Quote Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz View Post
It is worth remembering that the Lee Enfield series is fitted with a two-piece stock.

Therefore there is no material continuity between the fore end and the butt.

Thus all the tricks used on Mausers and Remingtons etc. are generally to no avail, for the simple reason that the mechanical structure is quite different, And then there is the fact that the action is rear-locking and thus behaves quite differently under recoil. The clever chaps at Enfield who took Lee's basic rifle and turned into the Lee Enfield (via the Metford series), knew what they were on about. It wasn't just about economizing on the walnut supplies.

A further complication is that the rifles were built and tuned for the ammo of the day; in the case of the No4, Mk7 ball. The catch for "hobby' users of the breed is that Mk7 ball is all but unavailable these days. If you successfully tweak your barrel bedding for one load, make sure you lay in a serious stash of components. You can just about guarantee that the beast will shoot all over the farm with a different load. And any correlation between the trajectory and the sight calibrations will be random coincidences. Unsurprisingly, just about every other sort of rifle on the planet is also fussy about its diet.

One example is the M-14 / M-1A. If you do a clone of the AMTU set-up and bedding, and shoot the requisite match ammo, you will probably get quite a thrill. Fiddle with the recipe and all bets are off. One individual of my acquaintance "worked" his M-1A by bedding the action but decided to "free-float" it by removing the little "hook" on the lower band (the plate behind the gas cylinder that is "unitized" in the AMTU set-up). The result was that the rifle sprayed ball and "match" ammo all over the place but would do amazing things with 125gn varmint bullets; Speers as I recall.

Military rifles are built around the ammo. Just look at all the various changes that occurred with the basic SMLE in the transition from Mk6 to Mk7 ammo: sight calibration, magazine design, bedding etc. Try getting reliable ammo retention and feed in a No4 using 125gn bullets!! Then see how much fun folk have with the wildcats like .303-.25!
thanks Bruce,
finally someone with a way of thinking like me. As I tell all others who shoot service rifle and wonder why I can get good scores and them not, that these rifles where built around a standard load factory ammo, replicate as close as possible the ballistics and whacko it will shoot as it should. many do not understand this FACT.
Every breed of service rifle I have shot and there is not many that i haven't, I have loaded ammo to rerpoduce the issue ammo of the day.It simply works and takes out the one variable when trying to tune these nearly 100 yr olds!!!
Cheers
Ned