Wrong stagger in charger ....

[smellie]

Fellows, sorry for popping in here so late. This isn't 'thread necrophilia' or anything, believe me; I was looking for something and the Search function suggested coming here.

Several years ago, a friend took a 1910 Ross to the 'Battle of the Bulge' winter shoot at CFB Shilo. After the first relay, he was ready to throw the Ross away, but the rules are that if you took it to the firing line once and it still was firing, you couldn't discard it. So, between relays, he asked me to look at his rifle being that I had been elected the local Ross Guru or something, so I did.

I noticed immediately that his chargers are were loaded rim-over-rim.... and his complaint was that "that $#&&%* POS (**&^$ ROSS just WOULD NOT FEED!". I loaded a charger DUDUD and handed it to him and asked him to show me just HOW it wasn't feeding, so he stripped them in and shucked them through the action perfectly. So I did it again and, again, it worked perfectly. His comment was, "This thing feeds slicker'n greased monkey-s**t! What did you do?"

We reloaded all his chargers and no more problems: his team came in First on the B side for an overall Second in the match. But that was in a match. In a war there ARE no second-place prizes.

But the point is simple: the Lee-Enfield rifle vastly prefers its chargers loaded DUDUD, but the Ross DEMANDS it. The single-column Ross magazine holds the rounds very securely and tightly; there is no 'wiggle room'. I think this could have been the source of some of the WWI jamming with the Ross.