Sheridan PG rebuild

[Reflex0283]

I bought this PG last week for wayyy too much, really shouldn't have set my max bid as high as I did but whatever. It's time to actually get it running again, hopefully in time for the pistol game at Xtreme (agawam) in early June.

I opened up the package Saturday night and found that the bolt is very, very stuck, the safety is free floating, and it's in worse shape than I originally thought it was. Not the end of the world

I was feeling optimistic so I threw a 12 gram into it and operated it by just pushing on the hammer, surprisingly it didn't have any leaks and seemed to operate fine aside from the lack of a functioning bolt. Despite that, it's still going to be receiving new seals everywhere.

Now, the big issue is that bolt. I tried beating on it from the barrel side with a wooden dowel and a hammer, and many other positions to no success. Eventually I tried heating the bolt with a torch, still to no success. That heat from the torch melted the solder joint connecting the rear of the lower tube to the rear of the barrel tube, so at that point I figured I might as well go all the way and get all of the tubes by themselves.

Detaching the other tubes allowed me to extract the grub screw for the bolt, so that issue is out of the way now. However, the bolt has still not budged and no amount of heat, WD40, or whacks with a hammer will convince it to move. I'm open to suggestions at this point

[$L!mBo]

i think, unfortunately, youve used too much heat and warped the tube significantly.
that glob near the threaded lug hole
on the bolt, is that solder? it kinda looks like the tube melted there?
to get the bolt out, id soak in atf/acetone 50/50mix overnight in a sealed container if possible.
get things in a vice and see if the bolt will twist/tap out.

im sorry you overpaid and more sorry that things might be on the further side of fixable at this point

[Reflex0283]

yeah, I can't say I'm surprised. I have no idea what the glob is, it was there before me and doesn't really want to move. It's only on the body and not on the bolt.
The bolt is super stuck. Does not rotate or slide, I'll try acetone/atf tomorrow.

Eyeballing it, the tube doesn't look warped from heat but I really do not know what I'm talking about. I can probably check better with something straighter tomorrow. If it's warped, I'll consider attempting to machine a new tube but I don't exactly have high hopes here.

[BrickHaus]

How long is your dowel? Try sliding the dowel down the barrel again, then gripping the barrel and pounding the end of the dowel on a concrete floor. Ive gotten a few stuck valves that way after hammering for days. The inertia helps a lot.

Another idea is to thread a longer bolt into the cocking lug hole, and pull laterally to get it to break free rotationally. Once it moves a little bit. I assume you will be able to work it out.

The safety is likely missing the bearing and spring. They are 2mm in diameter. And super easy to lose.

And as far as warping the barrel. Im not sure you harmed it, but if you did you can put a tight bore barrel on it, which would help it quite a bit.

[Reflex0283]

Didn't see this earlier, I got it out by putting the barrel in a wooden bench vice and hammering on it with a rather long screwdriver. The safety is only missing the bearing, but I have more bearings of various sizes.

[Ecapnation]

Early pgs the back section by the bolt was much thinner than regular standard sheridan's. The bolts were also generally raw aluminum for some reason what you're looking at is probably galvanic corrosion from the combination of paint and just sitting around.

I've had this happen on former rental Sheridan's and the easiest way to get the bolt out was hitting it with something from down the barrel usually use they half inch stainless steel rod that I had floating around in my shop.

Taking off the tubes without removing that bolt might actually make things worse for you. Good luck though

[Reflex0283]

@$L1mBo thanks for the 50/50 acetone/atf suggestion, I picked up some atf fluid for $2 today and let it sit in the (likely cancerous) solution for about 8 hours and got the bolt out.

Today I also cleaned up the trigger frame using a wire wheel on a pedestal grinder, it's probably not the right way to do it but it looks nice, and I really just needed something to focus on for a while since things haven't been great for me recently. I do also have an extra trigger frame if I seriously messed something up.