Ross vs. Mauser???

xenasdad said:
Mauser all the way. The ross was an embarassment as a battle rifle. And yes i know bad ammo not the rosses fault blah blah blah. POS then POS now.
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Read the military inquiry and investigation, available from service publications as "a question of confidence".

A lot of the problem with the Ross 1910 was that they deliberately undersized the chamber so that they could squeeze an additional 150 fps out of it.

Not commonly known is that the smle also had problems with sand in Palestine. The solution was to use the max bolt raceway and the minimum bolt dimension as the new standard.

That is the reason that the Australians sought out pre 1916 smle actions for their WWII sniper program. Not the commonly stated "better" flex characteristics.
 
The .280 Ross cartridge was adopted officially for target and other uses by Canada. That's who adopted it.

There is much MORE to the story than many wish to admit. As one tiny example, the Dominion of Newfoundland troops never received the Mark III Ross Rifles for which the Patriotic Committee had PAID. The rifles were sent to England by fast ship, trying to catch up with the troops on the SS Florizel, who had sailed unarmed. The rifles were intercepted by the British and disappeared into storage, never to be seen again, and the Newfoundland Regiment was issued the SMLE. Today there is not a single Newfoundland Ross Rifle which can be authenticated, yet the Ross was adopted as the OFFICIAL RIFLE of the Dominion.

BTW, my "as-issued" Mark III Ross Rifle will make a 1/2-inch group at 100 yards any time you care to shoot it. It is 100 years old this year, being number 1625 of the first production lot. It has served in Canada, Bermuda, England, France, at sea and in Chile for over 40 years, being surplussed after 60 years of continuous Service.

Not bad for an inferior piece of junk.
 
CanadianAR said:
Thats a bold statement.

If they are/were so great why arent they manufactured anymore? With the patent long expired, any company could be building them. But they dont. lol.
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That's my opinion! In terms of as issued milsurp accuracy you really can't beat a Ross! I shoot hundreds and hundreds of rounds through most of my guns every month. In -40 to +40, rain shine and snow. The Ross has performed the best in all conditions. Now I'm sure there's new plastic guns that are better, lighter, more accurate (if that's possible) but if were talking bolt action milsurps then I stand by my opinion that the Ross is the finest bolt action MILSURP rifle built ever.

I just find that most people I let shoot my Ross shoot well with it right away.

Now the whole "the Ross is only good if you're a bench rest shooter" argument makes me laugh. Last time I checked not a single one of us is going to war so what the hell else are we doing with milsurp guns? We're taking them to the range and throwing some lead at targets. Or am I the only target shooter here? If a gun doesn't shoot well from a rest then in my oppinion it's no good. As for the Ross' weight, yeah it's heavy but not any heavier then a proper full length Mauser, maybe my Mauser is slightly obese but it feels every bit as porky as the Ross does.

And once again I'll add that I absolutely love my Mauser, Enfields, carcano etc., but my Ross out shoots them all!

Maybe CGN should hold a Ross rifles against the rest target shoot. My Ross only manages 3/4-1" at 100 yards on most days so maybe Smellie has the only good one.
 
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If you care to put a fresh battery into your Chrony and actually USE the thing, you will find that the Ross did not need an undersized chamber to get the extra 150 ft/sec from the Mark VII round. The cartridge actually shoots just about that much faster in a Ross, due to the extra 5 inches of barrel.
 
smellie said:
HOWEVER......

In the gas attack in the St.-Julien sector, two men from A Company, 8th Battalion, told me that they both fired their Rosses until they were too hot to touch to reload.

They then acquired Rosses from casualties and continued the fight until THOSE rifles were too hot to touch, then went back to their own now-cooled rifles.

The men were Private Alex McBain and Lance-Corporal Robert Courtice.

Lance-Corporal Courtice denied that they had ANY problems with their rifles.

Private McBain was most vehement in his denial of problems with the Ross, very nearly becoming violent when I suggested that there might have been a problem. "We had NO problems with the Ross Rifle! It's all lies!"

These men could not have confused that battle with any other because, for each man, Second Ypres was their ONLY big fight. Private McBain was shot during the battle and invalided out when it was over, then sent home. Lance-Corporal Courtice was blown up by a 90-pounder (15cm) at Givenchy, a day before the attack.

It should be noted that A Company, 8th Battalion was the Reserve Company; they were the ones who went up through the gas and plugged the Line when the French Colonial troops (who had no protection against Gas) broke and ran. This was the "schwerpunkt" of the German attack, with several German DIVISIONS scheduled to pour through the gap. German troops were carrying the Gew 98 (Mauser) rifle.

The 120 men of A Company, 8th Battalion (the Little Black Devils) were in a position to LOSE THE WAR that day, but they did not.

The ensuing battle was a pure rifle engagement at very close ranges ("Too close to miss," said L/Cpl Courtice).

The Ross won.

Further deponent sayeth not.
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That's the same thing that McBride says in "a rifleman went to war", however, McBride was a prewar target shooter and personal friend of Sam Hugh's son.

There might have been some political value to his observations.

The army voted with their feet, to such an extent that there were court martials threatened for using Lee Enfield rifles.

My belief is that the Ross factory was unable to keep QC
up with war production, not that they had great success with the prewar pre 1910 models either. There was a major program to replace ALL of the 1910 bolt heads with properly heat treated bolts in England early in the war.
 
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CanadianAR said:
If they are/were so great why arent they manufactured anymore? With the patent long expired, any company could be building them. But they dont. lol.
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Just was thinking!

Because everything manufactured today is CLEARLY high quality and better right?? Do you think one of your new plastic guns will be around in a 100 years like my Ross is?



I rest my case!!!
 
Tinman204 said:
Just was thinking!

Because everything manufactured today is CLEARLY high quality and better right?? Do you think one of your new plastic guns will be around in a 100 years like my Ross is?
I rest my case!!!
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A) the plastic ones may not but the mausers will be!
B) not trying to say all new stuff is great, alot is trash, but for such a phenominal rifle no one has reproduced the Ross action for any reason, where as the mauser has been duplicated 100s of times.
C) Straight pull isnt even a highly duplicated system. The swiss yes, but they dont fight. LOL
 
Tinman204 said:
Just was thinking!

Because everything manufactured today is CLEARLY high quality and better right?? Do you think one of your new plastic guns will be around in a 100 years like my Ross is?



I rest my case!!!
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Maybe not some of the plastic junk being made today but I bet the M98 will still be in production and a good many of them made a hundred years ago will still be in use another 100 years from now.
 
Imported from another thread.

I hereby quote the nicest guy I know (myself, of course!):

I would like you to consider the case of Captain Dibblee for a minute. Captain George Dibblee was a schoolteacher at Miniota, Manitoba for many years, but he was a bit more than that.

He had been a cowboy just after the turn of the LAST century, ran 700 cattle into the middle of what is now downtown Calgary, right about where the Husky Tower stands. He decided that cowboying did not have much of a future if you didn't own the critters, quit and took a job he was offered: he became a GUIDE for the NWMP. From his first pay bag, he bought a new rifle, an 1886 Winchester in .45-70 which still looked like a brand-new rifle when I held it, 65 years later.

The point is, George Dibblee was very much a professional and had a thorough knowledge of firearms at the time the Great War broke out in 1914. He joined the 5th Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles as a Private soldier in 1914. His first job, still in training, was mucking out the horse-barns. They were trained with Ross Rifles, using the Mark II model in training and then switching to the brand-new Mark III with which they were equipped when they embarked for overseas. They used the Mark III (1910) rifle in combat until the Regiment was re-equipped with the SMLE.

Overseas, the Regiment fought dismounted, as infantry, and George Dibblee was promoted....... six times. He began as a Private soldier and ended up a decorated Captain with a Distinguished Conduct Medal, at that time regarded as second only to the Victoria Cross, which is the medal he likely should have had. I was told, in writing, by General George Pearkes VC, also a 5 CMR veteran, that Captain Dibblee's heroism had never been properly recognised....... but there was a reason for that.

"The Ross Rifle," Captain Dibblee said to me when I asked, "was UNPOPULAR due to its length and weight. You couldn't get into a dugout with your rifle slung."

I then asked about problems with the rifle.

"We had NO trouble with the Ross Rifle," he replied, "but we kept our equipment CLEAN, unlike SOME outfits that never cleaned their equipment."

All I will say is that this parallels my own experience with the rifles..... but here you have it, directly from a decorated War Hero who used the Ross Rifle IN COMBAT for 2 years.

************************************************** ********

One of my own observations regarding the 1910 Ross action is that, essentially, it is a self-cleaning action. Light mud in the locking-recesses will be displaced by the Lugs as they turn into position, mud in the Bolt Channel will be drawn rearwards when the Bolt is pulled back. Keeping the Ross in action should not be much more onerous than keeping any other rifle in service, and the specialised Ross Cleaning Stick (5 cents, but the Army refused to have them) would have made this task much easier.

In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes ever made by the Canadian Army was NOT adopting the Mark III SHORT RIFLE which was designed for the Artillery. With a 26-inch barrel and a Guard for the Rear Sight, this would have been the best rifle of the Great War.

Ends quote.

The Government of Canada refused to declare the Ross Rifle Company factory to be an essential war industry, despite pleas from Sir Charles Ross.

The declaration would have prevented employees from leaving their jobs during the War.

This meant that anyone could go to work at the plant, get some training, walk out the door...... and head for Ilion, New York or Eddystone, Pennsylvania or one of the other American centres of firearms production, walk in and get a job at a much higher wage than he would have earned in Canada. Ross actually spent most of the War training technicians for Winchester, Remington, Savage, Westinghouse, Colt, Marlin and other American manufacturers while his own production suffered from falling standards due to the rifles being built by largely-untrained workers.

Once again, BRILLIANT work by a Government of LAWYERS.
 
CanadianAR said:
A) the plastic ones may not but the mausers will be!
B) not trying to say all new stuff is great, alot is trash, but for such a phenominal rifle no one has reproduced the Ross action for any reason, where as the mauser has been duplicated 100s of times.
C) Straight pull isnt even a highly duplicated system. The swiss yes, but they dont fight. LOL
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We'll have to agree to disagree! Lol
Just for conversation sake which model of Ross do you own? How accurate is it??
 
what i find interesting is i don't think the ross was never adapted to be a automatic type rifle . ( or at least a autoloading rifles based on the ross ) .

it would have been alot easier to do than convert a lee enfield .


but my vote would be for a mauser ... or more specificly a swedish mauser .
i like how they feel and i like the way the steel smells .
 
Huot Light Machine Gun.

Cost 1/6 as much as a Lewis and worked better.

Again, a Canadian success story: M. Huot put his entire savings into the project, built the test guns out of his own pocket. The Government then decided that they didn't need a new machine-gun and walked away from it all, leaving Mr. Huot flat broke.
 
I don't have enough experience with either to add anything constructive, but I am really liking these "versus" threads this week. Lots of awesome info, facts and stories.

We should have one every week of comparable milsurps just for fun.
 
@ CanadianAR;

If you think that straight-pulls are some kind of weird thingie that popped up and died, I would suggest that you take a careful look at ANY modern semi-auto or selective-fire rifle.

They are ALL essentially straight-pull designs with some sort of piston or recoil system added to give the initial impetus for operation.

BTW, do you know what the Army nickname was for the AR-15/M-16 in Viet-Nam?















Jammin' Jenny...... or Mattie Mattell!

Same problem as the Ross, too: sh*tty ammo.
 
CanadianAR said:
Im fine with disagreeing. We cant agree all the time or the forum would be a boring place, haha.

I dont own a Ross.
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You don't own a Ross? How do you know if they're any good or not??

For those of you with an open mind, I'll write this:

You see I bought a Ross to see for myself wether the stories I read were BS or not! I was afraid to shoot it at first, in fact I'll admit, my first shot was with a string attached to the trigger with my gun secured to a rest! That's NO JOKE!

After that first round, I picked it up and shot the hell out of it, and have never looked back since. I've probably put 600-700 rounds through it in the last 5 months. So when I say they are good it's from my own testing, which I do every weekend, carefully writing down the results.

Might I add going by my notes the Ross is the only gun I own that I haven't had to do extensive load development or bedding to. I feed it darn near anything from FMJs, to cast .312 bullets and it shoots. I've tried 3 different powders, from starting grains right up to max charges, it shoots well with just about anything I load for it.

I'm a GUN NUT, I spend ALL of my free time restoring, testing, bedding and building ammo. My quest is to see how good I can make these old war horses shoot, without optics or any mods that will ruin there collector value.

I'm glad I went into Ross ownership with an open mind, cause honestly from my research they outshoot pretty much any other bolt action rifle, that's the truth not speculation, or anything I've read. I say that based on a lot of carful reloading, and a lot of shooting!

Now, that being said, if something else goes to the head of the pack I will state it openly on this forum.
 
You don't have to own something to know if its a good or not. History tells us what was good in battle conditions and what wasn't. If it came down to choosing a bolt action rifle to defend my life in battle, the fact that one type of rifle MAY be more accurate shooting off a bench than another would be very, very far down my list of important criteria. Reliability would factor in way higher on the list than the ability to shoot a 1" group off the bench rather than a 2" group. That kind of accuracy edge wouldn't matter one bit in battle.
 
There is an awful lot about the Ross story that has not really seen the light of day, and may never unless someone takes the time to really dig into the matter. Yes, the authors of The Ross Rifle Story did, but there is more. I've found some myself in just a few hours digging online. Of course they didn't have the benefit of the Internet when the book was written.

Sam Hughes was a very patriotic Canadian, a loyal supporter of the Empire, but also very much a Canada-firster. Being a man of bull-dog determination he also had the flaws of that personality profile: a tendency to be dogmatic and bloody-minded. It was he was refused to allow a shortened Ross MkIII, not Sir Charles Ross. It was he IIRC who insisted on the minimum chamber dimensions.

The fact is that the Ross had few friends and some of its friends, like Sir Sam Hughes and Col. Harkom, were almost as good as enemies at times.

The Imperial authorities, civil, military and in the UK arms industry especially, were against the Ross and against the idea of Canada making her own small arms. Some like the Canadian representative of BSA, made no secret of their agenda.

They got what they wanted in the end.

Unlike Avro Jetliners or Arrows we still have Rosses around to examine and test and compare all we want. The design wasn't perfect, but it was certainly impressive.

In 1940 the British specifically asked for scope-sighted Ross rifles. We had none to give them.

One has to remember that the Ross was designed to be the perfect rifle for the previous war: South Africa. The Boers were almost all marksmen - if a Boer wasn't, he wasn't considered much of a Boer - they knew their rifles like the bowmen of England and Wales once knew the long bow. The British also set about designing their "perfect rifle" for the previous war: the Pattern 14. A rifle with all the advantages of the M1895 Mausers and none of the disadvantages; except of course the five round magazine and one piece stock.

The SMLE was considered by the experts to be rather passé before WWI. Not as accurate as the Long Lee Enfields, a compromise weapon for infantry, mounted infantry, artillery and cavalry based on the South African experience again. A compromise that "would do" until something more modern was devised. By a stroke of pure luck, it turned out to be a good length for the trenches of WWI, but that was an accident such as rarely happens in weapon design!

I find the MkIII to be less handy and well-balanced than the MkII or the SMLE, but it was designed for the long .280 cartridge, just as the P14 was designed for the .276 cartridge. The MkIII would have benefited from a two piece stock and smaller wrist, but there had been problems with Enfield butts coming loose in South Africa and a one piece stock was cheaper to manufacture, and lighter.

The real problem with the straight pull is primary extraction. The only solution to that is ammunition quality and rifle maintenance. As Smellie has pointed out before, the Department of Militia & Defence refused to issue cleaning sticks and we allowed the Imperial authorities to issue sub-standard ammunition. The rest is history.

The "Long" Lee Enfield MkI is 61.45 inches with bayonet fitted
The Ross MkIII is 61.50 inches with bayonet fitted.
The SMLE is 56.7 inches with bayonet fitted.
The Gew98 is 49 inches long with a bayonet of 19.8 inches for total of 68.8 inches (late war 10" bayonet introduced)
The Steyr M95 is ??? inches long with bayonet fitted.

Without bayonet fitted the Gew98 is exactly 1.5" shorter than the Ross MkIII, with the bayonet fitted, it is 7.3 inches longer. How did the Germans ever make it into their dugouts folks?:rolleyes:

So how much difference did the approx. 5 inch difference between the overall length of the Ross MkIII and the SMLE really make? The Germans seem to have managed until late in the war, which a much longer combination of rifle and bayonet.

And Smellie I hope you have written a full account for posterity of your conversations with those three men, we owe you a debt for having the foresight to interview them, or their testimony would be lost forever.
 
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