New rifle...

I just picked up a No 4 Mk 2, it's been sporterized (poor thing), but I got it for a song so I figured it'd be a good little project.

To begin with it's marked:
No 4 Mk 2 A18197
F 57 FTR

Here's where things get interesting, the backsight is marked:
F
CR403

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this a 7.62x51mm sight with the datum line recut to read in meters?

Also, am I correct that the portion of the trigger guard that surrounds the magazine is of a different shape on 7.62mm rifles than on .303 ones? And further, that 7.62 magazines should not fit up far enough into the magazine way to allow ejection of spend rounds unless modifications were made to the underside of the receiver?

I'm very curious as I compared the above mentioned areas on this rifle to my DCRA Enfield and found them to be identical. My Enfield 7.62mm mag fits and ejects rounds.

One other oddity I came across was a marking on the inside of the channel that runs down the body of the bolt that reads "P20". Anyone have any idea what this means?

I'm really puzzled by what I've got here. Photos to follow this weekend.

Cheers!

The leaf part, marked (B1/)CR 403 is the same. It's just the slide that has been modified. I don't know about these DCRA rifles but on the UK MIlitary spec rifles, the .303" and 7.62mm rifle trigger guards are the same.

Re the fitting of the 7.62mm magazine into the .303" body, some say that they will fit without modification, others say that some might fit. So to make sure, the UK MoD said that they'll be modified so that they ALL fit. But even then, it wasn't quite that simple. So I'd suggest that you read a small article about the subject in the feature library. I'm puzzled how you can say that your 7.62mm magazine fits your new Mk2 rifle, feeds and ejects.............. Surely it can't feed as the 7.62mm rounds won't fit into a .303" chamber will they? And if it can't feed, how can it extract and eject - or am I missing something. When you fit a 7.62mm magazine to a No4 body PROPERLY, it has to touch the magazine stop face at the front of the body AND engage fully with the magazine catch at the rear with no fore and aft rock. That's the in-depth knowledge that Armourers possess

Steel batch number

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Hi Peter,

No, I manually placed an empty 7.62 case in place on the bolt, although I now realize that the ejector pawl pushes the edge of the case over far enough that it was ejecting off the old .303 ejector screw, not the plate on the magazine. Interesting, to the eye the undersides of the two receivers look identical, but in the new one the back of the mag sits too low.

Thanks for the help, I'll be posting pictures later today,

Cheers