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But wait, there's more!! P. O. Ackley did a bunch of tests way back when. With a SMLE action set up for .30-40 Ackley Improved, the following results were obtained:
57gn Hi-Vel#2 - 150gn ball projectile - High pressure, Primer OK
52gn 4198 - 150gn ball projectile - Leaky primer
50gn 2400 - ditto bullet - Bolt wrecked, receiver bent.
He noted:" When this action gave way, the receiver itself bent down at the rear, allowing the front end of the bolt to come up out of the receiver ring, thus allowing the bolt to be bent and to be broken. The locking lugs themselves did not give way".
I'd been looking for Ackley's tests involving the SMLE, his testing of other action types is more easily found.
Remember that the "NATO Proof Rounds" of that era generate little more pressure than the max allowable deviation of the M118 Long Range Special Ball.
Keep the pressure level of loads you chose to use within the safety margin of the action and you'd have no problems, that goes for just about any rifle and cartridge combination.
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'the bolt failures were such as would be unlikely to cause injury to a firer'.
Serious injury or death due to shattered bolt heads or blown out boltheads that I've found references to were apparently to bystanders such as an officer instructor or where a shooter tried to testfire by holding the rifle away from himself.
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It is also worth adding that if an Enfield bolt head is cracked due to failure/overstressing, which is not that uncommon, it can simply be replaced with another,
Unfortunately pieces of broken bolt heads have ended up in the internal organs or throats of those standing too close when they gave way.
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and that the main full-length locking lug on the No 4 bolt is quite massive." Not only that, but there is a hell of a lot of metal behind the locking shoulders in the receiver.
Yet those massive ribs can be assumed to have bent and/or broken along with the rest of the bolt body.
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I suspect that factors of "logistics" and professional pride also contributed to this abandonment.
The only supposedly official reason I've heard of was that the rifles would have had too short a service life to be worth the effort and expense of conversion.
If a rifle has to be babied to insure that it won't fail in combat thats not a good sign.
Battle rifles are expected to continue to operate under the worst conditions with no more maintenance than a beleagured trooper can give it when he himself is short of the basic necessities of life.
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I still don't think you're going to convince the doomsayers on this board
Chevalier attitudes towards gun safety don't help the sport.
I expect that the gentleman who required reconstructive surgery to repair his crushed and torn genitals after the magazine of his 2A rifle blew out would have done better to have limited his shooting to ammunition that generated pressures no higher than the rifle was designed to handle.