Oldelkhunter- Don' t know much about that[>:]

Bigbulls- check out CDNN investments- do a web search for their site.
You can getg mismatched M48' s and k98' s from them for as low as $69.

I would say stay away from the m48' s- I' ve owned two of them and am not impressed with the workmanship put into them. They were made under a communist occupation and probably are inconsistant in quality at best. On one of the rifles, the safet will not engage , on the other, the rear of the receiver was peened by the what might have been the bolt beeing slammed into it really hard- the receiver should be hard enough for thhis not to happen. The rifle I still have also has the shoulder of the firing pin peened back from dry firing it a couple of times- I know this was my doing as the damage to the metal is fresh- this shouldn' t happen either on a mauser 98 action. I think that possibly the metal is of very poor quality and probably too soft.

You can also get a K98 from this company. It' s simply a wwII kar98 that was left in Yugoslavia after the war. Before the yugoslavians started making their own rifles, they used or rebuilt these kar98' s- they also have a yugo crest stamped on the receiver and often leads to confusion that m48' s and kar 98' s ar the same rifle. The Kar 98 will be a much higher quality piece to work on than the M48, even though most of the M48' s are practically new. You can easily differentiate an M48 from a Kar 98 sitting side by side in that the Kar 98 will have a hanguard that starts in front of the rear sight and ends before the front band, while an M48 has a handguard that starts at the receiver ring and ends under the front band.


The reason why I like Czech made mausers such as Vz-24' s, Vz-22' s, and 98/29' s is that during the period between the end of WWI and the occupation of the Sudentenland by Germany in 1939- Czechoslovakia was the worlds largest supplyer of small arms. They copied and refined the wwI vintage gewehr 98' s and during the ' 30' s when there was a worldwide recession, made made rifles of extremely high quality in order to keep the contracts coming in from abroad.
You can usually find vz-24' s and VZ-22' s for around $80 to $100 form a Dunham' s store, can order them from century international arms http://www.centuryarms.com/store/ They even have cracked stock specials which will probably be pretty cheap.
The 98/29' s have beautiful receivers and are practically brand new, but will run $250+