New-ish SMLE Project

[Surpmil]

Good catch by MJ1: the "E.Y." marking deserves a bit of looking into if you plan to shoot it much. LSA had a pretty good reputation for quality I believe, though 1915 would have been a time of vast expansion in production and things can slip or be "let by" in such circumstances that wouldn't be otherwise.

So was it stamped "E.Y." because the body/receiver was out of spec from new, or due to wear, or was it the condition of the barrel that was on it then that caused the stamping? I can see how in the urgency of wartime, with tens of thousands of new rifles coming off the production lines, it might not have been worth rebarreling a worn out rifle that would have been overhauled in peacetime.

Or was this a rifle that served three years in France and then came home to be inspected and downgraded to "E.Y."? But with the enormous glut of rifles after WWI one would expect that any rifle that was less than serviceable, particularly in the body, would be stripped for spares and scrapped?

Thousands of brand new Eddystone P14s were stamped "E.Y." due to being out of spec.