The Russian Mosin Nagant Forum

The mosin has all maching numbers, the barrel, receiver,stock al marked with bow in triangle. But the bolt has Tula stars all over it. Can someone explain this?

Very common. Most of them are refurbs and were put together with the next part out of the bin. Welcome to the forum and that better be a Buckeye name.

First, welcome!

You do not say what rifle you have, but the odds are that it is an M91/30 refurbished after WWII by the Soviets. They took piles of parts from different rifles and reassembled them, grinding off or electro-pencilling through non-matching numbers, then renumbering parts to "match." This is called "force matching." It's not unusual to have a mix of parts. Older rifles, such as M91s and Finnish Mosins are usually the same but may also have parts from rifles made by Remington, Westinghouse, or the Russian Sestroryetsk arsenal from the Czarist era.

Welcome to the board, sometimes you will even find Imperial era marked parts in these refurbs.

Luck of the draw from the parts bin during refurb.

In case all of the above is a little hard to understand, here is a link to the process from the info section of the forum. Welcome to the forum.
http://www.russian-mosin-nagant.com/ref ... index.html

There is no refurbish mark on stock and the serial numbers match on everything. And thank you for the welcome.

And the only thing that looks force matched is buttplate, it is all scratched off with new numbers on top.

Not every refurb got the so called refurb marks, I have many that are missing the metal , or the wood refurb stamp, or both and the rifles are obvious refurbs. Over 40 years of the refurbishment project going on they did change things, went from stamped to engraved force matched numbers, and maybe dropped the refurb stamps also. The entire rifle except for the barrel is force matched, this is just SOP for the refurb process. The Soviets were refurbishing millions of weapons over decades of time , trying to keep the parts of one particular weapon together along the entire refurb process would have been pointless, it was easier to refit parts to the action. Most war used rifles would have had at least some mismatched parts anyway from years of field repairs.

You'll see parts from every armory and just about every era on these rifles. I just sold a '32 Izhevsk with an Imperial bolt recently. I thought that was a cool selling point - others might not. The cool mix masters are the Finn rifles... We can hardly wait to tear them apart and find out where everything came from and how old the parts are. I know, strange but you'll understand soon...

I thought you can't track mosins

Osufan456 wrote:I thought you can't track mosins

What do you mean by track?

Osufan456 wrote:I thought you can't track mosins

To some extent there is a lot that is unknown about the history of these rifles but there is a lot that is known as well.

qz2026 wrote:

Osufan456 wrote:I thought you can't track mosins

What do you mean by track?

See where they were used how long they were used ext

Osufan456 wrote:

qz2026 wrote:

Osufan456 wrote:I thought you can't track mosins

What do you mean by track?

See where they were used how long they were used ext

That part is mostly true. Lots of speculation but nobody can really tell you.

Osufan456 wrote:

qz2026 wrote:

Osufan456 wrote:I thought you can't track mosins

What do you mean by track?

See where they were used how long they were used ext

That's just about impossible for the refurbs since most are comprised of parts from rifles that could have been used anywhere. Many times we can determine where they were originally manufactured and subsequently refurbished but that's about it. Some non refurbished rifles show up some times that from experience indicate they were used in the Balkans. We have determined that others were used in the Spanish Civil War. Some we know were captured by Finland and used against the Russians. Some of those were recaptured. Many could have been used in many theaters during WWII. Some of the M-91's we know were captured and used in Austro-Hungry in addition to Finland. I would hazard to guess that Mosins were used in every country in Europe at one time or another, in Asia, the Arab world, China and Japan. It might be easier to determine which countries they were not used in vs. which they were used in. Even we used some, albeit in a training capacity, that Russia contracted with us and reneged on with the advent of the Russian Revolution. There are no written records that we have access to that would tell us where a particular rifle went with a few exceptions. Half the fun of these rifles is trying to determine what their story was. We would like to know what each stock and metal stamp means and who made it and when but Russia has volunteered no information whereas there is much more information on Mauser and Enfields.

Thank you for all the information guys really helped me out. And I knew the USSR, although our allies, wasent our best friend in ww2 but they sold Weapons to our enemy's?

Osufan456 wrote:Thank you for all the information guys really helped me out. And I knew the USSR, although our allies, wasent our best friend in ww2 but they sold Weapons to our enemy's?

New England Westinghouse and Remington both built M91s for Russia from around 1915 to 1918. They defaulted on their contract and many rifles never left the States.