Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're gonna tackle
a really pretty thorny labyrinth of a question.
That question being the Ross Mark II, or Model 1905 rifle. Now this is complicated for a couple of reasons.
The first of which is that there are no fewer than six separate varieties of them,
we have everything from the Mark II through the Mark II ***** (five star).
Following in the British Imperial nomenclature, major patterns of the rifle are designated by marks, Mark I, Mark II, Mark III,
minor variations are indicated by stars, the equivalent of an American A1, A2, that sort of thing.
So we have in fact here at the front we have a stock standard Ross Mark II.
And then over the course of this video we're going to look at the 1 star, 2 star, 3, 4 and 5 star iterations of it.
Now what makes this more complicated is that at some point this developmental branch split
because we have the regular 1, 3, 4 & 5 stars that are short barrel, 28 inch barrel, versions like this.
And then we have the Mark II** which has a number of different mechanical features to it.
It has a stripper clip guide, it has a different style of safety, it has a longer 30.5 inch barrel.
It's here, it is the last one of them developed, and yet it is the 2 star.
So why on earth ... did they mess up this number? Well, we don't know.
This is a question that has not been ... (I mean it's a really weird, convoluted subject),
but it's something that hasn't been adequately answered yet. Best hypothesis that I'm aware of is
Charles Ross during this development process decided to break the rifle into two separate development branches.
One of them following on what the military was currently contracted to buy,
and one of them maybe tweaked to a design that he thought was a little better,
that he thought eventually he would be able to convince the military to take. At any rate,
before we even start it's key to understand that the 2 star version is the last one that happened,
and is fundamentally mechanically different from all of the others.
So let's start by looking at what we'll call kind of the standard patterns.
So in the very first place the origin of the Mark II Ross comes from curing some of the shortcomings of the Mark I.
So before we look up close at this guy, we're going to look at a couple of Ross parts.
We will start with receivers. What I have here is a Mark I receiver, a short Mark II and a long Mark II receiver.
So, just starting with this guy, the difference from Mark I to Mark II.
You can see clearly how much material has been added up here for the Mark II receiver,
made it substantially stronger. You can see that the receiver wall has been thickened, this compared to that.
The rear tang on the Mark II has been shortened, so this is the improved version.
There's not as much hanging out the back, the lugs for the trigger attachment have been beefed up.
You can very much see the added material on the underside here as well.
One of the other problems with the Mark I was that it didn't have any primary extraction.
So with the Mark II they kept the same style of bolt, but they cut a
... cammed angle at the front ... on the bolt lugs so that as you start to
retract the bolt you actually get a little bit of primary extraction from the bolt lugs.
That was done by screwing in an extra piece into the receiver.
You can see that right here. That's the part that's going to force the bolt lug back as it begins to rotate.
And there is no equivalent in our Mark I receiver.
In conjunction with that of course there had to be a couple changes made to the bolts as well.
So this is a Mark I bolt, this is a Mark II bolt.
You can clearly see the angled cut on the edge of the bolt lug there
for that primary extraction on our Mark II, which is this guy.
And to help further, on the Mark I bolt we have just two cam tracks here,
... for the bolt body here to cause the bolt head to rotate. With the Mark II gun
first off, the cam tracks have been cut with gear teeth, and you can see there are two extra short sections
added at the back, so that when you start to open the bolt you're pushing on four sets of these tracks instead of just two.
Now we can go through and look at the different patterns. So
this is a 1 star rifle, and it has the same sort of rollercoaster rear sight,
or Lange Visier copied from the Germans, as the Mark I Ross. That was the initial pattern.
There are some other mechanical changes that were made. For example, the safety here has been substantially improved.
It's bigger, it's beefier, stronger, ... it's of the same style, it still pushes in to make the rifle safe.
But that is an improvement to the Mark II.
The bolt stop here, which is used to remove the bolt from the rifle, this has been enlarged and strengthened,
so that the bolt no longer will fall out of the gun during parade drill. ... That's a good thing, you don't want that happening.
If we take a look at the stock of the rifle,
this is where on the Ross rifles you can find a lot of good information about the gun.
We have the Quebec roundel here. This one's pretty well worn. We have Mark II and a star above it.
We then have a serial number. It'll be a three digit serial number (or up to three digits), 259 S.
... Each letter block was 1,000 guns. They started at "A".
The first 10,000 or so were Mark Is, and then they moved on to the Mark II.
The date on the bottom is the date of manufacture. So this is actually a pretty early one, 1906.
... The Mark II started production in 1905, and ultimately would run until about 1912.
Now this one has been marked DP, drill purpose. I believe the CC here is Cadet Corps.
You'll find a bunch of other unit markings on these guns.
Now here we have ... another slight variation from the established rules. This is a Mark II gun, no stars.
"AP", so this one came later than the one we just looked at
(after they got to 999 Z, they started over at number 1 AA, and then AB, AC, AD etc.),
This is a 1908 production gun, despite the fact that ... this is after the one star, this is a no star.
And this is the pattern described as a Mark II with a Mark III rear sight.
Which is the name for this, this is basically the same rollercoaster style sight, but with a flat sheet metal top.
So to adjust this we actually lift this up and then we can push that up
You can see here we've got the same sort of curved track as on the earlier sight, but this is just a different pattern.
Presumably one that was a bit less prone to damage or disturbance.
This would be like the main place where all of these subsequent versions of the Ross changed, in the style of the rear sight.
This was due partly to some of the sights being deemed too expensive or too fragile.
It was also partly due to supply issues trying to get rear sights. A lot of these parts on the Ross were made in the United States,
they couldn't always supply them as quickly as Ross would have liked.
Next up we have a Mark II*** (three star).
So at this point they stopped stamping extra stars, and they stamped a digit in there
so it's digit 3 and then a star, this is another 1908 production rifle, "AN" serial number block.
And this is the 3 star pattern of sight, now this is probably the one that you're most likely to see.
If for no other reason than the fact that this is the model that the United States purchased for its own training rifles.
So what we have here is an open notch sight on the top,
and an aperture in the back, so that you can flip this whole thing up and use it for precision shooting.
This adjusts out to 2,200 yards, there is a 2,200 yard open notch at the top.
It can be adjusted for windage using this knob. This knob adjusts for elevation.
It is a quite complex, very precise but perhaps a bit finicky and fragile rear sight.
Note that as we're going through these, as the rear sights change
so do the handguards to accommodate, you know, ... just the geometry, the shape of the rear sight.
So this one has a nice single piece ...
Well, it has a two-piece handguard, but the front piece comes all the way back
to match where previous patterns had left an open section for the base of the rear sight.
Now a bunch of these rifles would be purchased by the United States for training use.
And the ones that were are marked "US" on the bottom of the stock just behind the trigger guard.
So, when you find a 3 star there's a decent chance it will be a US rifle, and it's easy to identify those.
Now here we have a 4 star. You'll notice Mark II, 4*, 1910 production. We're up to the BP serial number prefix.
However, this has been re-stamped 3*, and that's because this was supplied to the United States.
There you have that US marking on the bottom of the wrist.
And we have a 3 star style of rear sight.
Now, ... unfortunately I don't have a model ... of the 4* rear sight to show you because,
when the US made this purchase, they wanted uniform rifles and they bought 20,000 of them.
And so the Canadian government took all the ... 3 stars that it had and then it also took 4 stars, re-marked them,
and retrofitted them to the 3 star pattern to supply to the US.
So really kind of an odd thing to do, but I suppose in context that makes sense.
So what comes after 4 star? Well 5 star naturally, there's our "5*" marking.
This is a CB serial number block, so we are getting close to the end.
1911 production, this one's also been marked DP. This ... mark indicates that it was sold out of service.
These are all units that used the rifle, and then handed it off to other units.
These were used as training guns, and so they went through a lot of different hands.
At any rate,
the 5 star rear sight here is actually fairly similar to the previous 3 star pattern, but not identical.
This is just a matter of finding a sight that did the same thing but was easier to get.
You'll also notice these are both open notches, this no longer has an aperture aspect to it.
Still have windage adjustment, still have elevation adjustment.
This is a pretty fine adjust sort of thread.
So that is the 5 star, and that brings us to the ... real enigma of the Mark II Ross, which is this Mark II** rifle.
These came after all of the other iterations.
The very first production actually was like 1909, but the major batch of them was 1910 / 11 / 12.
So first off, these 2 star guns have longer barrels, right about 2.5 inches longer here.
And then you might notice that they have extra rear sights on them, like, it's got this rear sight, but it's also got this rear sight.
The reason for this is that the military was getting concerned about loading,
and they wanted to use stripper clips with the Mark II Ross.
So Ross added a basically a screw on, or bolt on, stripper clip bridge.
Where the previous Mark IIs had nothing up here, the Mark II** adds this bolt-on stripper clip guide bridge over the receiver.
And of course if you're going to have a bridge back here, you might as well put an aperture rear sight on it.
You can get a lot more sight radius out of this, and so they went ahead and added this as a unit.
But a great many of these were built on rifles that had already been built with regular rear sights.
Now there was a contract that was negotiated at one point ... for another company in Quebec to go through and remove these rear sights.
The contract was never actually put into play, because I guess someone probably realised like this doesn't cause any problems,
why should we pay good money to take it off if it's not causing issues?
So you get this very interesting result of a military rifle that has a front sight and two
significantly complex rear sights.
Now in addition, the safety has been changed to a flag style of safety. So,
in the fire position you can read the word "Ready" right there on the flag,
and when flipped around into the safe position it reads "Safe".
One other minor mechanical change that was made was the addition of a third screw here.
This is just a keeper, it's a very short little screw. And you'll notice it cuts into these two.
It's just there to prevent these two screws from coming unscrewed over time.
And there's one other change that was made that's more significant mechanically, and
kind of an interesting mystery that maybe helps us understand why this 2 star is a 2 star that came last.
Well, the 2 star has kind of traditional, regular barrel threading.
All of the other earlier rifles have this very coarse (almost like a Lewis gun barrel thread), threading.
And they have this set screw in there (this is also, by the way, left hand threaded),
this was designed (and this is all of the early rifles),
these were designed to ... have their barrels changed very easily. All you have to do is of course pull the stock off,
unscrew this so it doesn't lock the barrel any longer, and then it just takes like half a turn to pop the barrel out of
this very coarse threading, and then you can easily change it.
Now, British .303 ammunition at this point was loaded with cordite. It was quite hot burning,
it was ... a significant cause of throat erosion on the rifles, which was a problem for barrel life.
Hypothetically Ross might have included this as a selling point for the British to make it easy to
replace worn barrels. ... There isn't any good documentation, but that seems like a pretty decent hypothesis.
If that's the case, why did his later guns get rid of it? Well the best answer that we can come up with,
and this isn't proven, I don't have any documentation to show this, but the idea is
Ross throughout the whole course of his rifle development, he led the way with sporting guns.
He did commercial sporters first, and then incorporated those design changes into military guns.
And it makes sense that you wouldn't need a quick-change barrel on a sporter that's not
going to see the sort of volume of fire as a military rifle.
So ... this suggests that the 2 star gun may very well have been Ross kind of
developing a side branch of his own rifle development specifically for sporters.
That could explain the longer barrel ... you know, a long barrel for higher power commercial hunting cartridges.
And it seems like this was something that he was developing separately from the standard track of military rifles.
And he got to a certain point and decided that his own track was the better one at this point,
and switched from the short pattern to the long pattern. This actually did take the Canadian military a bit by surprise,
they weren't expecting longer rifles.
And for the artillery troops who actually were issued and carried these long Mark IIs,
they ran into some issues with things like the buckets, the scabbard for the rifles
on artillery carriages being a little bit too short.
Had to be modified to fit these slightly longer rifles.
Anyway, that is the best hypothetical answer that we can come up with as to why is the 2 star kind of this odd outlier.
Ultimately in total the standard, if we're going to call it that, the short model 1905 Ross rifles,
there were a 124,000 manufactured. So quite a lot. This comprises about a third of total Ross production overall.
20,000 of those, the three star pattern, went to the United States.
They were purchased as trainers late in World War One. You'll find them still in the United States,
you'll also find some of them having come back to Canada.
Up in Canada you will also find the other iterations of the short Mark II Ross.
So these are the fairly common ones. The long pattern, only about 13,700 were manufactured.
Finding these in original intact military configuration is really quite rare today.
These, the long Mark IIs, did actually see service in World War One, they were used by the Canadian Artillery Corps.
And so a lot of them were in fact lost in combat, left in Europe, that sort of thing.
That contributes to them being quite a bit scarcer than the short patterns.
Anyway, we are going to go on and have a separate video talking about the Mark III, or Model of 1910 Ross,
which is the one that comprised the majority of overall production.
And the one that was the standard issue rifle for Canadian infantry early in World War One.
So, stick around for that video later on.
Hopefully this one has shed at least a little bit of light on the weird eccentricities of the Mark II Ross.
Thanks for watching.