Sand blasted at that...the one pictured has now been listed as a repro... You can see the crosspiece has ONE crosspin.
Printable View
The RFI confirms Indian manufacture at least. No clean out hole which is usual for reproductions. This isn't a very good one. One I have looks a lot better, plus I modified it.
Peter, I was wondering if you could explain the problems that you had with the Australian blade, with rounded fuller ends, in service, please? Was it specifically the style of fullers used on the Australian blade that caused issues or were there other problems with the Australian L1A2 bayonet, please?
Thanks
I have mentioned on the forum a couple of times before if anyone could resurrect the thread '.....somehow'. Beyond my compu'a literacy I'm afraid. If nobody can resurrect it in the next few days I'll write it up again but it did cause problems. The last photo (thread 13) will help explain.
Incidentally, the photo of the stripped No7 (thread 9) amply illustrates what a total sack of crap they were! The stubby blade part was only held into the grip part by two rivets close to the Xpiece.
Nobody has chipped in, so here goes. In Malaya we had pooled Ordnance stores..., pooled from NZ, Australia, Malay and UK Ordnance based at 221 BOD in Johore Bahru. The Australian made bayonets that we had issued came with the rounded fuller. And to mate up with this rounded fuller bayonets, the spring retaining clip in the scabbard had a rounded pressed out part to retain the rounded fuller of the bayonet. It is this pressed out part that gives the final 'stop' or resistance to it when it's pulled from the scabbard. So far so good. Or bad.....
As soon as you got British/Malay issued scabbards, they matched the FLAT fuller of the UK L1A- type bayonets. So mix scabbards and bayonets up - as will inevitably happen on active service with pooled stores, the bayonet will only go so far into the scabbard because the spring retaining clip thinggy of the British bayonets would not drop into the rounded fuller of the Australian/NZ issue bayonets. The retainer spring would simply jamb up the blade into the retainer which will bind hard against the walls of the scabbard. Of course, being crunchies, they just push it until it DID go fully in. And there it stayed. The only real way was to unscrew the mouthpiece screw and take the whole thing apart.
It was a bit of a problem because we had all sorts of bayonets, scabbards and crunchies from everywhere so you just did your best....... Contrary to popular opinion, not everything on the L1A1's was fully interchangeable. Lithgow/Slazenger woodwork had to be slightly hand fitted to the Enf/BSA rifles we had and the pommy laminated HG's had to be trimmed at the metal rear ends to fit our Lithgow handguard retaining rings. But generally we all seemed to get on
Thanks for the reply, Peter, and for the information.
I do have several Australian L1A2 bayonets and several UK L1A3/4 bayonets but I have never tried or thought of trying to fit the Australian bayonet into the British scabbard.