Smith Corona & LC68

Six or seven years ago, a friend got interested in M1 Garands and bought one from CMP. He then found a deal on 800 rounds of LC68 M2 ball and wanted that stuff bad. The catch was, the seller wanted to sell his 03-A3 and the ammunition together. The price was somewhere between $800 and $1,000 so I told him to go for it. He pretty much got the rifle for free! We took that rifle, a couple of Garands, and that ammo to my range and fired over my Oehler 35P screens. We fired all three rifles with the LC68 and the average for 35 shots was 2560 fps with 111 extreme spread. One of the Garands would not reliably cycle. Average 5-shot group size was 4.13". We had a few rounds of LC53 and fired that in a Garand with 2784 fps, 57 extreme spread, and 2.46" average group. I'm wondering why that stuff was so slow. In '68, I would think the ammo would have been for older machine guns in SE Asia.

Mike Venturino of Rifle Magazine fired some of the LC68 stuff in some of the military rifles he was playing with and got velocities similar to my readings.

We tried that Smith Corona with some Greek CMP ammo and it was a great shooter. I now wish I had tried to trade my friend out of it. My friend died 4 years ago and his sons sold most of his stuff, including the A3 and the LC68 ammo.