The Baikal IZH 18: Bargain Basement Bang-for-Buck Guns Part 2

In the second part of my look at rifles that offer lots of gun for little cash I’ll focus on the Baikal IZH-18 single shot rifle.

In recent range trips I’ve found myself looking at the 200 yard+ targets more and more often, with a yearning to take some longer shots. While there’s satisfaction to be had in holding over and  shooting 100yards + with the .22 LR  it’s really at the limits of it’s trajectory past 100. This would dictate the purchase of a centre-fire, a gun I was entirely ignorant of.  What did I know about them? -they cost more to buy, shoot and needed to be cleaned properly, beyond running a bore-snake through the barrel after shooting anyway. Having no spare cash, (in fact a credit card that was still groaning from the excesses of Christmas) whatever I bought had to be cheap.

I began doing some research on the ballistics of the various centre-fire calibres and settled on a .30 calibre, specifically the commercial version of the  Nato 7.62×51 military round, the .308 Winchester. I was looking for a calibre that wouldn’t run out of legs on any distance I wanted to shoot it over, and something with some real power. Looking then for a rifle chambered in .30 cal I stumbled upon the Baikal IZH-18, a single shot centre-fire gun chambered in a variety of calibres from .222 up to .30-06. It’s adapted directly from the single shot Baikal shotgun and works essentially in the same way as the shot-gun, with a break-open action. They lossely (very loosely) resemble the venerable Ruger #1 and are kind of a pauper’s version that gun.

The IZH-18’s are sold in the US re-badged by Remington as the SPR (‘Spartan’)18, and are a gun that seem to polarize, with equal parts of love and hate being expressed by owners there. The Baikal features a milled steel receiver, an internal hammer and a unique spiral fluted barrel which (once again depending on your viewpoint) you’ll either love or hate. Until recently these were available only in a variety of wooden stocks, beech and walnut in the main (although I’ve never seen the walnut models for sale here). Most recently these rifles have been offered for sale with a black synthetic stock. I found an on-line gun-shop offering these for a very reasonable $349 NZ  ($243 US) in the synthetic stock, and quickly decided on this as the gun I wanted. The only draw-back was that they didn’t have the synthetic stocked gun in .308, only the beech so this left me looking at a plastic gun chambered in either .222, .223 or .30-06 -a calibre I had never heard of. A little research revealed that it was very similar to the shorter cased .308, with similar ballistic data, with the .308 having the edge in ammunition costs. So the .30-06 it was.

The gun was duly ordered, a police permit applied for and obtained and arrived on a fine summer’s day (fortunately a fine summer’s day that my wife, suspicious of couriers arriving with long rectangular packages happened to be working).

Good things come wrapped in plain brown paper ... (click for larger)

Good things come wrapped in plain brown paper II ... (click for larger)

Unwrapping the brown packaging revealed a surprisingly attractive box. Having purchased other firearms from the former Soviet Bloc I was expecting plain rough oil-stained cardboard so this was most encouraging. The label on the end of the box declared in a mixture of Russian and English the contents to be 1 x synthetic stocked .30-06 IZH-18):

Your gun comrade: (click for larger)

Opening the box I found the rifle is shipped broken down into the butt, fore-end grip and barrel. Also in the box was 20 rounds of Highland .30-06 Springfield ammunition to get me started – the ammuniton costing exactly 10% of the value of the gun:

IZH box contents: (click for larger)

IZH box contents + 20 rounds: (click for larger)

Next task was to try and figure out how to put the thing together. To be frank the Russian/English manual is at best adequate, it’s well worth going on-line and downloading the Remington SPR-18 manual in pdf format, it’s written for english-as-a-first-language readers and has some nice photographs on how to make the gun fit together.

Next task was to scope this. Much of the criticism directed at this gun relates to the length (lack-of) of the 11mm grooves machined into the receiver. To call them short would be damning them with faint praise frankly. I had a 11mm dovetail to weaver base already purchased off eBay. It looked to have an equally short 11mm base but even it was too long as the short receiver grooves don’t run the full length of the receiver, they finish short of the receiver end so fitting an adapter that could extend forwards beyond the receiver towards the barrel becomes impossible. Don’t think you’ll hang one off the back either, there’s a little ramp that I suspect is intended to assist in closing the action that sits taller than the reciver groove face, preventing the base adapter from extending backwards towards the end of the gun.

In the end I spent time with a file modifying the adapter by removing enough of the adapter groove outsides to fit the adapter onto the available receiver groove length -just. Note that the adapter base is thinner forward of the first allen screw:

Modified adapter base fitted: (click for larger)

From here it was a matter of fitting a set of low B-Square weaver rings and tightening everything up real tight before fitting a Tasco scope I had sitting around looking for somewhere to be. To be frank, given all I’ve read about the recoil of the .30-06 cartridge, and the fact that this is realtively light gun I have serious doubts as to the longevity of this scope in this configuration, Loctite may help but I suspect I’ll be looking for a steel adapter sometime soon (and most likely a stronger scope) but we’ll see how this pans out:

Tasco scope fitted I -click for larger

Tasco scope fitted II -click for larger

So how am liking my Baikal project so far? -very much.

It has a nice weight to it, it seems to point very naturally when put to my shoulder. I’m hoping the weekend will see me able to head up to the range and sight it in, something that should be made easier by being able to remove the barrel completely with the scope attached to bore-sight it. At $349 this gun seems to represent exceptional value for money, but I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve shot a few rounds through it. Hopefully the cleaning rod/brushes/jag etc will have arrived by then too -I’ll post some more after I’ve had chance to deflower the gun.

IZH scoped ready to go -click for larger

Spiral fluted Barrel -click for larger

IZH-18 Ready to go -click for larger

IZH 18-click for larger