Winchester
Active Member
I recently picked-up a nice 03A3 (looks like a older CMP re-arsenal). I noticed that the front blade was slightly bent and the rear sight was not centered (not that they always are...). The rife (bent blade and all was dead-on accurate at the range. Of course, the visual of seeing a bent blade for a sight picture bothers me. After removing the stock, I noticed that the barrel was slightly over-timed. The hash marks are just past lining-up (not much as the hash marks are still touching). So, I'm beginning to think that the front blade was bent on purpose to make up for the over-rotation of the barrel. So my question is: if I were to back-out the barrel so that the hash marks lined-up perfectly, would such a minute rotation (1 mm) be enough to change the headspace or cause other problems? I've never messed with barrel timing before so I'm hesitant to do it.