Alan

Lower on this page is some information from our leading American Ballistic testing laboratory “The H.P. White Laboratory Inc. I have never posted this information before because the term "Inherent Weakness" bothers me when talking about the Enfield Rifleicon BUT the information below applies to all firearms no matter what country they are made in.

“H.P. White Laboratory, an Intertek Company, is the leading small arms and ammunition research, development and testing laboratory and the only true independent ballistics testing laboratory in the country.” (The United Statesicon)

HP White :: Home

Alan the information coming from the U.K. that you and others have been posting about 7.62 NATO bullet weights and the No.4 Enfield, specifically the Britishicon 144 grain load puzzled me. This is because the chamber pressures for ALL bullet weights in a given caliber are set at the same approximate chamber pressure. And to be blunt I thought this bullet weight limitation was so much garbage.

The last article you posted here about water on your ammunition or in your chamber I also thought of as misinformation but I was re-reading some of the material I collected about oil or grease in your chambers and found the following information from the H.P. White Laboratory.

The key words in this information below is “cumulative effect” and “reducing the ultimate strength of the assembly”.

Excerpt below:

"1.4 Failure of a gun assembly from internal pressure may be from either
of two (2) failure mechanisms.

1.4.1 The general perception is that those failures are the result
of a single exposure to a CATASTROPHIC PRESSURE level. This
may be an over simplification in that the strength of the
assembly may have been degraded by previous repeated exposures
to excessive, but lesser, levels of pressure whose cumulative
effect is to reduce the ultimate strength of the assembly.

1.4.2 Repeated exposure to pressures which exceed the elastic limit
of a material will continually reduce the ultimate strength of
the material until the ultimate strength is exceeded by a
relatively low pressure level causing fatigue failure."

http://www.hpwhite.com/uploads/file/101-00.pdf

I have more to say but I will bring this up latter in this posting after a little feedback and discussion.
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