A question about milsurp ethics

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stickhunter

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I'd like your opinion about the following situation...

Suppose you have two Savage-made Lee-Enfield No4's, both in very good mechanical condition with excellent bores.

Rifle #1 is in full military configuration with everything matching and Savage-marked except:
- the bolt is a Long Branch
- the rear sight is a Faz-produced MkI
- there is an importer's mark electro-penciled as tastefully as possible on the receiver

Rifle #1 has Union of South Africa markings, but you don't know its provenance (e.g., whether the bolt mismatch was done by the importer or an armourer).

Rifle #2 has sporterized stocks with matching bolt and uncut barrel except:
- the front sight protector and barrel bands are missing
- the magazine is missing

As it stands, you have two rifles, neither of which are in their original as-produced condition, but with Rifle #1 perhaps having an interesting history and possibly field-replaced parts.

Question:

Do you leave these rifles as-is or do you move the wood, metal fittings, and magazine from Rifle #1 in order to desporterize Rifle #2. The end result would be Rifle #1 becoming a parts gun and Rifle #2 being returned to nearly-original Savage-produced configuration. In one hand, you've removed/destroyed the history of Rifle #1, but on the other you've righted a previous transgression done to Rifle #2.

I would have no hesitation using the parts from Rifle #1 if I knew it had been bubba'd by a civilian, but it wouldn't be so straightforward to me if the mismatching had been done while the rifle was in service.

What would you do?
 
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Hmmm, Armourers were only concerned with returning a serviceable rifle to service. So you have one serviceale rifle and one restorable rifle.
Swapping bolts brings up the ugly problem of headspace.
 
John Sukey said:
Hmmm, Armourers were only concerned with returning a serviceable rifle to service. So you have one serviceale rifle and one restorable rifle.
Swapping bolts brings up the ugly problem of headspace.
Click to expand...

Hi John,

You're right about the issue of headspace. The military No4 with the mismatched bolt has been checked and is fine. The sporterized No4 has a matching bolt. So moving the parts from Rifle #1 to Rifle #2 would not involve a bolt swap.
 
swap the wood or find a replacement set of wood and fix both rifles.

there is wood out there still, and if you can wait a while, Marstar will get its seacontainers in there will be more wood available.
 
Personally I would leave #1 alone. There's nothing saying that it isn't 100% accurate as done by the armourer. Sometimes with milsurps honest ignorance is bliss ;)

As for #2, wait out until parts come along to de-sporterize her. No matter how pure your intentions are, she will always be a de-sporterized rifle, and in my opinion, it's not worth destroying the history of #1 for that.

And besides, then you'd have 2 serviceable rifles:dancingbanana:
 
An Armourer would NEVER let a rifle off his work bench for issue unless the bolt serial number matched the rifle serial number.

The squad NCO would have a screaming fit if the bolt serial number didn't match the rifles serial number of one of his riflemen.

And last but not least the manuals state the bolt number must match the number on the receiver.

You have a rifle that the importer put a mis-matched bolt into. (a bitzer)

Look at the EuroArms website photos of the stored enfields in Italy, the bolts are kept seperate from the rifles. These Enfields are shipped to the U.S. and Canada without the bolts being fitted until they are sold.
 
bigedp51 said:
An Armourer would NEVER let a rifle off his work bench for issue unless the bolt serial number matched the rifle serial number.

You have a rifle that the importer put a mis-matched bolt into. (a bitzer)
Click to expand...

Makes sense, as I think I've seen FTR'd Enfields with mismatched bolts that were at least force matched with electropencils.

The best solution would be to find a spare set of Savage wood/bands to restore the sporter, but I don't know how easy/hard it will be to find. The mismatched Savage is readily available to me, so that's what got me starting to think about making the swap and restoring the sporter. I take the mismatched Enfield further away from original state, but the harm's already been done, and the result will be a fully-restored Savage Enfield.
 
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