The serial number is 4577. It's in decent condition but of course has some dings and scratches. Looks like it's been used quite a lot but was taken care of mechanically at least.
The worst part was that someone shortened the stock quite a bit, and fitted a thick hideous rubber buttpad.
The short stock didn't fit me at all so something had to be done.
Luckily they had kept the original buttpad, and even more luckily I had a spare stock for an Auto-5 which was more or less broken but the backend was fine.
Seeing that the 1900 stock and the Auto-5 stock are virtually interchangeable it was an easy task to cut the end of the Auto-5 stock and fit it to the butchered 1900 stock. Of course I also mounted the original buttpad again.
The result is far from perfect when it comes to looks but now it fits me, and I bought this rifle to use it for hunting, so who cares. Might redo it some day if I can find some better matching piece of wood.
While lengthening the stock I took the opportunity to recut the chequering. I was surprised how crooked it was. Unless someone recut it before, which I doubt, it must either have been an apprentice or hungover worker at FN who did it.
Redid the forend as well, which was a lot better but still worse than I would expect on a FN rifle.
Other than that, someone drilled and tapped the barrel rib. Which I don't really see as a bad thing. I'm not what you might call an avid iron sight shooter, so I've mounted one base so I can use a holo sight. I do plan to use the iron sights as much as possible though.
Anyhow, it was a neat job so no real harm done.
Here's some photos;
It will probably look better once I get a couple more layers of oil on the wood.
Now it's on to load development. As I mentioned in another thread, I'm going to use this rifle on driven hunts where we usually hunt for moose, wild boar and elk. To do this I have to push the loads a bit to fulfill the legal requirements to hunt these animals. Can report back with results if anyone's interested.
