Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House, where we're taking a look at some of the guns
that are coming up for sale in their September of 2016 Premiere Auction.
Today we've got a really interesting one. Now I have basically no documentation, no data on this.
All I have to go on is what we can see in front of us with the rifle.
So there's not going to be a whole lot of talking at the beginning of this one,
we're going to mostly delve into looking at this thing. But I will preface that with a brief description of
the fact that when rifle technology changed from single shot, well frankly from muzzle loading rifles to
cartridge guns, and then from cartridge guns to repeating cartridge guns,
and then from repeaters to self-loaders, at every one of these stages
military forces worldwide had to do something to catch up,
you know, they needed to get rid of the old generation of technology and get the newest stuff.
And every time this happened, every military pretty much everywhere always
wanted to have some way to convert their old guns into new guns.
Because this was a cost-saving measure, these guys didn't have unlimited money,
and they had a lot of things they could spend their money on.
And so they always wanted a way to take the existing guns and just,
like, add a couple parts and turn it into a self-loader or add a couple parts and turn it into a magazine rifle.
And this occasionally worked, the US Trapdoor Springfield is a good example of it actually working to some extent.
But it pretty much always turned out that the cost of doing a conversion process
really ended up being the same as the cost of a new rifle built from the ground up.
And the rifles built from the ground up on the new technology were pretty much always a lot better.
Well, what we have here today is an example of an attempt to convert a bolt action
1903 Springfield rifle into a semi-auto .30-06 rifle.
You can see it's got a BAR magazine in it, and parts of it kind of look like a 1903, but with some weird lumpy growths.
So, with that all out in the open, let's go ahead and take a close look at this, because it's got a really interesting operating system.
Alright, so what can we start with? First off, we know this has a BAR magazine, which is not uncommon.
Most of the semi-auto conversions at that time did use BAR mags.This one's been slightly modified at the front,
just to feed better. Looks like it's been modified a bit at the rear as well.
But this definitely started out life as a BAR magazine.
Now we can also date this rifle.
If we take a look at the receiver, you'll see this is marked US Springfield Armory, Model 1903.
Serial number is approximately 1,220,000. Now if we look that up, that indicates it was manufactured in 1921.
In addition to that we have a barrel which is marked "SA", Springfield Armory, with a production date of 3 - 21, so March of 1921.
So in 1921 this is the period where a lot of the semi-auto rifle experiments were really kind of starting to get going.
John Garand would have been working on some of his early guns at this time,
his primer actuated guns specifically. And a number of other experiments were going on as well.
The US military was looking for a self-loading rifle, and at this point it was still interested in getting one
that would be convertible from an existing 1903 Springfield receiver.
So that's clearly what this uses, obviously the receiver is a Springfield receiver.
You can see here it still got the magazine cut off on it.
There is a piece that has been added to the rear housing of the receiver.
And of course we have this interesting bolt handle. Now when the bolt handle's down it's locked in place.
When we lift it horizontal like this, then we can operate the action back like so.
We can even see that it still has a rotating bolt.
If you look back here, when I pull the bolt back you can see that that is clearly rotating to lock.
Anyway, let's go ahead and take this apart to see how it works.
Now the first thing I need to do is take off the nose cap.
This screw just holds the nose cap in place, so that's an easy one, I can pull that screw out.
The nose cap comes forward Our barrel band is just held in place by a little tension spring there,
so I can pull that off, and take the magazine out back here.
Now we can pull the handguard up and off. There's that.
Now this is where we get our first really interesting look at this rifle.
When I pulled this apart, I expected to find a gas piston in there because the barrel's fixed in place,
so it's clearly not recoil-operated. Which means it's probably got a gas piston.
And this bulged out stock makes it look like there's a piston under there.
However, there is not. All we have is this charging handle assembly.
Which, by the way, has this neat little feature of when it's all the way forward
there's a cut flat surface on the side of this lug, so that when I fold the bolt handle down
this hook holds it in place and keeps it from moving.
When I fold it up, indicating that I want to actually make use of it, this surface
and this pin push this hook up out of the way so that I can use it. That's pretty cool.
However there's no gas port in this barrel. There's no gas piston in there. We need to investigate further.
And in order to do that I need to take these two screws out, which will release the stock from the action.
Now we can separate the stock from the action.
And in the process we also get this little piece, which would have originally been a rear receiver cover.
Right there.
That just comes off.
Now there's only one thing in the stock, and that's this recoil spring
that's captive down in the stock, very much like an FAL for example today, or
a number of other prototype rifles at the time used a mechanism like that.
We have a little bit of a magazine box right here, but not much, that's just in there as metal reinforcement.
And then the rest of the stock is empty. It's also worth noting that there are no scorch marks in here.
Typically when you have a gas piston operated gun, you'll see some blackening of the stock wherever the gas port is located.
Now let's take a closer look at the action. We've got this tail hanging out the back,
which is clearly connected to the bolt.
In fact this tail is the camming surface that causes the bolt to rotate to lock and unlock like that.
(There we go, there's a better view.)
So when I pull this tail back the bolt rotates, unlocks, and opens.
Getting the bolt out is very simple because they left the bits of the Springfield system in place.
All I have to do is flip this to its original bolt removal position,
and then I can just slide the bolt right out the back.
Alright, so here is the important bit of the gun. And what we can see is
this lug connects up to the charging handle,
so that when you push on the charging handle, it pushes on this lug, which operates the bolt manually.
And then what's very interesting here is that the bolt face is actually spring loaded. Let's take this apart.
We can pull this out, it's got a little spring detent that holds it in place.
And then we can pull out that very fragile-looking piece.
And then we can remove our extractor.
There we go, everything just falls to pieces.
Alright, there is our complete bolt disassembled.
So what's going on here? Let's take a look. First off,
we can see that the bolt head is in fact spring-loaded on the bolt body.
Not very much spring compression, but just a little bit, couple of millimeters there.
We also have this very long firing pin, and the firing pin is directly connected to the piece here that works as a cam.
So this lug sits in here, like so, and it forces the bolt to run in this cam track.
Which means that when this piece goes backward the bolt has to rotate.
This is what's causing the bolt to lock and unlock.
This is in fact a primer actuated gun, meaning that when you fire, the primer itself...
(this requires a specialised type of ammunition which was used in the 1920s for these guns),
when you fire, the primer actually backs out of the cartridge case head.
Now normally ... if you saw something like that, it would indicate a significant
pressure problem in your hand-loaded (presumably) cartridge.
But in this case the cartridges were designed specifically so that it could happen.
When the primer moved back it acted like a very small little piston,
and it would push on the firing pin, which would push this backwards.
Now the spring loaded piece here is a way to get a little bit more energy out of the system.
So what would happen is the firing pin runs through here. The initial movement
can only be done by the firing pin going backward. Once the firing pin has started to move backwards,
then the bolt head can follow it back under residual pressure
and this piece pushes on the rest of this piston.
So the firing pin movement gives you the initial bit of unlock, and then this can help it and continue it moving.
Once you have a little bit of inertia there, this whole thing runs backward in the bolt,
which forces it to ... unlock and then retract. And then of course the spring in the buttstock
pushes everything back into reverse to load a new cartridge.
Now just to make things a little bit more unusual, we also have this lug cut here
on what is basically the recoil spring tail of this whole assembly. This is actually the sear.
If you look at the bolt there's nowhere for it to actually catch
and prevent the firing pin from going forward until you pull the trigger.
This, however, is directly connected to the firing pin.
So what happens is the gun is basically in battery ready to fire, with the firing pin just back behind the breech face.
Until you pull the trigger, which allows this to move just slightly forward under pressure from the mainspring,
which drops the firing pin all the way onto the primer and fires the rifle.
So by the way if you install this upside down, which you can,
you then end up with a gun that has no way to fire because there's nothing to catch on.
Alright, let's take a look at this actually set up to fire.
Now we know that this lug, right here, is what is going to be held back and then released by the trigger.
So it's ... constantly under pressure from the mainspring, which is in the stock.
Now when the bolt goes into battery, it is going to rotate, right there, and then stop right about at this point.
So you can kind of see bits moving right there. You can also see it right through that hole in the cam track.
Now at this point the ... sear in the trigger is catching on this bar.
When we pull the trigger it lifts up like so, and allows this
(Oops, I already pushed it in.)
Alright, so when it's ready to fire it is sitting right there, I can feel it.
When I pull the trigger, it lifts up and allows this to go a few millimetres,
maybe 5 millimeters farther forward, maybe a quarter inch tops.
At that point the firing pin goes through the face of the bolt, hits the primer, and begins the whole firing sequence.
As this bar then retracts backwards, it actually trips a semi-auto disconnector,
right there, in the trigger which ensures that holding the trigger down will not cause it to fire more than once.
Once it's back at that point, you have to pull the trigger again to allow it to go forward to fire a second time.
Now what's interesting is because this bar has been welded on to the front of the trigger body,
... the magazine disconnect actually is acting as the safety.
So this bar has to go down into this area. If I engage the magazine disconnect
now there's no place for the bar to go, it locks the trigger, renders the gun safe.
Same with the disassembly area. However, the cut out here
allows this to fire.
So contrary to its external appearance, this big old handle on the side of the gun
simply allows you to manually operate the action.
Although interestingly, it actually ... has no forward effect, you can only use it to push the bolt back.
You cannot use it to pull the bolt forward.
That is only done by pressure of the mainspring back here.
So once again, just to put it in context, here is our stock, here is the spring plunger, the mainspring is down inside here.
This ... tail fits into that plunger, and that's what forces the bolt to move.
Now one other thing I want to point out is that this stock is ... a newly manufactured stock.
This isn't adapted from a 1903 Springfield stock.
However, because they kept the Springfield receiver
which you can see here, ... these would normally be the front and rear lugs for the receiver.
But they've added this much material on
(there we go),
they've added several inches onto the end of the receiver, which means that the stock has kind of been pushed forward.
The result being this pistol grip is virtually impossible to use from a normal firing position.
You would have to grasp the stock here at the wrist, and then you can't really get to the trigger.
You have to have this weird grip where you're kind of up here,
way up ahead of the actual grip of the stock, in order to use the gun.
Clearly this was an experimental piece and either that would have been changed,
or it would have been a major element in why this gun was rejected.
All right, you guys want to see a little more gun nerdery here?
Well, we'll go into a little more detail on showing some of the bits that have been modified from original Springfield parts.
So this extractor, for example, is a normal extractor and what they did was rivet on
(you can see the two rivets right there, and there's the two rivet heads just barely visible),
they ... riveted on this extra lug to help control the extractor as it rotates back and forth.
They also added this pin, right under the extractor head itself.
That pin matches up with this little hole in the bolt head, and that ensures that the bolt head
rotates with the extractor, so that you don't get the ... ejector slot rotating underneath the extractor, which would be bad.
Now the receiver is another good place to look for this sort of thing.
The original receiver had its front bolt here, and then its rear here,
and this would have been the very back end of the original receiver.
What they have done is added this sheet metal cover, which comes back over the top of the rear of the receiver.
So it's kind of a complicated part, it's got this square bent piece, it's got this rounded section on the back.
And of course what this does is cover the full travel of the bolt.
On a regular bolt action you can have the bolt just kind of hanging out the back of the rifle when it's open.
It doesn't really matter because it's only open if it's being manually controlled.
Well on a self-loader, all of a sudden now the bolt is flying back and forth very quickly under
spring tension and basically of its own regard.
And so you need to keep the the shooter's face protected from it. So that's why this cover has been added.
What's interesting is that it's actually been screwed onto the receiver. So you can see there's two attachments back here.
You can see this sheet metal where it sits right up against, and kind of doubles the thickness of, the original receiver.
And we've got another screw locking it in place there.
Then on this side it only comes to here, and then it comes up, fits nicely over this,
which would have been where the original cocking piece of the bolt sat on the original receiver.
There's two screws holding it in at the back here, and then one screw here on the front.
There's just this little tab of sheet metal that comes up so that can be screwed in place right there.
And this acts as the cover of course, and then it also acts as the housing shroud for this bolt handle.
Which is sliding back and forth inside this cover.
If we look up close at the barrel, you can see all these kind of horrible marks.
It's like this was put on with a pipe wrench or something similar.
However, what's interesting is it was put on before the gun was finished.
You can see that the bottoms of all of those deep scratches are blued.
So someone used a big ol' wrench, cranked the barrel on, and then blued the whole gun after they were done.
This little hole is where you would have originally had the pin locking the rear sight in place on a 1903 Springfield.
Because, of course, this is a 1903 Springfield barrel.
So that's another just a little leftover from what this part began life as.
And we will end with the front sight, which appears to not have been modified in any way,
so actually a totally normal, unmodified, 1903 Springfield front sight on this rifle.
Thank you for watching guys, hope you enjoyed the video.
This is definitely a unique one-of-a-kind rifle, very cool to get to take a look at it.
And very cool to actually see a primer-actuated rifle up close.
Those are a very rare type of operating system, they went out of favour very quickly.
And yeah, it's awesome to check one out. So if you'd like to add this to your own collection,
this is the sort of thing you normally only see in museums behind glass,
but this one is privately owned and coming up for sale. If you'd like to own it yourself
take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on the gun.
You can see their whole lengthy description and their pictures,
and either come up here to the auction in person or place a bid on-line right through the website.
Thanks for watching.