Range Day! And Enfield!

Today company came from Virginia in the form of Stretch, and he, Bruce, Proud Hillbilly and I hit the range on a cold November morning.


Here's Stretch with his M1A

Bruce, with the 1916 Spanish Mauser that I sold him after buying it back from the last guy I sold it to. (And it shoots great. What was I thinking?)

PH with her little PH-sized Carbine.

I brought out this Enfield #1Mk3, one of the three that I bought a few months ago from a neighbor down the street.

This is one of the ones that I'm in the middle of refurbishing. It's a straight Mk3, not a Mk3* like most of the ones out there today are.

Made in 1912. Cool, eh?

As such, this one has all the neat sutff that they left off of the Mk3*.

It has volley sights. This was a dumb idea that was intended to let a whole company of riflemen put rounds on a large target--another company of riflemen--up to 2800 yards away.

It didn't really work, and it was eliminated from the rifles by 1916.

It also has a magazine cut-off, another dumb idea of the time. The British army was transitioning from single-shot rifles to magazine-fed repeaters, and the generals who grew up with the old rifles felt that their soldiers would waste ammunition if allowed to fire from the magazine, so this cut-off was put on the rifles to block the magazine. The idea was that with the cut-off in place, the soldiers would still fire the rifle single-shot and conserve ammunition, but when it came time to charge, or if they were being attacked, they could open the cut-off and then use the whole ten-round box.

Yeah, it was dumb. And the US Rifle ,30 Model 1903, aka: the '03 Springfield, had the same cut-off on it's five-round magazine.

1903 Springfield cut-off.

This one also has a fully adjustable rear sight instead of the later elevation-only rears. This was not a dumb idea.

Looking over this rifle, someone was apparently unclear on the concept of the windage-adjustable rear, because they drifted the front sight post. Now I have to remove the nose cap and try to hammer it back where it's supposed to go. But as-is, I was still able to keep my rounds in the nine-ring (4x6") of the target I was firing on at 100 yards...that is until I started getting cold, at which point my accuracy fell off noticeably.

All in all, I'm happy with this one, though. And I'd fight with it if I had to.

It even has a unit-marked ID disc on the stock, dated June of 1912. No idea what NIH stands for though.

Only real "flaw" (if you view it as such) is that it now has a light spot on the left side of the buttstock where I had to sand it down and refinish it with Linseed oil.

The neighbor that I got this from had a house fire some years back and this rifle's stock was scorched. I got it cleaned up but had to take the wood down a fair bit to get past the charring. Scary to think how close this old matching-number, non-import marked vet came from being destroyed in that fire. But she still looks good, and shoots well enough that I'd use it in a foreign service-rifle match any day. Just let me get the sights re-aligned right and she'll be quite the shooter indeed.