New Member and New owner has questions

First of a big hello to everyone on this forum from a fellow Garand owner in Canada :cool:

I just joined this forum yesterday after having just purchased my first Garand on the weekend. So of course I just went to Google and punched in searches to find out more about this rifle. It has always interested me since it was designed by a fellow Canadian so I just had to get one. I just found one and bought it. Not the best example but an M1 Garand none the less. Currently it has a black synth stock on it but I got all the furniture for it and have sent it out for restoration so that I can be returned to original look.

It is serial number 4,250x,xxx which an online age calculator tells me is 1952, yet I have a barrel stamp of 10 53. Of course I would like to find out as much as I can about the gun. I know that it is a Springfield but what is curious is the NM stamp on the top of the operating rod handle. Is it possible that it really is a 1953 national match rifle? None of the serial numbers on the parts match so it has definitely been rebuilt over time which does fit into what I read online about how NM rifles were done in '53 (and repaired/refurbished over time)

I look forward to hearing back from fellow enthusiasts here. This is my first post, and I'm still trying to figure out just how to even use this forum. No, I'm not selling it or asking for a value. To me it's worth the few hundred bucks I paid for it. It's a part of history I wanted to add to my military collection of British, Russian and now US arms. It's the Canadian link that had me interested more than anything :)

Hello porscheman, nice to see another cdn garand owner :)
Welcome, I'm new myself here. The only parts on a garand that will match are the reciever and stock, the rest of the parts have drawing and lot numbers so none of the parts will have matching #'s. There's a few online sources that will tell you the date of Manf on the parts and you can see how closely they Line up to the rifles Manf date.
Cheers

So...actually if you search here in the stickies at the beginning of the M1/M14 forum you'll find most of the information you seek. Lot numbers and how they relate to your serial number. I doubt this gun's a match gun. If it was you'd find NM stamped plainly on several parts. We'll want to see a few careful pics after re-build . Matter of fact we would have liked before and after but I guess it's too late for that. Keep us info'ed...

Well I was unaware that the host of serial numbers would not match all the parts. All the rest of my Milsurp has matching numbers everywhere so I had "assumed" that the Garand was the same. I have already learned something so thanks!

My stock has no number on it at all, and no cartouche marks either - but wear, marks, colour etc all indicate that it is old. All I have done to date is "clean" the stock with a furniture stripper to get years and years of gunk, dirt, wax and build up off of it. I was hoping that this process would reveal some hidden marks. The stock was so dark with dirt it was approaching black. Stock is walnut for sure, but no marks were found :(

I can include some pics, I photographed everything but like I said earlier, it is in a black synthetic stock right now so it's nothing special to look at. I'll work next on how to attach a photo. I don't want to get off track on this thread however.

If I re-parkerize this, can anyone tell me if it "should" be zinc or manganese based parkerizing on a '53 Springfield? Right now it has a zinc type colour and not the darker blackish colour so I will assume it should be zinc based. It's unfortunate that it was not taken better care of in the past, but at least now it has found a good home. Bore however is spectacular! :thup:

You would expect that a 425xxxx rifle would have a barrel dated between 3 53 and 6 53 but if the receiver was held up a bit during production the 10 53 barrel may be original. As far as the NM marked op rod, they were frequently used as replacements. All NM rifles will have, at a minimum, the letters NM stamped on the barrel between the rings of the gas cylinder. NM rifles made latter, between 1958 and 1963, will be marked NM on other parts, such as your op rod. Wecome to the forum.

Here's the famous Ernie Pyle article from a repair depot in Normandy that explains why M1s rarely have their original parts:

"Brave Men"
No wonder many of WWII M1’s have mismatched parts. Read the following account of a weapons cleaning session by noted war correspondent Ernie Pyle. This graphically depicts the lack of sanctity of original parts replacement on battlefield pick ups.

Ernie Pyle was THE war correspondent of World War II. He was a foxhole correspondent and told the story of the soldiers and sailors he lived with to their families back home. Pyle was killed-in-action by Japanese small arms fire in the Pacific in 1945. This article is about an Ordnance Repair Company at Normandy. Pyle's story shows us how many of our M1's earned their parts mix and their ‘character'. Division histories of D-Day Infantry Divisions - the 1st, 4th and 29th, show casualties of 205%, 252% and 204% of authorized strength during the course of the European campaigns - quite a turnover in men as well as weapons. Lest we forget!

Quote:

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"Every infantry or armored division has an ordnance company with it all the time. This company does quick repair jobs. What it hasn't time or facilities for doing, it hands back to the next echelon in the rear. Daily to the small-arms section of the company there came trucks with the picked-up, rusting rifles of men killed or wounded, and rifles broken in ordinary service. The outfit turned back around a hundred rifles a day to its division, all shiny and oiled and ready to shoot again. They operated on the simple salvage system of taking good parts off one gun and placing them on another. To do this they worked like a small assembly plant. The first few hours of the morning were devoted to taking broken rifles apart. They didn't try to keep the parts of each gun together. All parts were standard and transferable; hence they threw each type into a big steel pan full of similar parts. At the end of the job they had a dozen or so pans, each filled with the same kind of part. Then the whole gang shifted over and scrubbed the parts. They scrubbed in gasoline, using sandpaper for guns in bad condition after lying out in the rain and mud. When everything was clean, they took the good parts and started putting them together and making guns out of them again. After all the pans were empty, they had a stack of rifle - good rifles, ready to be taken to the front. Of the parts left over, some were thrown away, quite beyond repair. But others were repairable and went into the section's shop truck for working on with lathes and welding torches. Thus the division got a hundred reclaimed rifles a day, in addition to the brand- new ones issued to it.
And, believe me, during the first few days of our invasion men at the front needed those rifles desperately. Repairmen told me how our paratroopers and infantrymen would straggle back, dirty and hazy-eyed with fatigue, and plead like children for a new rifle immediately so they could get back to the front. One paratrooper brought in a German horse he had captured and offered to trade it for a new rifle, he needed it so badly. During those days the men in our little repair shop worked all hours trying to fill the need.

I sat around on the grass and chatted with the rifle repairmen most of one forenoon. They weren't working so frenziedly then, for the urgency was not so dire, but kept steadily at it as we talked. The head of the section was Sergeant Edward Welch of Watts, Oklahoma. He used to work in the oil fields. Shortly after the invasion, he had invented a gadget that cleaned rust out of a rifle barrel in a few seconds whereas it used to take a man about twenty minutes. Sergeant Welch did it merely by rigging up a swivel shaft on the end of an electric drill and attaching a cylindrical wire brush to the end. He just stuck the brush into the gun barrel and pressed the button on the drill; away she would whirl and in a few seconds all the rust was ground out. The idea was turned over to other ordnance companies.

A stack of muddy, rusted rifles is a touching sight. As gun after gun came off the stack, I looked to see what was the matter with it - rifle butt split by fragments; barrel dented by bullet; trigger knocked off; whole barrel splattered with shrapnel marks; guns gray from the slime of weeks in swamp mud; faint dark splotches of blood still showing. I wondered what had become of each owner. I pretty well knew.

Infantrymen, like soldiers everywhere, like to put names on their equipment. Just as a truck driver paints a name on his truck, so does a doughboy carve his name or initials in his rifle butt. I saw crude whittlings of initials in the hard walnut stocks and unbelievably craftsman like carvings of soldier's names, and many and many names of girls. The boys said the most heartbreaking rifle they'd found was one belonging to a soldier who had carved a hole about silver-dollar size and put his wife or girl's picture in it, and sealed it over with a crystal of Plexiglas. They didn't know who he was or what had happened to him. They only knew the rifle was repaired and somebody else was carrying it, picture and all."

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Bob

Thanks guys... the missing gaps are starting to fill in on this gun. I just found another website with Garand info (it's the one you find when you Google M1 Garand Born on Date). He has notes on there about the NM rifles and in particular the early rifles. Appears that there were only 800 of them built in 1953 and the site goes on to note, "The earliest production National Match rifle had few identifying characteristics to set it apart from the standard M1 other than its precision assembly and its shooting ability. They did not have the front or rear "NM" sights, nor did they have glass bedding. Few, if any, components bore the "NM" stamp of later models." I find that interesting and it would be in line with what I have here. A single NM marking and nothing more.
That said, I'm not getting too excited about the NM possibility. It is not the reason I bought this rifle. I got it just because it is a piece of Canadian history, and military history in general. Here are two pics that I snapped with my cell phone. This is how I received the gun. Synthetic stock installed, furniture off. All I did was 'wash down' the wood to clean it up a bit and see if there were any hidden marks.

Attachment 35590Attachment 35591

From the "Born on Date" site:

THE M1 NATIONAL MATCH RIFLE

The Ordnance Dept. began studies by the Spring of 1948 to improve accuracy in the M1 rifle as an eventual replacement for the '03 Spring*field in the National Matches. In March, 1953, the Ordnance Dept. was directed by the Chief of Ordnance to furnish 800 U.S. cal. .30” M1 rifles for use in the National Matches. The rifles selected were hand-picked from newly manufactured weapons that had workmanship and accuracy superior to the average service weapon. Since Springfield Armory was still making Ml's, only hand-picking of superior quality weapons and some minor gunsmithing were needed to bring the weapons to required standards.

A meeting at Springfield Armory in September 1956 resulted in the funding of an engineering program to improve the M1 National Match rifle. Improvements and changes were implemented by an evolutionary process from 1954 thru 1963, until the M1 was replaced by the M14. Weapons were built from newly made rifles, or rebuilt from previously made NM rifles. By 1959 production of new M1 rifles was phased out and all subsequent M1NM's were made by rebuilding existing rifles or from parts stock on hand. This explains some of the very low and very high serial numbers that are found. The rebuilding operation required considerable inspection, refinishing and refitting to eliminate parts which were excessively worn, or which had been altered in the field for some reason. Every rebuilt piece, however, was re-barreled and restocked.

In early 1959 the application of glass bedding to improve stock fit and accuracy came under study. Prior to this, the fitting of wood components essentially followed procedures developed by Marine armorers thru experience. Glass bedding was first used on M1 rifles made during 1959 for the 1960 National Matches, and was continued on the M14NM.The bedding compound was applied to routed-out areas at critical receiver contact points, assembled to the receiver and cured. After excess compound was removed, the stock was stamped with the last four digits of the receiver serial number to prevent accidental interchange.

IDENTIFICATION OF SPECIMENS

Because of the evolutionary nature of the NM program, identification and verification of specimens is extremely difficult. The abundance of National Match parts, and the
premium placed on the rifles have made "parts guns" and forgeries commonplace. The only positive way to verify a specimen is to have the original documentation for the rifle. (Of course, another clue would be to check the fits and accuracy of the piece. Few forgeries would have the accuracy of an NM rifle.) To the best of our knowledge, serial numbers of the weapons were never recorded until the actual assignment or sale of a rifle, and then apparently not retained for permanent records.

The earliest production National Match rifle had few identifying characteristics to set it apart from the standard M1 other than its precision assembly and its shooting ability. They did not have the front or rear "NM" sights, nor did they have glass bedding. Few, if any, components bore the "NM" stamp of later models. They would, however, have high serial numbers and barrels dated no earlier than about 1952, since they were selected from current production.

SERIAL NUMBER RANGE

The majority of the rifles were selected from new production lots in the 1950s and serial numbers of earlier specimens should reflect that. After 1959, many of the earlier weapons were rebuilt, always with a new barrel, and some used receivers were selected. (This accounts for low number NM rifles, but with barrels dated later than about 1959 and marked "NM".) Some new receivers were also selected from spares stock, thus accounting for serial numbers higher than 6084145, the last production M1 made at Springfield Armory.

QUANTITY PRODUCED

1953 800 1954 4683

I can practicly guarantee your rifle isn't one of , what...800? It's a parts gun. Why? Because it's here in Canada. The really odd ones are in the US. Most of the ones we have here have come back most recently from Danish returns. The NM part will have been installed by someone trying to do something they knew little about or because that's the only part that came to hand. If you think I'm being harsh, I'm just being realistic. There's men that will eventually find this thread that will explain exactly what's going on and how to identify an early NM rifle.

U.S. Military Dates of Manufacture (OldGuns.Net) Try this one for info on military born on dates. Not just M1s either.

The article you quoted failed to mention that ALL National Match rifles will have the barrel marked NM between the rings of the gas cylinder. If the barrel is not marked in that manner it is, without a doubt, NOT a NM rifle.
Here is another article for you to read. If you rtead it closely you will see it mentions the NM marking on the barrel. The National Match M1


This is the NM marking on the barrel:

https://www.milsurps.com/images/impo...l3166857-1.jpg