After running out of elevation adjustment on my peep sight on my very new to me Hw50 I eyeballed the barrel angle. Sure enough it's got droop. You can see it here.
View attachment 596385 This is not uncommon in late model Hw50s so I figure I'd run through it here on the forum for the benefit of others. The cause on this one is the fixed wedge that sets the lock up isn't set properly. It's rotated so the breech sits on its high corner. You can see the witness mark under the left side of the breech step between the chisel and breech seal.
View attachment 596388 You can see the matching witness mark on the high point at the top of the fixed chisel.
View attachment 596387 There's a few ways to deal with this.
If scoping this rifle without messing with the rifle itself I'd recommended using a one piece Sportsmatch brand drooper mount. Some larger scopes don't fit one piece drooper mounts so the next choice would adjustable rings. There's a few out there but few are worth their salt. The ones that are, are expensive. Sportsmatch and Burris Signature come to mind.
I'm putting peeps on this rifle and I'm out of elevation adjustment. My simplest choice for peeps is a shorter front sight.
Now if I want to address the droop in the gun itself, there's a few ways I might go. First is to machine down the high corner of the fixed chisel. That would allow the breech to rotate to a lower position bringing the barrel up. Machining that down between the compression tube ears with hand tools is dicey.
Another way is I could remove metal from under the breech at the witness mark but that might turn into an eyesore that I'll have to look at every time I load the gun.
Both of those last two ways could go horribly wrong if I removed the slightest amount too much metal. Then the flexible breech seal would set your lock up point. At least until it smooshed flat and the breech hit metal somewhere.
The last way I know to address this is to bend the barrel up a tick. This gives some people the Willys but I do it all the time.
Stay tuned how.
