[ Parker-Hale .303/.22 Conversions ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a Parker-Hale .22 conversion system
for originally the Lee-Enfield,
but one that was also adapted to both the Lewis
and the Vickers guns, which is pretty cool.
This was actually originally adopted by the
British government as a formal .22 conversion system
in July of 1918, so right at the end of World War [One].
.22 calibre conversions were of course a handy training tool
that allowed you to practice marksmanship ... basically without needing a full-size rifle range.
So this sort of thing made it possible to do marksmanship training indoors,
and that was really a valuable tool for getting a little bit of rifle practice in
before you moved up to full-power cartridges with new recruits.
And the same thing applies to the Vickers and the Lewis conversions as well.
Now the fundamental idea of this was a little different than
... pretty much all of the other British .22 trainers.
So let me show you exactly how this worked.
The basic idea here was that you would take a totally standard service rifle,
presumably one with a worn-out barrel, you would bore out the barrel
and re-line it with a soldered in .22 calibre tubular insert.
However, you would leave the ... original .303 chamber intact.
And then you had a handful of these adapters.
These of course are the same basic profile as a .303 cartridge,
they will fit in the .303 chamber and
if I pop this apart,
what you do is you drop a .22 rimfire cartridge in the base here.
You have this spring-loaded plug that goes behind it,
and there's a little rimfire firing pin on that.
So this sits in here.
When you fire the rifle, the firing pin of the rifle hits the back of this,
and pushes it forward just enough through that spring-loaded detent
to fire the .22 that's inside.
As an example here, we have the sort of .22 Long Rifle that you would use.
There's nothing special about this really, ... any .22 Long Rifle cartridge will work.
And when it fires, the bullet will travel through this un-rifled section of the cartridge adapter.
It will then hit the new barrel insert in the rifle, which is rifled
(you don't really see much loss of accuracy, a little bit because of that much free-bore),
but then the rifle shoots. The sights are used just like a standard full-size rifle.
So this is a commercial example of one of the rifle conversions.
It's been marked "DP", that means the rifle was taken out of service as a drill purpose rifle,
but it'll serve just fine as a .22 conversion.
And those markings have been over-stamped with Parker-Hale's markings:
Parker-Hale, '.303" cum .22" system'.
You can see very clearly here at the muzzle how they have drilled out the original .303 barrel,
and replaced it with a rifled .22 liner.
They had to do a little bit of modification to the front of the magazine in these rifles,
simply because the front of this cartridge adapter
doesn't quite have the same profile as an actual cartridge.
Which would have a pointed ... bullet on it, which helps it feed a little better.
So they modified the magazine feed lips just a little bit to ensure feeding with the new cartridges.
And if you look down into the chamber there, you can see that it's clearly a full-size .303 chamber.
Just one that simply ... necks down to a .22 calibre bore.
In addition to the rifle, we have an original cased set
of components for a Vickers gun conversion using the exact same system.
So Barrel, Parker-Hale, this originally said ".303 cum .22" for the calibre conversion.
And if we open this guy up,
inside we've got 10 of our cartridge adapters.
We've got our Vickers barrel with a cleaning rod here.
We actually have the original packing slip.
So we have 10, they called them "containers" for the cartridges,
loading rod, the unloading tool.
Which is this little guy, this is for manually taking the cartridges apart.
There was actually a proper ... hand lever tool that made it a lot easier to pop rounds in and out,
and unfortunately I don't have that to show you.
An oil can, a ... box of cleaning patches,
and of course the chest.
There are your cleaning patches.
And your oil can.
If we take a closer look at the barrel,
there's a lot of grease on this, but that is clearly a .303 ... cartridge sized chamber.
With a .22 calibre barrel liner sweated in there.
And this is marked Parker Rifled,
where the "R" is shared between the two, so it's like "Parkerifled A.G.P".
Now I don't have the case for it, but they did also sell this for the Lewis gun.
And here we have a Lewis gun barrel.
You can see that is proofed .303-.22.
And again it has a .303 chamber.
That just drops right in like that.
Now in the Vickers and the Lewis there is no way that a .22 was
going to have enough power to actually cycle the operating system of the guns.
And it didn't, and ... Parker-Hale was very upfront about that,
the training practice involved with this, you would just manually cycle the rifle for each shot.
So it gave you a little bit of marksmanship practice.
I imagine this would be quite useful with the Lee-Enfield rifles,
it would be moderately useful with a Lewis gun,
and to me it seems kind of not all that helpful with a Vickers gun.
But I suppose you can actually go through the loading procedure,
and safety, and firing drill, and all that sort of thing with this.
This is actually pretty similar to the system that the French would use
on their .22 calibre MAS 36 trainers, which would come much later.
Those came in the 1930s, where this was originally developed in 1918.
The one significant difference is with the French trainers
the cartridge runs all the way out at the front of the adapter,
and the bullet sticks out the front so it engages directly into rifling.
Where on this, the cartridge is positioned in the back of the chamber adapter,
and so it goes through a long un-rifled tube before it gets to the barrel rifling.
The Lewis is a gas-operated gun of course,
so the original Lewis barrel that they converted here had a gas port in it.
And you can see that ... they've just run the liner right past the gas port.
There was no need to actually tap gas off the .22.
The disadvantage of this system is that it's really kind of a laborious thing
to load and unload these charger adapters.
And if you've got a whole squad of guys who are going through marksmanship practice,
you're going to have a whole bunch of other guys well and truly occupied
keeping cartridge adapters loaded for them.
The advantage is you can load these into the rifle magazine.
You can actually use these in stripper clips just like you would with normal cartridges.
The bolt throw of the rifle is full length.
And all of your training drill is properly duplicated, just without the noise
and the recoil and the ballistic danger of full-power cartridges.
So you can do very realistic training with this.
Other .22 calibre rifles, the ones that were just single shot,
tend to have a bolt throw that only needs to be about that long
to cycle just a plain .22 calibre cartridge through.
This gives you the real, full experience.
In 1920 the system was declared obsolete by the British military,
that would be the rifle system,
and it would be replaced the next year by the Rifle Number 2 Mark IV*.
Which was just a ... simpler single-shot .22 calibre training rifle.
However, the Parker-Hale company would keep this system in their catalogue into the 1930s,
and offer it for sale for all three different platforms.
So it's really cool to get a chance to look at all three of them side by side here
because it's a neat system. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.