Help with m14 purchase

[AussieMike]

Hi Guys,

There is an auction here (Australia) for an m14 said to be fully automatic. I have only seen pictures because Australia is a very big place and I can't get to the auction and so will be telephone bidding. The m14 has a 20 round mag, is in 7.62 NATO and has a wooden pistol grip added to the stock. It is not exactly a seamless join. It also has a folding pistol grip(metal) on the for end.

It is stamped, on the top rear of the receiver U.S. Rifle and below that 7.62MMM14, the below that WINCHESTER in capital italics, With, in smaller print below the words TRADE MARK with what I assume to be the serial number bow that, 29477.

The selector switch which I assume to be on the right side near the rear of the receiver, below the lettering, is round rather than having an indicator point and the auction house "expert" told me that it needed a tool to turn it.

He also said that he went over the entire rifle and it has no military markings whatsoever, nor did it have proof marks.

Can any of you shed light on what exactly this is eg could it be a prototype M14 for the role of a squad automatic rifle?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Mike

Information

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[GUTS]

The round button is the lock, it is removed and the selector switch is pushed into the hole and will lock so semi and auto can be selected.

[AussieMike]

Thanks for the info - any other thoughts on this rifle? Can full auto be selected using the lock (I guess not, otherwise it would not be a lock). What about the lack of military markings. Did Winchester ever sell M14s to the public?

Mike

[GUTS]

The markings on the reciever and the serial number indicate that it is indeed a genuine Winchester M14. The thing that throws me is the lack of marked parts, they should all be marked numbers like a Garand. Did someone remove the markings or is your gun guy mistaken? The stock is called an E3 m14 stock. A while back the feds authorized a company called MKS to reweld some M14 recievers, some of which were Winchester. After a short while the feds changed their opinion and ordered all of the rewelded recievers returned and destroyed, they got most of them back but some still remain in private hands. As far as I know there is only 48 registered M14s in the USA. To the best of my knowledge no M14s were sold to the public untill after the military was done with them. Pictures would of course help.
If you watch the movie in the stickies it shows this, but some guys probably haven't seen exactly how it works so I dug mine out to show how. ALL M14s came from the factory as select fire rifles, however it was up to the unit armorer(forgive me if I used the wrong term for the wrong branch)or the individual's job description as to whether or not he got the happy switch. Some units in some branches always had one or more with rock and roll, sometimes the the guy that didn't usually get to have the switch did get it one way or another from the armorer.

Here is what it looks like with the button or lock installed:



Then you punch out the roll pin and install the selector switch:

[AussieMike]

Thanks GUTS, that helps a lot. The rifle has somehow turned up in Australia. I'll try to add pictures if and when I get my hands on it. It is registered here as full auto which, with our unusual laws, means it is worth $1,000 - 3,000 less than a semi auto only M14. It is difficult to get a licence for a machine gun here, which is probably the reason. I understand the Australian troops in Vietnam used them as what you would call a Designated Marksman rifle (the alternative being a Parker Hale 7.62 bolt action). I think some of the guys liked the ability to to throw a lot of lead in ambush situations. Why they didn't use the L2A2, a heavier barreled version of the SLR, the Australian manufactured semi auto only version of the FAL.

Can I just buy a selector switch and install it or is it some sort of controlled part?

[GUTS]

Over here it's okay to buy it as long as you aren't trying to make a machine gun. They come up on GunBroker quite often.

[Neal Myers]

My issued rifle in the US Army (in 1964-1965) was the M14. All of our rifles had the selector lock. Does anyone have a picture of the lock installation/removal tool? Better yet, is it possible to remove the lock with simple tools, like a pin punch?

[GUTS]

The pin can be removed easily with a roll pin punch but I can't say how the unit armorers did it, they may have had a special tool. I am installing this hardware on my USGI M14 stock so it looks right and fills the hole in the stock. The pieces are fastened to the stock itself so it is legal. The semi-auto M1A(as Springfield named it)doesn't have the leg coming down off the rear of the reciever that is used to mount the pieces on an M14, so it has to be fastened to the stock itself. I am hoping to be done with it sometime tomorrow, if I do I'll post some pictures. The game wardens where I live have TRW M14s as their service rifles and they all have the selector lock installed, no happy switch for them.