Faux Enfield wierdness

Tell Ed Hello

Not mine!!!
No offense intended if this is against the rules.
I don't think there is any danger of bidding with only 25 minutes left.
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/Vie...=175685488#PIC

After seeing some of the stuff Bannermans was producing to fool and confuse I just think this look like one of those. Maybe not but it's strange it hasn't been heard of before?

be mildly interested to see a pic of the bolt removed from the rifle - looks like a mauser/springfield pattern.

Regards,

Jim

Didn't savage make 303 ammo back in the day for their own rifles? if so then the lineage of this is reasonable and well worth the left testicle asked for in the price, $9,500. Interesting item for sure, I've love to see the experts comments on this one ...

I would have to send this to Ian Skennerton and get his comment about this? Why is the wood around the bolt undercut??

Savage made a cartridge called the .303 Savage, most definitely, but it actually was a .30, rimmed and looked VERY much like a .30-30WCF. Main difference was that the base diameter at the rim was .020" larger. It was a fairly decent seller in the Model 1899 lever-action and was used in some of their early bolts. The British always referred to it as the ".301 Savage", which likely was closer to the truth.

Britain got very good service from Winchester and Remington both during the Great War, but what happened in 1940? Sure, Winchester was building Garands but, when you compare time to output, you see that they built the P.-'14 and then the M-1917 a lot faster. Oh yes, they also had the carbine to build, but so did half the telephone directory... and it was a Winchester design, so they must have got a rake-off on every one built: close to 6 million.

And Remington was working hard at redesigning and manufacturing the Springfield, obsolete as it was and, in better than 3 years, managed to turn out just over a million of them. In the Great War, they had made Moisin-Nagants, Berthiers, P.-'14s and even some Colt M1911s.

And those were the two BIG makers. So along comes War Number Two and Britain pops up once again and hands SAVAGE, who had made LEWIS guns previously, a whacking great contract for about a million Number 4 Rifles. Does that decision have anything to do with this rifle?

There are so many questions about this rifle. Why the 9000-odd serial number? WHERE are all the rest, if that is indeed the number?

Whatever, the thing was certainly designed for Production-with-a-capital-P. It's about halfway between an SMLE and a Mauser and looks to combine most of the better feaures of both types.

Do any MORE of these critters exist? Enfield? Pattern Room? Savage? Has anyone at Savage done a proper sweep on the records? Has anyone miked the bore on this one? IS IT actually a proper .303... or is the bore actually .30? And here's a nasty one: which parts, if any, interchange with Savage parts from rifles they are known to have produced?

LOTSA questions. It would be really nice if we had some answers.

These have shown up before and were a legit project that Savage proposed to the UK during WWI, if I remember correctly. Someone has stuck a No4 magazine in it and it looks like Savage made some changes to their magazine cutoff design considering the let-in piece of wood in that area of the stock.

Presumably it is front-locking simplified Mauser type action. Were it cock-on-closing it would be quite a practical rifle combining some of the best features of the SMLE and P14, which was no doubt the intention of the designers.

These have been discussed in detail on some other forums. They were found a couple of years ago and purchased for about 1/10 the current asking price. Consensus from that other discussion was that they were what they are advertised as. Skennerton is aware of them as are most of the other very serious collectors.

First time I heard of these was one "found in a stack of junk in a gunshop", six or seven or eight or nine years ago----it might even have been on the old Gun&Knife Forum.......that would be the Pleistocene Era, in Internet Years.
They all seem to be incomplete and are not improved by the forced addition of a No4 magazine.
-----krinko

I recall that - i think it was on the old British guns.net forum.