Need help figuring out year of manufacture

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on these forums. I purchased my first Enfield the other day. It is a British No.4 Mk 1/2. The year it was made was apparently ground off along with most of the "No.4 Mk1" mark. Is there anyway to tell when the rifle was made just by the serial number? The serial is S23227A.

Any ideas?

Thanks

The 20,000 number range with an S prefix would fall in the ROF Fazakerley serial number block. The A suffix is used to indicate the rifle had some non interchangeable parts.

They started the block at 20000 and went to 29999, and began with the single letter A through Z and then started again with double letters AA etc.

So if each letter group represented 10,000 rifles and the letter S is the 19th letter, this rifle was around the 193,000th rifle produced in this serial block. Unless my mathematics is wrong :)

Production started in 1941 at Fazakerley but I have ben unable to find annual production numbers. My best estimate would be 1943.