Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're taking a look
at the Mark I*** version of the SMLE.
The British Short Magazine Lee-Enfield.
This is a World War One era update of ... existing Mark I* SMLEs.
So really this whole conversion centres around the ammunition that was being used.
So ... when the Mark I* was adopted, it was adopted for the Mark VI ammunition.
This was a 215 grain round-nose bullet travelling at just over 2,000 feet per second.
Now in 1910 the next mark of ammunition, Mark VII, was adopted,
and that was a pretty fundamental change.
Because the Mark VII was the first .303 British spitzer cartridge,
which is to say a pointed bullet.
They reduced the bullet weight to 174 grains,
and they bumped the velocity up quite a lot to 2,440 feet per second.
So more than a 20% increase in velocity.
This necessitated a change in the sights
so that they would be properly calibrated for this new high-velocity ammunition.
And that is what the 3 star is, the 3 star is taking the original ... Mark I* guns,
and updating them to use current ammunition.
So the British nomenclature system can seem pretty complicated,
but in reality this one is a pretty basic, simple update.
Let me show you up close, and then I want to talk about some Irish rifles.
Basically the conversion to Mark VII high-velocity ammunition
involved grinding down the sight base here so that it had a flatter curve
which matched the flatter trajectory of the new projectile.
You can identify that by eye if you really know exactly what you're looking for,
but to make it simpler they went ahead and stamped an "HV", for high velocity,
here on the barrel, just behind the rear sight.
So you can lift up the rear sight and check that on any rifle.
For what it's worth, here's a comparison of a Mark VI rear sight and a Mark VII rear sight.
So note that on the Mark VI the sight base comes all the way up to this top horizontal groove.
On the Mark VII it does not.
At the same time, when they did these conversions,
they also wanted to improve the sight picture.
And so the 3 star has a U notch in the rear,
instead of the V notch of the earlier pattern Mark I*.
And you can see that on the front sights as well.
So our 3 star has a nice square front post.
That square post and U notch give a nice precise sight picture,
more so than the barleycorn pointed front sight and V notch of the earlier pattern.
And the one last element of this change was to ... remark the dial sight on the front of the stock.
So this still goes out to a maximum of 2,800 yards,
but with the high-velocity ammunition 28 is marked back here.
Where on the Mark VI lower-velocity ammunition 2,800 is out here.
There are the two side by side for comparison.
Now you know what the Mark I*** rifle is.
Now should you decide that you would like to go out and find one
and add it to your own collection, and you're here in the US,
the rifle that you're most likely to come across is going to be an Irish Mark I***.
And the reason is that's what came into the US.
So, in 1922 the British government started supplying the Irish Free State with arms,
military assistance basically.
They sent them revolvers, they sent them Lewis guns,
and they sent them a bunch of Lee-Enfield rifles.
A lot of those were Mark III SMLEs,
but in 1923 a shipment of about 10,000 Mark I*** rifles went over.
Now some of these were in standard Mark I*** configuration,
and some of them had been modified to add some Mark III elements to them.
All of the guns had their original serial numbers lined out,
and they were renumbered with serial numbers that had either an "ER" or "CR" prefix.
And this, presumably, was done to make them identifiable.
So if any of them ended up in the hands of, say, the IRA separatists,
they could be easily identified and traced.
I should say, there were also some with "G" prefix serial numbers,
those were wire-wrapped grenade launching rifles and we're not going to get into those today.
... Well those rifles, the ERs and the CRs, stayed in Irish military use through the 1950s.
They were ultimately surplused in the late '50s, and in the early 1960s
they were bought up and brought here to the US by one of the arms importers.
I think it was Interarms, but I'm not sure about that.
Anyway, 4,105 of these Irish Mark I*** rifles came into the US,
and so that's far and away the predominant type of Mark I*** that we have today.
So I've got examples of both, and I want to show you the details on those,
so that you know what you are getting into with them.
So here's what the new serial number looks like.
This is an ER pattern, and the ER ones
are the ones that are in standard Mark I*** configuration.
So they have exactly the same sort of rear sight that you saw on the British rifle.
Note that this is of course lowered, this is cut for Mark VII ammunition,
that was the whole point of the 3 star.
Where we get into something a little bit different are the CR marked guns.
And on these the rear sight was updated to the Mark III configuration,
they basically call it the World War One configuration, what people would expect.
So, they have the rear sight protector wings that are all metal,
and now screwed in and connected down there.
The rear sight is not windage adjustable, it's got a fixed plate screwed in place.
And the rear sight adjustment is of the Mark III type.
Nobody seems to really know exactly why these guns were ... updated in this way.
They didn't do the front sights,
this is still a ... Mark 1*** style with a square front post.
But for whatever reason, ... some of the rifles that eventually went to Ireland
had been updated with Mark III sights.
Probably done in England as best we can tell.
They were in this configuration when they were sent over.
But you never know 100%.
The receiver socket markings here are going to reflect the original production model of the gun.
So this is a London Small Arms, LSA Company, 1905 production, Short Lee, Mark I*.
And when it was converted to 3 star, they just added 2 more stars to the designation there.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, I think the Mark I Enfield is a pretty cool rifle.
... We mostly know the SMLE from its World War One incarnation, the Mark III and the Mark III*.
And this in the early Mark I configuration is pretty cool.
This is ... the SMLE as configured the way the British thought
they needed it if they were going to fight another Boer War.
So you got nice precision windage adjustable sights, and all that cool stuff.
So now hopefully you know what you're getting into if you get interested in these,
the difference between the Irish ones and the standard British ones.
Thanks for watching.