There's a long story behind the apartment Gal and I live in which involved our neighbors/grounds keepers operating a small drug ring out of their apartment and another one, random nights of strange events with said neighbors, and culminated with the county sheriff's department showing up one day to arrest/investigate said groundskeepers and the landlord for drug possession/sales and theft of property. The groundskeepers and landlord were evicted/fired, but not before doing significant damage (in the five figures) to the properties they rented and shooting the apartment sign before leaving.
Problem solved? Not so much. Occasionally the former groundskeeper's friends still show up to visit people they know in the apartment complex. On a side note, the majority of the other renters are college students who invite their friends over for regular parties (i.e., copious amounts of alcohol). All of these events (and others I will write about later), led up to Gal and I seriously considering purchasing a shotgun of some sort. She preferred what she referred to as "swish guns" (pump), but when the gift horse came calling I didn't feel inclined to part his lips.
I saw where a man had posted on a local web listing that he had a Mossberg 935 for sale. After a friend (we'll call him Gun-guru) and I met and looked over the gun, we decided that it was a good deal at nearly half the listing price plus all the chokes the man had purchased over the years. Minimal wear to the breech area, some slight rust on the barrel (years in a gun bag), and a little dirt on the body all added up to an easy fixer job.
Upon taking the gun apart, I realized that a factory line worker was probably the last person to see the innards of the gun. Funk (technical term there) was on every moving portion of the insides, requiring a liberal dose of oil, paper towels, and elbow grease. The previous owner is an avid water fowl hunter, so in accordance with Tennessee hunting laws, he had inserted a device into the magazine tube to limit the number of shells in the gun to 3: one in the chamber, two in the magazine. The owner's manual (online) said that all that had to be done was to remove the magazine cap, tilt the gun downward, and gently shake until the dowel rod/magazine-limiter falls out. Simple enough.
*shake shake* nothing
*shake more* rattling sound
*forego-all-decency shake* out fall funk-covered splinters
Not dowel rod splinters, just splinters. The previous owner had apparently run into the age-old hunter's dillema: you get out to the hunting spot, you get settled, you wonder if the game warden is nearby, and then you check you magazine. It's full. Lots more than three total shells in the gun. What to do?! *mental gears roll* What can I use, way out here, that fits in the magazine tube that will limit my shell number? *suddenly notices copious amounts of trees nearby* A twig! Problem solved!
At least for him it was. I have looked everywhere on the internet, and no one addresses how to disassemble the magazine tube. Now I have to ask Gun-guru to help get this thing disassembled further. This is an ongoing process to be updated later.
-Guy
Update: With Gun-guru's aid, we stripped the gun down to the mag tube. With a little screwdriver-finesse, the cap at the end of the magazine came out. Upon inverting the gun, the spring, shell-guider, and a offending piece of wood came out. Seems that the previous owner did use a dowel rod, he just cut it off with something like a pair of wire snips instead of a saw. The crushed end would not come out of the hole, so there we were. With some skillful manipulation and a homemade tool provided by Gun-guru, we reassembled the gun in working order. 00 buck shells are in the works.
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