I have a Swedish M96. I have been told over and over that these are exceptionally accurate rifles. So I was somewhat disappointed with the accuracy mine displayed the last time I was at the range. Upon getting it home, I took the scope(which is a tried and proven performer) off and removed the scopemounts. Now first of all, let me say that this rifle already had the bolt turned down and had a scope mounted on it. I changed scopes because the one I got with the rifle was missing the windage turrent. Night before last I took the rifle out to look it over and noticed a small raised ring around each hole for the screws for the mounts. I'm wondering now if this was the source of my lack of accuracy. If it is, then I wasted an entire box of ammo.

Squint

Holes should be flush with the reciever or they will apply some odd pressure to the bases. You can carefully file them flush, polish then use a coldblue to finish off the job. Another alternative is to countersink holes in the bottom of the base so it will fit flush to the action.

One concern I would have is someone using a short scopebase screw set actually pulling up the first few threads of the tapped hole. You might want to run a bottoming tap in the holes and see if they will clean up. If you have messed up threads you can go to 8 by 40 tapped holes (the next size from the standard 6 by 48 tap). the only problem with doing this is sometimes you have to redrill and countersink bases designed for the smaller screws. Lots of folks do this to magnum rifles to make much stronger mounting systems. In fact the Mossberg 835 ulti-mag shotgun I just bought came with Weaver bases and was already tapped for the 8 by 40 screws.