Interesting 1941 Winchester

[latigo 1]

I think it does not seriously affect the strength of the receiver. I bet if you could measure the thickness of the ones without the hole you would find that area is so thin on all of them that it would not really add any strength to the receiver. As far as Winchester's rough machining goes, it also does not affect the operation of the rifle. If you check out the early SA parts you will find that many are as rough, or even rougher than the WRA parts. It is just a matter of producing a functional part with the least number of operations and not doing an extra finish cut to make the part smooth. It was not, as some people have suggested, that Winchester kept using thier tools even after they became dull. Winchester was given some sample SA rifles to use to figure out a bid to produce the Grarand Rifle. I expect the sample rifles were the early SA's that had the rough machining and since that is what was expected of them, that is what Winchester used to figure thier bid. Later as SA started producing more and more rifles, they added the finish cut which did not really improve the part but just made it look better. Winchester could not be expected to add an extra operation to each part without modifying thier bid to compensate them for the extra work, whereas SA being a government operation could do anything they wanted since they had no stockholders to satisfy. That is also the reason that SA made many changes to thier parts during the war, but Winchester continued using the early parts throught most of production. Every time Winchester changed to an updated part (for instance going to the trap door butt plate and the wide base gas cylinder) thier contract had to be renogiated. Most of the changes were not important enough that the government wanted to go to the trouble to do that.