Guys,
All the books make a huge a fuss on the M1903 low number. But the documents paint an entirely different picture on the low numbers, than what the books state.
But what I did find, that I have never seen in any book, is there were a lot of safety issues with the M1917's. Even in WWI, Andrew from Archival Research Group found more M1917's failed than low number M1903's.
This is in a string of documents where they are inspecting M1917's to be sold to NRA members immediately after WWII. This is just the tale end of the docs where they recommend that no one fire live ammunition out of a Midvale Steel M1917 (Eddystone).
They also had substantial problems with every maker and M1917's not headspacing correctly. A lot of these rifles were sold with paperwork declaring they were not safe and they should only be used in Drill practice or in firing blank ammunition.
They did not mark these rifles in anyway as not being safe, and the paperwork on these is most likely long gone for most. These rifles are sitting in our safes as we speak...
Please check your M1917 rifle's headspace and examine it for cracks. In the docs they detail that they looked for cracks of M1's with black lights. I assume then everyone can do the same now.
Just keep a look out as everything in our books focus on only the M1903 low numbers being unsafe. Well our authors failed to warn us of problems with the M1917.
Just a heads up...
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