New Jungle Carbine Day!

[heyheyuw]

Jrhead, is there a typical location for that stamp? I'll take a look for it this evening.

Peter, the helmet is in storage but I'll make an effort to retrieve it soonish... :-)

My Grandfather was a Swede with a notorious appetite for vodka. Apparently the owner of the helmet saved my grandpa from getting his ear cut off after he drunkenly insulted the wrong man. ;-)

[Black Jack]

I was able to find a No5 last month and it had a Savage mag as well. Hmmm. . .

[heyheyuw]

Where?

[jrhead75]

Jrhead, is there a typical location for that stamp? I'll take a look for it this evening.

It's usually somewhere near the rest of the proof data. On yours, it looked to me like it might be right behind the "18.5 Tons per Square inch" stamp, but the shadow from the handguard is obscuring it.

[heyheyuw]

Cool. I'll check it out later tonight.

[RJW NZ]

Drool worthy jungle carbine, nice wood patterns and the end cap, all a combo I'd be stoked to have safe in my safe. Welcome to the forum, and btw the Knowledge Library here is one of those places a reference museum would be proud to own and a place to get lost in too.

[heyheyuw]

Yeah... I've been perusing it a bit. Great stuff. Also, I think I recognize some names from the Lee Enfield forum I used to frequent in the early aughts.

It's good to be here!

[heyheyuw]

About as clean as they come...nice find! since the commercial proving was done at the B'ham Proofhouse, you should have a date code somewhere. Look for a small stamp that looks like the pic below and see if you can read the letter in the left hand quadrant. That will be the year the proof was done.
Attachment 36724

I'd be interested to know what it is in this case...trying to see if it's possible to loosely fit dates with the "ENGLAND" import stamp.

This is about as good as I can get with the lens I have...

Cheers,
Chris

[Peter Laidler]

I wouldn't worry too much about which manufacturers magazine is on any No4 or 5 rifle. We'd check the tightness ans security of every magazine and generally, certainly with Army rifles they'd come through our big workshops numbered to the rifle. If not, and it was tight and secure, we'd just bar the old number out and re-number. We had a mandril that we'd use to stamp them over. You can always tell when a butcher has done it as the stamps would put big dents the magazine as well. Otherwise we'd engrave the numbers.

Magazines with worn back straps would be put in a box and when there were a big heap of them we'd machine off a small length of the back strap and the welders would silver solder a small section of new back strap on. They'd come back to us and we'd make good and linish out any old numbers if possible or just barr out as necessary. But we'd leave the backstrap slightly oversize. They'd all go through the phosphating plant, paint and be put back on the shelf ready to re-fit to another rifle and re-use.

I don't say that I have ever specially picked out any particular magazine for any particular rifle. In the real working world, we didn't have concourse events.......... It didn't work like that I'm afraid!

[jrhead75]

This is about as good as I can get with the lens I have...

It looks to me like it's a 'P' which would point to it being done sometime in the early/mid '60s (1963/1964-ish, going by memory). Fits nicely with the few other dates I've managed to get.