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 missing link in the Lee-Enfield .308 conversion story.
... I've covered the rifles that came before it and came after it,
this is an L39A1, and this was essentially the civilian competition version
of what would be the L42A1 British sniper rifle.
This was actually taken into military service under the designation of "Service Target Rifle".
And it was intended for competition shooting, not for actual combat use.
Now chronologically or developmentally, this falls between the L8 rifles,
which was the British military's first attempt at a .308
precision rifle conversion of the Lee-Enfield.
And ... then on the other end the L42A1, which was the final adopted military sniper.
So there were a total of 1,213 of these manufactured between 1968 and 1972.
And essentially what they were doing was basically copying the civilian competition shooters
from British NRA and Bisley matches, and how they did a .308 conversion.
So of course ... we have a very heavy barrel out here,
the stock has been cut down, the barrel has been free-floated.
... With the L8s they were attempting to still have full handguards on these guns,
which was a problem for precision and accuracy.
Now the way these guns were actually issued was with no sights at all.
They were intended as competition rifles for military units,
and sights would be added at the unit level, whatever specific sight was desired by that unit.
So A.J. Parker did a lot of the sights,
but Parker-Hale was also a major supplier of sights for these guns.
Interestingly, they were also supplied with a .303 calibre magazine.
Let's go ahead and take a closer look at that.
Alright, so we have our .303 magazine here.
In this case we have a Parker-Hale competition rear sight.
But let's take a quick look at the markings before we go further.
These are pretty simple and straightforward markings.
... What was originally on these receivers has been milled off.
They were originally of course new old stock receivers.
The markings have been replaced with "7.62mm L39A1".
"UE" indicates that these were manufactured by Enfield, 1972 was the date.
So you'll find these with 69, 70 and 72 dates on them.
The serial number is A1216. There was a single serial number range
that they used for the L39A1s, as well as the pre-series trial guns of this pattern,
and a series of what were called "7.62 Conv" or "Con".
Early 7.62 ... NATO converted Enfields.
So most of the guns in that serial number range were L39s.
Specifically, they made 300 of them in 1969, 500 of them in 1970,
and 413 in 1972, which include this one.
The highest known serial number is 1241.
Now the reason for the .303 magazine is that these were intended for competition shooting,
and specifically a slow-fire style of competition shooting
where you didn't actually use the magazine of the rifle.
However, if the rifle is configured without a magazine
it's a lot more difficult to actually single load it.
You have to thread each round into the chamber.
The point of having a standard .303 calibre magazine
is in essence to act as a loading platform.
So you can just drop a round on here, close the bolt, and it will chamber that round.
Now the receivers on all the L39A1s
were actually relieved to use .308 magazines, the conversion magazines.
And so a lot of these guns in actual practice
have had the magazines replaced with magazines from, say, L42s.
They'll fit just fine, and once you put that magazine in you essentially have
a fully functional, repeating .308 Lee-Enfield.
You do also have to check the extractor, some of these have .303 extractors.
Because if you are single loading, instead of the round coming up under the extractor,
the extractor has to snap over the round when it chambers.
And a .303 extractor is a bit shorter, and it's a little easier to do that with than a .308 extractor.
It means you have pretty weak, sort of erratic ejection,
but that's not really that important with single-shot slow-fire competition shooting.
Anyway, that's the magazine conversion there.
The calibre conversion is really just a matter of replacing the barrel
with a heavy .308 calibre barrel
and then making the modifications to the inside of the receiver to fit that .308 magazine.
These guns do all have Number 5 style hollow bolt handles, which is a bit unusual.
And the bolts are matched to the guns by serial number.
So that's one way to detect clones or fakes of these,
is they need to have the hollow bolt handle that is number matching.
These have a unique butt stock to them that has a little bit of a pistol grip.
More than a standard Number 4 Enfield,
less than something like a Number 8 target rifle, but a little bit there.
You will sometimes find a little container added into the bottom of the pistol grip
to hold the front sight inserts.
They were also sometimes stored in the hole under the butt plate here.
There's obviously a hole for the attachment screw that holds the buttstock on,
and it will also fit the front sight attachments and the sight tool.
Some, but not all, of the L39s have the rail on the bottom here for a front hand stop,
that's very much a competition accessory. So you'll find that on some of them.
The barrels were manufactured by Enfield, and they are hammer forged barrels.
And it's kind of cool that they've left the machining marks.
So you can see the spiral markings here,
and that's from the hammer forging process, which is kind of cool.
The finish on the whole gun, the action, the bolt, the barrel and everything
is Parkerising or is bluing covered with Suncorite, which is this heavy black paint.
Suncorite is not used any more because the application process is apparently massively toxic.
There's no problem with the guns, I mean, don't go licking paint chips off the gun.
But they don't use Suncorite any more.
It was very durable, but not good environmentally.
There's our front sight with the ... hooded style of competition front sight.
You can unscrew this and pull out the front sight insert.
So different styles of competition (oops), and different ranges
would use different specific sizes of front aperture.
You could also get ... an insert that was just a front post,
although the aperture like this is the typical sort that would be used.
One will also sometimes see the Enfield "Envoy" rifles,
that is the commercial sale version of the L39A1.
"L39" indicates that that is a military firearm, it was the Service Target Rifle.
The commercial competition version was the Envoy.
The only real difference with the Envoy, aside from markings,
is that it has a little bit wider of a forend down here, that's it.
There are a lot of rifles out there that are like these.
There are a bunch of different patterns of .308 converted Lee-Enfield actions,
both for military use and for civilian competition use.
And a lot of them are done in basically the same way.
So there are actually some fake L39s, this one of course isn't, this is a legitimate one.
This ... has all the features that you should normally look for on an L39.
They were fairly successful target rifles, of course they are very accurate guns.
Interestingly, ... a few of these were actually deployed to the Falklands,
because British special forces, the SAS, in the Falklands had L42A1 sniper rifles, of course.
But the problem is they were having a lot of trouble with their scopes at the time,
and a bunch of the scopes were not suitable for service, they were being repaired.
And so they actually didn't have enough complete rifles to deploy to the Falklands.
So they ended up taking some L42A1s, and some L39s.
What they did is they went ahead and got the largest aperture front ring sight,
and used that as essentially a combat sight.
Now I don't think any of them actually saw combat in the Falklands,
but it's interesting that they were in fact deployed to the combat zone with the SAS.
Anyway, as an interim step in Britain's development of a sniper rifle program,
these are a cool and important step. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.