Hello Aaron,
It did come with unnamed QD rings for the integral mounts, but I could not get them to stay tight and I discarded them. The irons worked very well for my hunt. And yes, it is drilled and tapped but I am not sure what base it was designed for.
Respectfully,
Chris
I believe this is a Dumoulin action. The bases, taps, and front notch looks exactly like others I have seen.
I can confirm that this is a Dumoulin action. It was sold in the US by Sarco for $350 up until the mid 2010's, which even then was inexpensive considering the tremendous value it represented. These actions were rough but diamonds in the rough, and turned out quite nicely in the hands of qualified gunsmiths.
It was represented as being manufactured in Belgium. Since it requires considerable and expensive machinery to manufacture M98 actions, and no individual gunshop could possibly to so profitably and competitively (see how much Granite or Prechtl must sell their action to stay in business, and with modern CNC machines allowing for short production runs to boot), and since Dumoulin has never been known to actually produce actions - they typically used actions from FN, military M98, Sako, etc. - they likely contracted to have actions built to their specs and branded with their name. To the best of my knowledge, it was never disclosed who the manufacturer was.
It had a standard length / standard bolt head in the original condition.
The front and rear square bridges do NOT have a recoil shoulder, in keeping with the original Mauser flat top square bridges designed for the addition of claw mounts, but they are machined (dovetailed) for integral scope mounting, and the front flat top has a recoil notch inside which a front ring recoil pin can nest. With proper rings, this is recoil proof.
I do not know which rings fit on this action but if I considered purchasing this rifle I would:
1) Contact Sarco at (610) 250-3960 or
info@sarcoinc.com to see if they have some institutional memory of what rings were adapted and who supplied them.
2) Ask
chris275 to carefully measure the width between the two dovetails with a caliper to see if Talley or Warnes ring would fit. It would then be quite simple to install a recoil pin at the bottom of the front ring.
3) Ask
FlowHamed18 who owns two rifles based on this action what rings he uses.
From memory (?), the dovetails were 14 mm on these actions, which is wider than the 1/2" (12.7 mm) Talley rings. This means that it would be really easy to mill Talley-specs dovetails, including a recoil shoulder on each bridge. This would likely be my favorite option as the cost of milling and touching up the blueing would be minimal compared to the cost of the rifle.
