I bought a Spanish Mauser advertised as a 308 WIN. It came with a tag with 308 WIN on it. I bought this rifle to practice my custom rifle building skills. I also have a book by Jerry Kuhnhausen. Jerry says that “the Spanish Mausers are chambered for the 7.62 CETME round and its chamber pressure operating range is considerably less than the 308 WIN and the action is not strong enough for the 308 WIN.” Should I trust the advertised tag or trust Jerry Kuhnhausen and trash the action or rechamber for a weaker round?
Well that will depend a lot on what you are or were going to do. If you are going for a full blown custom job then you will do sooo much to the gun that it will be tighter and better in every respect. You will NEED to have the action re-heat treated and that will make it strong enough for the .308 round. If you were just wanting to restock and maybe reblue with no reheat treat then they are soft and you will not want to shoot it. You don’t mention which model of Spanish Mauser you have one of the later LaCorona’s or one of the earlier 93-95 series of Mausers, but it doesn’t matter they ALL NEED TO BE RE=HEAT TREATED. I get a lot of questions from students and customers about this and there is so much misinformation out there. So many places say don’t shoot them or use them to build guns on as they are soft, and that is correct, but you CAN reheat treat them and they are just fine then. While we are on this topic I just had a customer call me and ask about heat treatment. He was going to heat treat his bolt and action and then do a bunch of work to it. That is also a NO-NO as Mausers are basically case hardened and after you heat treat it you don’t want to do some work and wear thru the surface hardened area, do all the work you are going to do to the gun prior to heat treat. Sorry this is a long answer but it is important, if the action or bolt are not heat treated correctly the gun will develop headspace rapidly and/or be unsafe.
