In the process of taking it apart to apply Tru-Oil on all the wood, I took off the forearm. I could not get the screw to thread into the band. My hands are pretty arthritic and I doubt I could put much more than about 30 lbs of pressure on the screwdriver. I eased the mag tube and barrel notches ever so slightly with a round file. Slipped together. Happy camper. Or so I thought.
After about 40 rounds, I noticed the mag tube had worked its way about 5/8" past the muzzle. DRAT! I was surprised to see that the mag plug screw had escaped captivity. When I looked closer, I saw that the "hole" in the barrel wasn't a hole at all. More like a slash or divot. It would prevent forward and back movement but when the mag tube rotated slightly under recoil, out came the plug screw tip from the divot. And so began the mag tube's journey forward.
A have a friend who was a machinist for the Navy in WWII. He took pity on me and offered to fix it. He made a new lower band screw that had a fatter shank where it passed through the barrel/mag tube notches (which I had enlarged slightly in length). Armond cut the band's metric threads on the end of the screw and made it a little bit longer so about 4 threads engaged instead of the original 2. Then he moved to the muzzle. He made a flat bottomed drill and bored a shallow hole into the barrel where the divot was. Then he made a bushing that OD fit into that hole with a center ID hole that matched the magazine plug screw. Then he contoured the other end of the bushing to fit the radius of the mag plug. I'll have to take out a second mortgage to pay him.
The moral of the story is one I come across too many times to count. Sometimes going for that last 5% of perfection is NOT worth it. I could have put a fine Tru-Oil finish on and NOT removed the forearm. That is what I wish I had done. I'm really too old to make the same mistake over and over. Ha Ha
