Last winter my son turned 12 and I presented him with his first hunting rifle, a Zastava M85 in 7.62x39. He was on the fence about hunting so I didn't want to spend too much on a rifle then have to resell it due to lack of interest so when I found a shop still listing them at the old price of 499 I grabbed one. I had of course done a fair bit of research on them and knew what I was getting into as far as possible issues but for 525 shipped to my door I wasn't expecting a whole lot.
As typical for these the metal finish was pretty darn good. Nice bluing and polishing on the barrel, receiver, trigger guard, etc. The bolt is a little crudely finished and was pretty rough at first but has since smoothed out considerably. It doesn't bind or anything so good enough.
Some of the issues I noticed right off the start weren't too serious and didn't affect usage so I loaded up a bunch of reduced loads for practice and 50 max loads (worked up to of course) using 150gr Sierra's for hunting. Any way after shooting about 200 rounds of reduced loads, 40 of the hunting rounds and harvesting his first buck it was time to do some repairs and improvements.
The trigger was pretty bad right out of the box and I adjusted it immediately but the other issues I let slide for a while were the horrible inletting and a poorly functioning ejector. I have examined several Zastava center fire rifles with wood stocks and the poor inletting around the front of the action is a common theme. It was so poorly fit that after the couple hundred low recoil rounds and less than 50 full power rounds, the wood behind the recoil lug was completely broken off and was just a large chunk of wood floating around in the stock. Rather than trying to glue the wood back in place, I just removed it, drilled some holes in the stock to provide a good mechanical lock and reinforcement and filled the entire area with Acraglass. I bedded the action and first 2" of barrel then free floated the rest of the barrel.
The ejector was an easy fix. It was a simple matter of the hole in the stock for the ejector box screw not being aligned properly causing the screw to apply upward pressure on the ejector box and blade assy. This caused the blade to bind in the receiver slot. A few seconds with a drill bit to elongate the hole resulted in snappy reliable ejection every time.
A set of Talley Lightweight rings to replace the cheapo ones I installed originally and we were off to the range to test the results. Accuracy with the 150gr Sierra loads before the bedding and free floating ranged in the 3-4" mark with no groupings going under 3". My son fired off 5 rounds of the reduced recoil rounds for practice and then I shot a 3 round group with the Sierra loaded ammo. Below is the result:
I know one 3 round group isn't concrete evidence it's going to shoot like this all the time but it never even came close to this kind of accuracy before so I was pretty happy with the results. We will be doing a lot more shooting in anticipation of spring bear season and I plan on working up a load using some 130gr Woodleigh's so we'll see how it does over time but I'm pretty confident it will shoot consistently better than before. Overall the rifle is a pretty decent little hunting rig if you're willing to do some fine tuning.
As typical for these the metal finish was pretty darn good. Nice bluing and polishing on the barrel, receiver, trigger guard, etc. The bolt is a little crudely finished and was pretty rough at first but has since smoothed out considerably. It doesn't bind or anything so good enough.
Some of the issues I noticed right off the start weren't too serious and didn't affect usage so I loaded up a bunch of reduced loads for practice and 50 max loads (worked up to of course) using 150gr Sierra's for hunting. Any way after shooting about 200 rounds of reduced loads, 40 of the hunting rounds and harvesting his first buck it was time to do some repairs and improvements.
The trigger was pretty bad right out of the box and I adjusted it immediately but the other issues I let slide for a while were the horrible inletting and a poorly functioning ejector. I have examined several Zastava center fire rifles with wood stocks and the poor inletting around the front of the action is a common theme. It was so poorly fit that after the couple hundred low recoil rounds and less than 50 full power rounds, the wood behind the recoil lug was completely broken off and was just a large chunk of wood floating around in the stock. Rather than trying to glue the wood back in place, I just removed it, drilled some holes in the stock to provide a good mechanical lock and reinforcement and filled the entire area with Acraglass. I bedded the action and first 2" of barrel then free floated the rest of the barrel.
The ejector was an easy fix. It was a simple matter of the hole in the stock for the ejector box screw not being aligned properly causing the screw to apply upward pressure on the ejector box and blade assy. This caused the blade to bind in the receiver slot. A few seconds with a drill bit to elongate the hole resulted in snappy reliable ejection every time.
A set of Talley Lightweight rings to replace the cheapo ones I installed originally and we were off to the range to test the results. Accuracy with the 150gr Sierra loads before the bedding and free floating ranged in the 3-4" mark with no groupings going under 3". My son fired off 5 rounds of the reduced recoil rounds for practice and then I shot a 3 round group with the Sierra loaded ammo. Below is the result:
I know one 3 round group isn't concrete evidence it's going to shoot like this all the time but it never even came close to this kind of accuracy before so I was pretty happy with the results. We will be doing a lot more shooting in anticipation of spring bear season and I plan on working up a load using some 130gr Woodleigh's so we'll see how it does over time but I'm pretty confident it will shoot consistently better than before. Overall the rifle is a pretty decent little hunting rig if you're willing to do some fine tuning.
