[ The M1 Garand "7th Round Stoppage" ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to talk about the infamous 7th round stoppage on the M1.
I brought this up as an example of problems spontaneously arising during production,
and how difficult it can be to take a product
(in the case I'm talking about a firearm, but really any industrial mechanised product)
from prototype to mass production stage.
And you guys clearly wanted to know more about this 7th round stoppage.
So that's what we're going to talk about today.
My reference source on this, by the way, is Julian Hatcher's "Book of the Garand",
which is a fantastic reference work talking about early US adoption of semi-auto rifles.
And it's not just about the Garand, although it does talk in detail about the
trials and tribulations of developing and adopting the Garand.
But he also talks about a bunch of the other rifles that were tested out, notably the Pedersen,
and some other interesting and more obscure ones.
Anyway, so to set the stage, this is 1938.
The US military, ... the Army, has formally adopted the M1 Garand.
The Marine Corps hasn't, but the Army did.
The War Department is pretty excited about its new self-loading rifle,
like ... the US is kind of on the cutting edge here.
Nobody else has really taken the step of saying,
"We're going to give every infantryman a self-loading rifle."
Russia has some, Germany's going to have some. Russia doesn't have a ton of them.
Yeah, there's the Mondragon in Mexico, which was basically never used.
The Garand is really cutting edge here, so the War Department is excited about this.
And frankly they want to publicise it, they want to make the most of this from a PR perspective.
Well, as this is happening, Springfield is just starting to roll out production M1s.
Now the role of Springfield in this case was intended to be that of
... not a proof of concept facility, but ... an arsenal.
... It would be a repository of experts and expertise
where they could build a production line set of tooling for a firearm, like the M1 Garand,
and figure out all of the little quirks.
All the stuff like this 7th round stoppage sort of thing.
And get a complete technical data package, complete specs for all the tooling,
and jigs, and dies, and fixtures, and gauges that you would need to make the M1,
or any other firearm, on an industrialised basis.
And then ... if we didn't need a lot of the guns they can make a few,
and then kind of just put all the tooling and all this data in storage until such time as,
"Oh no, we're at war, we need a million rifles."
Now they have this data package that they can give to ... private companies
who have the industrial capacity to manufacture the guns.
And those companies won't have to figure this all out from scratch.
This is frankly a really good idea.
This is the sort of thing that a nationally funded armoury ought to be doing.
They stopped doing it in the '60s when they shut down Springfield.
But that's a story for a separate time.
So Springfield's working on developing this tooling.
And the shop-prototype handmade M1s work great, no problems at all.
They start ... getting guns off this new production line,
and all of a sudden the problem crops up.
The 7th round of the rifle will jam instead of loading.
But it's not always, it's only sometimes. And they're able to track it down a little bit,
and realise that it only happens when the top round in the clip is loaded on the right.
So with an M1 clip ... it has 8 rounds and they're staggered,
but you can load it either way. So the top round can be on the left or on the right.
And in trials the rifle didn't care, that was one of the nice things.
Not only could you load the clip either way, you could insert the clip into the rifle either way.
There was no up and down, it was either one worked.
And this was specifically a point of advantage for the M1 over the Pedersen rifles,
where the ... design the Army tested you had to load the clip right way up, or it wouldn't work.
So all of a sudden, sometimes, if the round is on the wrong side, the 7th round will jam.
Which is this truly mysterious problem, it never showed up in testing, it's completely novel.
What the heck? Like these rifles look fine.
And as long as the [round] is on the left it's not a problem. And yet, what the heck?
Well this is happening right as the War Department, as I mentioned,
is very excited about its brand-new high-tech rifles.
And the War Department is getting ready to ship 200 of them to the National Matches
at Camp Perry to show off to all of the shooting media,
and the gun world media, and the top competitive marksmen in the United States.
... I mean, we still have Camp Perry matches,
but at the time think of this perhaps more like SHOT Show.
The US government is going to ship 200 of its brand new rifles to SHOT Show,
and let basically any Joe Schmoe who shows up try one out. What could possibly go wrong?
Well the guys at Springfield are freaking out because they know that 50% of the time,
a random flip of the coin, you have a really good chance of the rifle jamming on the 7th round.
And how is that going to look at Camp Perry
in front of everybody who's anybody in the shooting world?
Including by the way, a whole lot of people who are in this ... other camp arguing that,
"Hey, this Johnson rifle is actually better than the M1,
we should adopt the Johnson either in addition to, or instead of, the M1."
Well, what better for those people than if M1s show up at Camp Perry,
and just malfunction left and right.
So there are two problems at stake here, two problems at hand.
One is: we've got to figure out ... what's causing this problem, and how do we fix it?
And number two: it doesn't look like we're going to be able to do that before Camp Perry,
and we can't convince the War Department to scrap these plans.
There are already people who think that the rifle is a disaster,
and the War Department's hiding behind lies and trickery.
And if they ... cancel this plan, everyone's going to be really sure
that there is something tragically wrong with the rifle, and it'll be an even bigger mess.
So, first problem.
The officer who's assigned to deal with these rifles at Camp Perry is in fact Colonel James Hatcher.
I mentioned this book was written by Julian Hatcher, James Hatcher is his brother.
Both of these men were in the Ordnance Department.
James Hatcher comes up with a stopgap plan where he modifies the follower,
the little follower thing, in the M1 to prevent you
from being able to load a clip with the top round on the right.
So in theory this should prevent any issues.
He also talks to the Army officer who is dealing with all of the ammunition for the M1s.
Of course, M1 clips are this brand new thing, and ... they aren't just out there.
So if you're going to try out one of these new rifles at Camp Perry,
you're going to be getting your ammo from the Army.
And Hatcher talks to the Army officer who's doing the ammo,
and makes sure that every clip that they have is loaded with the top round on the left.
So these 200 rifles all get modified with special followers,
nobody knows it, they don't tell anyone about it.
And they manage to avoid the problem.
Like there is still a 7th round stoppage issue,
blaring, blinding issue, when these rifles are at Camp Perry.
But nobody ever finds out, because they manage to prevent anyone
from ever encountering the condition where the problem will happen.
But that is not a sustainable solution for production.
Because unless we want to make these clips ... uni-directional,
(which nobody does, ... frankly just trying to do that will institute more problems than they've got now),
they've got to figure it out. So the guys are racking their brains.
It finally comes down to an assistant foreman at Springfield
by the name of Walter Campbell, who figures it out.
And actually, let me just show you exactly what was ... happening here.
OK, so in the M1 receiver (and by the way, I'm totally swiping this from Othais),
there are two big guide ribs, here and here, and they're also on this side, here and here,
that hold the clip properly in place while it's in the rifle.
On this side they're really pretty obvious, pretty easy to see.
The back one has been cut out to allow the follower to slide in it.
But what happened was in the production room, during the production process,
they had to drill a hole up here for the barrel to fit into the receiver.
And when they drilled that hole, you can see the cut
that had to continue in here to drill out sufficient material.
... At the first stage, when they caused this problem,
they actually drilled through this little nub, right here, at the top of this guide rail.
So imagine this curved surface continues all the way through into this void.
That was it, that was the entirety of the problem.
Now this one of course has been fixed.
What they had to do was stop that cut right here, and leave that guide rib intact.
So it turns out, if you don't make that one little tiny cut,
(and by the way it's not always that cut, it has to be a combination of that cut
plus stacking tolerances in the other parts around it,
that causes the 7th round stoppage), if you don't make that little cut,
the problem completely disappears like it was never there in the first place.
So they take the existing rifles and they weld up that little bit of guide rail,
mill it down to be properly shaped and, presto, those work fine.
And then they adjust the tooling in the production line at Springfield
so that it doesn't nip off that little bit of that rail.
And boom! The problem's gone. It's like it never existed in the first place.
And it all comes down to little tiny changes that are made by the staff on the machine ... shop floor,
... they are of course under pressure to manufacture things as quickly, and efficiently,
and within the current capacity of all the machine tools, as well as possible.
So they're looking at this, and going, "Ah, we can just take the top of that off,
no big deal, it doesn't matter. Like ... there's this whole guide rib there, ... the top doesn't matter."
And these little tiny changes happen without being documented.
Which is why this ... was so difficult for Springfield to figure out,
is no one ever documented it, they didn't change the blueprint.
They just cut it minusculely different than what the blueprint showed.
As an interesting side note, this is an area of specialty
where it's important to have people on a machine shop floor
who are, shall we say, fluent in engineer as well as fluent in machinist.
And can interpret and say ... to the engineers,
"If you're drawing it this way, we can't effectively cut this thing this way."
And if they're on the shop floor saying, "But you can't use that tool on this part,
because it's not going to quite work. ... You have to go do this other operation to make that cut,
even though it's twice as long, because otherwise you get issues like this."
And inevitably this happens somewhere.
There were a number of other less substantial occurrences
like this during the development of the M1.
But that 7th round stoppage is just the perfect example of it,
because it was a tiny undocumented change to the fabrication of the receiver
that led to this immediately obvious and easily documented problem.
And then one little change, and away it goes.
So that is the story of the 7th round stoppage, as documented by Julian Hatcher,
who was there at the time, and whose brother was the one who had to
deal with preventing the press from finding out about it.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the story.
Thanks for watching.