When they demilled the VZ-58 they cut the receiver in half, tossed the rear part of the receiver and sent the front part with the barrel attached. This receiver stub is what get sent in the build kits. It honestly looks like they cut the receiver with a dull band saw it’s pretty rough.
Disassembly of the receiver stub is pretty simple, but it requires a few tools, and I’ll be honest here, I improvised, and had mixed results.
The rear site is held in place by two small pegs on either side of the site. It too me a bit to figure out how to get the site out, and I ended up using YouTube. The solution was quite simple, though I am not convinced it is the “Best Practice”. A screwdriver can be fitted into the notch at the base of the site and a firm but gentle “whack” will knock the site out. Under the site is a leaf spring, pull the spring towards the muzzle and it will lift out. Pretty simple construction, simple disassembly.
There is a pin that holds the barrel in place. I was not sure if this was a taper pin, a straight pin, or something that was loctited in place. Unfortunately I did not have the proper set of punches with me to try and force the pin out, and I was unsure of how much force, or in which direction the pin needed to be driven out.
The pin itself was made of pretty soft material and I was concerned that I would peen it over if I continue to try and use what punches I had. So I made the decision to drill out the pin and replace with a new pin on reassembly.
I drilled a 3/32 pilot hole, the drilling was easy, the steel was quite soft. Once the pilot hole was drilled stepped up to a 9/64 drill bit which seemed to be quite close to the pin diameter.
The remnants of the pin pushed right out, without much of a problem. On to pressing out the barrel. This was a little tricky as the way the sub was cut you could not put a full diameter rod on the barrel and press it out. Whatever piece of stock you had, had to be offset a little to push on the top half of the barrel. Unfortunately, stock of the right diameter was hard to comeby. If I was doing this job for anyone else but myself, I wouldn’t have done it they was I did, but because I am doing for myself I went ahead and found a 10mm Deep Socket that fit perfectly.
There was an initial “Pop” and then the barrel came fairly freely. The socket wasn’t long enough and we had to use a few spacers to press the barrel out completely, but this was a pretty pain free step.
Once the barrel was pressed out there is one more part that needs to be stripped from the Receiver Stub. There is a crescent shaped stop that sits in a groove and is held in place by the barrel. This stops the piston from over travelling when returning to its neutral position. Don’t forget this part!
So the reason I would do this differently is shown in the picture below. The socket clearly left an imprint on the end of the barrel. It’s more of a visual defect then something that will affect the function of the weapon. With that said I’ll be stoning this out.
With everything taken apart there is one thing I did not want to forget to do when I reassemble the new receiver. That is putting in the stop for the piston. Once the barrel is pressed into a new receiver, I am unsure how I’d press it out should I need to fix, or redo something. So I tapped the part into the new receiver and will remove the tape just prior to pressing in the barrel.
Now I have all the parts and pieces for a VZ-58 ready to build out the VZ. Well almost, I am waiting on the headspace gages I ordered from Brownells and I need to do a little prep work on the barrel to make it legal before pressing it into the receiver. I’ll detail this in a seperate post.