Hi guys. Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company taking a look at a very cool and very unusual prototype
Enfield rifle. This is the result of a British program from 1942
aimed at creating a simplified, lightened and much faster to
produce rifle to take the place of the Number 4 Mark 1 Lee-Enfield [No. 4 Mk. 1].
Now the No. 4 had only been introduced basically at the beginning of World War Two
but, by 1942, the British were putting a lot of industry, a lot of time and material and effort into building rifles.
And it would make sense that they would try to explore some options for reducing that,
you know, make the guns cheaper, make them faster.
This isn't quite an emergency thing, like you would see with the Besal light machine gun.
Which was kind of basically put together during the Battle of Britain
on the fear that the Germans were imminently going to be invading the home islands.
This came a couple years later.
But it's still a fantastically interesting prototype, because they really did work from the ground up.
This isn't a simplified Lee-Enfield. This is a completely new rifle design.
So, let's take a look, let me show you.
This really is a very cool example of ... economy of design as the starting point for a firearm.
So, what we have here is basically one big block of metal from here, back to here
that was machined out (and it started probably as a piece of square stock about this big)
and that was machined out to form the receiver. The magazine box was added to it, as was the trigger area.
This front section was rounded out to form a front trunnion into which the barrel is attached,
and you have a really efficient system. I'll tell you what, let me go ahead and take the hand guards off
and take these little pieces of wood off and show you what's underneath.
So these little wood cheek pieces here are really quite British, this reminds me of the EM2
where they put this little fancy thin wood laminate on the stock of the gun just,
you know, because a proper gun needs to have real hardwood on it. So, we can take these off.
There's one other really cool element to these.
If you look at the underside of these you can see something really cool, namely these scribe marks,
and this tells you without any doubt whatsoever - this rifle was assembled completely by hand,
it was manufactured by hand. Because someone went through and marked out the locations
for all the cuts that had to be made to shape this,
and those are the two that indicate exactly where the screw hole needs to be drilled.
And so someone scribed those out by hand and then cut this little piece by hand, and shaped it to fit.
That's pretty cool.
The nose cap here is, I think, basically the exact same part as a No. 4, or very close to it.
We can take this off just by removing the sling swivel screw.
... does come out.
With that off, we can go ahead and remove the upper handguard, right there.
And then the lower handguard is held on by this one screw,
and then we can take off the lower handguard.
Now you can see the whole receiver, so you can see a couple of weld marks here,
and around here on the back surface.
And right there, and that is where this original square section of material was welded to the rear socket,
which clearly came off of a Lee-Enfield rifle, a No.4 or a No. 1 rifle.
And the trigger group here, which is just a couple of metal plates on the side.
And then we've got our magazine floor plate here, which is non removable.
This rifle is still chambered for .303 British. It appears to use standard charging clips
(I'm sure it would have had to use standard clips), but the magazine only holds 6 rounds.
It's actually a shorter magazine than the SMLE or the No. 4.
The barrel comes back into the receiver, to right there.
And one of the other big changes to this design over the previous Enfields is that this uses front locking lugs.
So here's the bolt.
You can see the bolt body and the locking lugs are one continuous piece, that's going to make it
simpler to manufacture than the No. 1 and No. 4, which have this screw-on removable bolt head, and locked at the rear.
The cocking piece here is much simpler than any of the previous Enfields. They don't put any grooves in it,
this isn't the sort of thing that you're intended to be able to recock manually if a cartridge fails to detonate.
You know what? It's 1942, the cartridges just work.
If you get a dud for some reason, rack it out of the rifle and go on to the next one.
You don't need to try and salvage every individual cartridge.
The safety on this is a push button safety, 'F' for fire, 'S' for safe.
The trigger is a stamped piece of sheet metal, and by the way, it has a really
pretty poor trigger pull when the thing's actually assembled. It's really quite long and creepy.
The rear sight has been changed to a simple two position flip sight.
They did maintain it as an aperture sight like the No. 4, which is a good idea.
This is the 600 yard aperture, that's the 300 yard aperture.
The ejector here doubles as the bolt stop. So you lift this up to be able to pull the bolt out.
Notice that this whole piece is dovetailed onto the side of the receiver. So when they're making the receiver,
all they had to do was cut a slot in it for the ejector
(which you can see right in there).
Just cut a slot for it, nice and easy to do on the receiver, and then all the hard work is done on a separate piece
that then attaches to the receiver. So again, simplification of the manufacturing process.
The front sight is pretty much identical to the No. 4 front sight, (I don't think it's an exactly
... in fact it's definitely not the exact same piece, you can see that these protective wings are welded on here).
But the design is the same, square post, windage ... adjustable with a drift and a couple of protective wings.
There is that hole on the bottom of the muzzle.
That is there to accommodate the bayonet, which is really a bit more complex than
maybe it ought to need to be. It's the same sort of spike bayonet that they had on
the No. 4, which is basically a piece of rod roughly ground to a point.
And then to attach, it has a little spring-loaded plunger here,
so it snaps on to the muzzle like that. And when you're not using it
you just flip it around,
and it locks on to the muzzle, like that, pointing backwards, and allowing you to not have to figure out where to put it.
That bayonet stowage, by the way, is the reason that the stock is this long.
It leaves this much of the barrel exposed, which looks weird when you don't have the bayonet on it.
When you put the bayonet on you realise, "Oh, we needed that much space to stow this thing."
So there we have it all reassembled back together. It is still a cock on close action.
There you go.
Dry fire it and,
yeah, what could have been - the lightened British 1942 pattern rifle.
It's interesting to see the British doing this kind of mid-war,
in the same sort of spirit that we see some of the Axis nations,
particularly Japan and Germany, trying out this sort of thing
right at the tail-end of the war. The British were doing it almost proactively
where Germany and Japan were kind of forced into this by desperation. And in their cases most, you know,
the last-ditch, late war, new types of rifle never really saw production because they were just too late.
And by the time any production could have taken place, the war was basically over.
Well with this, it's kind of the inverse situation.
This sort of development takes time, and by the time they had this suitably figured out,
well, maybe it wasn't all that important any more. The tide is turning in the war, things are looking up,
you know, we've got a good production line going. Maybe we're better off just
keeping the existing rifles that we have, that we know work, rather than trying to, you know,
juggle everything up in the middle of what is still very much an on-going conflict, to create something
that saves us a few bucks here and a few hours there.
So, there are two versions of this that I know of in total. There's this one, and then there's also one referenced in
Skennerton, which has a skeletonised metal butt-stock.
But there is very little information about either one of them, and it's really exciting to be able to actually
take a look at one in person, pull it apart, and show it to you guys.
Now, hopefully you enjoyed the video, that you learned something cool about this guy.
If you are the sort of collector who would like to see this rifle in your own collection,
take a look at the description text below the video. You'll find a link there to Rock Island's
... Well, you'll find a link there, I'm sorry, to ForgottenWeapons.com,
because YouTube does not allow links directly to places like Rock Island.
So from Forgotten Weapons, you can then find a link that will allow you to go over to Rock Island's
catalogue page. Take a look at their high-res pictures, their description,
their price estimate, their online bidding system and all that sort of good stuff.
Thanks for watching.