressure if you run std 310" bullets down the .308" bore.



The first thing I noticed was how sloppy this reamer cut the body of the cartridge dimensions. I guess it was a copy of the military CIP chamber which has very generous tolerances for multiple reasons. Automatic arms in this cartridge get hot.. with heat tolerances tighten, throw a handful of dirt, carbon buildup, crappy steel case lacquer coated ammo and those extra few thou are justified.

However, I want to build something that shoots a little better than your average milsurp rattley AK47 shooting steel cased Cobloc corrosive ammo into 6" groups at 100m so this added chamber slop made me nervous.





After scrubbing out all the inhibitor grease and polishing the bore a bit I blued it and got set up to load some test rounds.

I was just now wondering about the neck area of your chamber...by using the .308 button and partial length resizing we were going down 3/4 of way on neck resized with a sort of bump/2nd shoulder ,brass life wasnt too bad but it makes it work a lot more than if we were using fatter button and projectiles.
you will enjoy the 125 nosler ballistic tips BUT you will probably need to seat then till lip of case JUST STARTS to get into oglive area...I did to fit mag of norinco bisley anyway.

Yes that is basically where I ended up.



After loading a few 125gr TMKs and finding a load with 2207 over the chrono I found the case formed to the chamber nicely and all slop at the rear went away.
I tried hard to make the Redding full length sizing die work with a .307" expander ball even trying to short size the case left the case body over re-sized and sloppy in the chamber.
Regardless I tried the loose fitting new brass rounds on paper at 100m and it shot about an inch and a half.



I finally gave in and shot down to Workshop Innovation and picked up a Redding 7.62x39 neck sizing die and changed out the expander ball.
With the fire formed brass passed though this die down about 70% of the neck leaving 30% still blown out to the chamber dimension it help with tighter chamber alignment and didnt re-size the case body at all.
Now they fit snug and I put a second group at 100m on paper. This time only 3 shots. The heat and mirage was real bad and I was shooting through a 6 power scope so I was pretty happy with the results!

Fantastic results yet again

lilgun could well be your new best friend.....got a mate to run quickload figures for me and it works rather well.

Got about 500gms of CFE BLK if you want to give that a go too. It got me up to 2600fps in a Howa Mini.