I turned 60 last week. Things have been fairly quiet down at the farm. I went down and mowed last weekend. I’d like to write something dramatic about it all. However, this has been a rather boring summer.

Edit: I deleted a list of the highlights of my summer, because it was just too boring. That’s how boring it’s been. I figure that if y’all wanted to read that kind of muck you’d be on Facebook instead of here.

The reason it’s been so boring goes back to my first sentence. A lot of what has been happening has been health-related. When somebody turns 60, and you ask them how they’ve been, you’re asking for what my mother used to describe as an “organ recital.” KYHillChick bounced back great from her cancer surgery. They think they got it all, and she just heard she doesn’t have to have radiation or chemo. She’s been out mowing the lawn and going for hikes. Me? Well, I had a colonoscopy and a physical. Everything checked out. See? What did I tell you? An organ recital.

The other reason it’s been boring has been the weather. Normally, we don’t budge out of the air conditioning if the daytime highs at the farm get above 90. I stay home and work in the shamanic reloading cave. So there must have been a mountain of reloaded ammo, right? Actually no. I finally had to admit to KYHillChick in early July that I had gotten most of my big projects completed. I was pretty well caught up on my gunsmithing work. This is what happens when you turn 60.

Which brings me to the one big piece of news.

Angus must have caught wind of what I said to KYHillChick because for my birthday he presented me with French MAS 36.

Now you have to understand that I’ve spent the past 40 years taking unloved, unappreciated firearms and turning them into working deer rifles. This was the epitome of that ideal. Angus had gone out to Hibberd’s Armory and asked the guys for the perfect rifle for Dad. They had just the thing.

The MAS 36 was built by the French between WWI and WWII and then after the war in 1957. It was meant for rear-echelon work. The 7.5X45 cartridge it shoots is vaguely 308-ish in looks and has nearly the same capacity as a 300 Savage. It shoots .308 bullets. It ends up being hotter than a 30-30 and slightly less than a 300 Savage in performance. As such, it is a quintessential whitetail deer round. I found 100 rounds of brass for a reasonable price at Grafs.com.

The MAS 36 is not all that well known in the U.S. Relatively few showed up, and most of those that did got imported in the early Post-War era, when Springfields and Mausers were in the spotlight. The MAS 36 has gotten a lot of grief over the years. A lot of those that got imported into the States were munged up as they were converted to 308 WIN and the results were abysmal. This was due to poor machining– not a fault of the rifle.

In truth, the MAS 36 is not all that bad a rifle, but it has warts.

• It does not have a safety.
• The round is anemic as military rounds of that era go
• It has a funky forward-swept bolt that looks weird
• The trigger is heavy
• It has a bit of a stink on it from all the times its owners had thrown it down and thrown up their hands.

On the plus side, it has a rugged and strong receiver.  The whole thing is as simple as it comes.

The specimen Angus handed me had non-matching wood,  it was missing the bayonet, and the front six inches of barrel had been sawn off. This left the stacking hook sticking out. Someone had started to sporterize it and then lost heart. A sporterized lump of a forend had come with it.

Some might see this as a turd. I accepted the rifle from my son, and snapped it to my shoulder and I felt gold.

Francis Sell wrote a book back in the mid-’60s called The Deer Hunter’s Guide. In this book, he described a knocking-about stalking rifle for taking deer at short range. His method was simple and elegant. As soon as I got this rifle in my hands, I knew what I was going to do with it.

Sell’s ideal stalking rifle was an elegant, fully-stocked Mauser in 6.5X55.   This is a far cry from that, but it will get the job done.

I know a lot of you dig the Mannlicher style. Full-stocked rifles have a ridiculously high cool factor. However, have you ever wondered why folks use them? They’re not just there for window dressing. Mannlicher (now Steyr-Mannlicher) is based in Austria. The reason for the wood going all the way out to the end of the barrel, at least in a hunting rifle, is so that the hunter can use it as a prop going up steep hills. On the flat, it is way too short for a walking stick, but when you get on an steep uphill slope, a short staff is just the trick.  In this case, the lack of a safety is irrelevant, because you’d be daft to use a rifle in this manner with a hot chamber.

There is just such a place on the property where this sort of hunting method and this sort of rifle would be ideal. Heartbreak Ridge extends from the southeast corner up to the ridgetop. It covers about 100 feet of altitude in just a short distance, making it the steepest part of the property. Hurricane Ike back in 2008 treated Heartbreak Ridge rather roughly and knocked down a whole bunch of cedar trees, making it an perfect deer habitat.

Heartbreak Ridge got its name on one of the first weekends we were on the property. I had taken young Mooseboy for a hike to see the southeast corner and decided the fastest way back was up the hill in front of us. Mooseboy got about 5 steps up the hill and decided he wasn’t going any farther. He was eight. I don’t think he had really thought it out, but there was nobody that was going to come pick us up. He was going to have to make it up the hill one way or the other. Along the way, we saw a lot of deer sign and it was due to this hike, I put my first successful stand up near the ridge top.

The MAS 36 will also make a good rifle for the cedar thickets. SuperCore’s buck ran into one last fall, and I went in to fetch it out. It was a whole other world in there. Direct sunlight never reaches the ground. The branches up to my height are long since dead. There is a deep carpet of cedar needles there and sort of a spooky half-light– and gobs of deer sign.

It Needs Work

I stripped it down as best as I could and soaked all the parts in PB Blaster.  The butt stock and two-piece forend came off fairly easily and these got run through the dishwasher.   Yikes!  Shaman, you threw a rifle in the dishwasher???  Yeah, a learned that years ago as a way of cleaning really gunked-up stocks.  It does a bunch of things.  It gets rid of all the oil that has soaked into the stock, and it raises the grain.  It also steams out a lot of the dings and  scratches.  After drying, I sanded everything down to 600 grit and put a couple of coats of wipe-on poly/stain on it.  That evened out the differences between the mis-matched wood considerably. Yes, it has marks, but the wood has lost some its beat-against-a-wall look.

The little dingly-do stacking hook had to come off.  I used a hack saw and then ground off the stump.  A little cold-blue covered up the mark.  You wouldn’t know it was there. Normally, this would have been a no-no. However, there is no way, with 6 inches of barrel missing that I am going to get this back to an historically accurate rifle.  I looked for a barrel before I did it– nada.

I did a deep clean on the barrel. I did not find any pits and the rifling on this puppy looks clean like new.  It has not had a lot of rounds through it.

Frog Loads

While waiting for all the parts to dry, I received shipment of the 100 rounds of brass, and a set of Lee dies. The French loaded the 7.5X54 mostly with 139 grain bullets. There were also 181 grain and 191 grain loads.

My initial loads will be an assortment of rounds.

• A gallery load with 10 grains of Unique and a 110 grain plinker load just to check function.
• 130 grain Speer Flat point over H4895
• 135 grain Hornady FTX over H4895
• 150 grain Hornady FP and SP’s over H4895

I also snagged a Lee 312-155-2R mold I might as well see if this thing will shoot cast lead.

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