Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to a special production from Forgotten Weapons.
Today we're going to take a look at the Canadian Ross Mark III rifle. There's a lot of mythology surrounding this gun,
and I wanted to take a look and see what the actual truth of the matter is.
So a little bit of background. Around the time of the Boer War
the Canadian military tried to get a licence to produce Lee-Enfield rifles and they were turned down by the British.
Well Ross had this nice sporter rifle that he had developed, a straight-pull. And he put together a good successful publicity campaign,
and convinced the Canadian military to buy his guns instead of continuing to try to get Lee-Enfields.
And it worked, the Canadians bought a bunch of Rosses and tested them.
They found some problems, they revised them into Ross Mark II rifles.
Tested those and found a bunch more problems, and revised them a third time into the Ross Mark III.
Now, the Ross Mark III went into significant mass production, and at the time of World War One
the Canadian Expeditionary Force that left for France was armed with Ross Mark III straight-pull bolt action rifles.
Now the urban legend behind these things is that they would blow up.
Whether or not that's true we'll get to in a minute, but the other issue with the Ross is that it was
renowned to be a particularly poor rifle for trench warfare, and that is true.
The Ross was developed as a sporting and target rifle, and it did those things extremely well.
Unfortunately it was a bit finicky, it ... had close tolerances,
it didn't take a whole lot of dirt or grime to really bind the thing up.
And of course in the trenches of Ypres they were not a successful rifle.
So eventually the Canadian military switched them out for Lee-Enfields and Rosses continued to serve as
sporting rifles with civilians and as training rifles with the military and a number of other things.
However, the biggest part of the legend, and what we're going to take a look at today, is whether or not the rifles would actually blow up.
There is a legend that (of course being a straight-pull, in theory, if the rifle doesn't work correctly
there's nothing to stop the bolt from coming straight out the back of the receiver and hitting the shooter in the face),
and according to legend that's what would happen.
What isn't really clear is why that would happen, or what would cause it to happen, or how often it would happen?
So that's what we're going to take a look at.
Now we're doing this partly out of just historical curiosity, and partly so that
owners of Ross Mark III rifles can have a little more confidence in their rifles, and know whether or not it's safe to shoot them.
So we're going to start by taking a look at a Ross Mark II,
which is the other common version of the Ross that's around that you can find for sale,
and show you first of all how to distinguish between a Mark II and a Mark III.
This is an early Mark II Model 1905 Ross rifle. It is a straight-pull, as with the later versions.
This had a whole bunch of relatively minor imperfections to it,
but when you added them all up it made for a definitely a flawed rifle.
So Ross redesigned the rifle, made a whole bunch of changes, and came out with the Mark III.
Now we should say the 1905 here, the Mark II, is totally safe, there is no issue with the bolt in this rifle.
It's a fairly conventional two lug rotating bolt.
And they're great guns. Now the Mark III is the one that we have issues with.
Alright, so I've kind of decorated this one up a bit with some red tape here so that people don't fire it by accident.
This is a Mark III, or M-1910 Ross rifle, and this is the one that has potential dangerous issues.
Now there are a couple ways to easily differentiate it from the earlier safe version.
(For one I should point out this has been sporterised, so typically if you find one of these
it may look like this or it may have a full-length stock and a slightly longer barrel.)
The most obvious distinctive feature of the 1910 is this magazine that's exposed below the stock.
... In fact that's really the only thing you really need to look for to differentiate this from the other versions of the Ross.
If you see the magazine it's a 1910, and it potentially has this issue.
So let's take a look at how, if you know you have a 1910, what you need to look at to see if it's safe.
[Inspecting the bolt]
Alright, so let's start by taking a look at how you can tell if your Ross rifle is safe to fire in its current configuration.
When you know what to look for this is actually exceedingly easy.
What we have here is our bolt and our bolt sleeve.
And as long as, when the bolt is in the rifle, you can see about an inch here of exposed sleeve basically your rifle is safe.
When this is mis-assembled what you'll have is the bolt in this configuration with the lugs horizontal,
but with quite a bit less distance here, having the bolt head snug up against the sleeve.
So as we can see it, this is perfectly safe. Something else you can look for
is this rivet right here.
This was a modification made after the fact by the Canadians,
and putting that rivet in prevents the bolt from being reassembled incorrectly.
So again, if your rifle has this rivet you can also be very sure that this is a safe rifle.
(I drilled out the safety rivet on this rifle after filming this segment.)
Now finally, there's one other way to take a look and this is absolutely definitive,
you can tell that the rifle is locking correctly.
So if you watch right here, we can watch the back of the locking lug.
And as I push the bolt in, we can actually see that rotate up and lock.
When I pull the bolt back we can watch it rotate down and unlock.
Now if you can see the bolt lug doing that,
(and on most rifles you'll be able to because most of these rifles are just fine),
if you can see the bolt lug rotating like that
you know absolutely with no doubt whatsoever that the rifle is safe to shoot.
Because in it's unsafe condition the bolt does not rotate.
Alright guys, so what I don't want to do is scare people about the Ross to an irrational level.
So I want to show you that this is in fact a perfectly safe rifle to shoot as long as you've assembled it correctly.
Now looking at the bolt here, we can see that we have a nice large
space of bolt shank visible.
That tells me it's assembled correctly. When I close the bolt I can watch it lock, so I know this is safe.
Alright, so we're going to load it up and fire a few rounds.
It's a really fast rifle. It's a really nice shooting rifle.
It's a great gun. These were very popular sporter guns.
During World War One, even though they had some issues in the trenches with mud and being overly sensitive to dirt,
after they'd replaced them with the Lee-Enfield as the standard Canadian issue rifle,
snipers still had a significant preference for the Ross as a precision weapon.
They had long barrels, they're extremely high quality rifles.
[So ... is the danger just a myth?]
Alright, before we go further, let's take a look at the internals of the Ross bolt.
By understanding these we can see how ... this misassembly is possible.
Now what we have is a series of spiral gear teeth cut on the outside of the bolt shank here.
Those line up with a series of cut ... teeth on the inside of this shaft.
(It's hard to get a camera view in there.)
When we assemble these two parts together the teeth here on the bolt are interfacing with
the matching teeth on the inside of the bolt sleeve.
Takes a little bit of fiddling here and there we go.
This is incorrect, but if I put the teeth just slightly differently, now I have a correctly assembled bolt.
... When it's all the way back the locking lugs are supposed to be vertical to lock the gun.
If I take this out, and I just over rotate it slightly, now it will go back into its full length with the the lugs horizontal.
What this causes is this allows the bolt to go fully forward
without the lugs actually engaging in the barrel extension and locking.
Once the bolt's fully forward, the firing mechanism doesn't realise that the gun is out of battery.
And if I pull the trigger in this configuration, it will drop the firing pin and detonate the cartridge.
What I've discovered while playing around with this is that it's actually, to my surprise,
a bit easier to misassemble the bolt than to do it right, if you've got the whole thing stripped down.
[Task #1: Misassembling the bolt when fully stripped.]
Alright, so let's suppose that I'm a Canadian infantryman,
and I have disassembled the bolt here, which I'm probably not supposed to do but let's say I've done it anyway.
I know this has to go back in here, I'm gonna fiddle with that until it goes all the way in.
And let's say I've done it correctly, the proper procedure, there we go. The lugs are vertical when it's closed.
I now have to put my extractor in. It runs in this groove on the side of the bolt.
(A little fiddly, get in there.)
Comes back to here, and now I have to lift it up and place it in its groove in the bolt head.
Now the bolt is correct, we're in good shape. However,
let's go back a step. Let's say I assemble this bolt incorrectly, like this.
I still have to put the extractor in. And some people would consider that this is now
a problem. I have the lugs in the way. Well it turns out all I have to do is pull the bolt forward a bit,
I can slide the extractor in
(Again, it's still a little fiddly right there.)
and I still have to do basically the same procedure to put the extractor in.
So having the extractor in place really doesn't hinder the potential of mis-assembling the bolt.
[Task #2: Making the bolt unsafe without disassembly.]
Now let's consider the question of whether the bolt can be set up unsafely without actually disassembling it.
As we know from our previous experiments all we have to do to get it wrong
is to rotate this clockwise until it snaps into the wrong position.
Now if I try to do that here the extractor blocks it.
However in order to make it work, all I have to do is pry up on the extractor just a little bit,
and the bolt will rotate as far clockwise as it needs to to be incorrectly assembled.
So is the average soldier going to be messing around with the bolt head like this?
Well, they're not supposed to, but I don't think anyone's going to argue that they couldn't.
And you can see it's not that difficult to to set this up incorrectly.
[Task #3: Inserting a misassembled bolt into the receiver.]
So if we're tracking down the problems with the Ross, the next question that arises is
once we've misassembled the bolt like this, are we going to be able to put it into the rifle?
And if we can is it going to require, say, an extraordinary amount of force?
Something that would clue us in, no matter how jug-headed of a recruit we might be, that something was wrong.
Well, the answer is a little bit ambiguous.
When we misassemble the bolt the locking lugs come to rest not quite horizontal, but a little beyond.
So I have to pull the bolt forward
and rotate it just a little bit to get the lugs nice and horizontal.
And they have to be horizontal to sit on the rails of the receiver and thus slide smoothly.
So when I put the the bolt into the rifle,
I have to pry the bolt forward just a hair to put it in.
And then it will go in and lock with only a little bit more force than normal.
You can tell that it's stiffer when it's assembled wrong. But if you had just disassembled the rifle,
if the rifle was dirty, it might not be particularly smooth when it's put together the correct way.
This isn't enough to be able to definitively tell, just based on the feel of the bolt, whether it's put together right or not.
[Task #4: Firing the rifle with a misassembled bolt.]
Alright, so I know this is the moment you guys have really been waiting for.
We're going to go ahead and fire the Ross with the bolt unlocked, set up incorrectly.
Now I do want to point out before we go further that we are doing this on a closed range.
We know what we're doing, we are experts you might say.
And that you should definitely not try this at home, especially if you value your face.
So without further ado, let's go ahead and see what happens when we touch off a round with the bolt assembled wrong.
OK, ready, fire.
- Well, it didn't actually blow out. - Wow.
[The case head separated, and you can see it flying out.]
Alright, so we fully expected that when we touched this thing off, the bolt was going to go flying out the back.
We had the ballistic soap ready and everything.
However, the action is stronger than a lot of people would give it credit for.
The bolt stop appears to have actually prevented the bolt from flying out.
If we look in up close here, you can see that the rearmost locking lug has been sheared off
from contact really with the bolt stop. That's the only thing that's in there that could stop it.
And we have some nice scuff damage on the the right side rear locking lug.
In fact I can see a piece of the lug sitting back there,
see if I can pull that out.
So there's our locking lug.
Alright, so we attempted to set this up for a second run to see how much more damage the bolt could sustain.
And the first time we did it we were unable to get a firing pin strike.
The trigger pulled, it went click, but nothing happened.
So we reset for a second time, and our second one we made sure we had the bolt as far in as we could get it.
And that time we got a real light strike on the primer, it didn't detonate the cartridge.
So at this point I think we're pretty much done trying that out.
I'm really interested that this actually didn't go flying out the back of the gun like we had anticipated.
It does make one kind of question the veracity of the stories out there about Canadian soldiers being maimed or killed by these things.
On the other hand, the bolt doesn't necessarily have to actually leave the gun to do that.
If you had your face right up on the stock,
obviously you're not expecting the bolt to go anywhere until you move it,
so if you've got a nice sight picture, nice cheek weld up here,
and it does this, the bolt's going to come back and it's not going to be a good day.
That in fact could account for most of these stories, so.
Also I want to point out, the bolt stop here that actually
... prevented this bolt from flying out is a pretty small piece of material.
It's just this little shelf, that's the only thing that held the bolt in.
It looks like the bolt lugs were probably hardened, which makes sense,
and when the hardened, brittle bolt lug hit the non-hardened bolt stop,
the lug sheared off from the shock, and the bolt stop was left intact. Which is pretty cool.
Alright guys, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed learning something about the Ross and hope you enjoyed the cool high speed video.
And hopefully now if you do have a Ross you'll understand exactly what you need to check to make sure it's safe,
and you can go out and enjoy what is really a very good rifle.