Lee Enfield Aluminum stock

[smellie]

Not one of which I am aware, but there certainly was a wood shortage in England about 65 years ago.

Their huge stands of Ash all went for wagon wheels, artillery wheels, truck wheels during the two Wars. They actually imported Walnut from North America to build rifles at one point.

OTOH, the Aluminum in these likely came from Canada via one route or another. The refinery at Kitimat was the world's largest.

[Peter Laidler]

Don't mean to be disrespectful to anyone, BUT (you know what's coming now.......) anyone who REALLY thinks that there's something of an official nature about this sheer childlike exercise in either wood or metalwork is living up there with the fairies. My son could do better than this with an axe and hacksaw.

Look at it this way.......... If there was some sort of official sanction of this, er....... - and I'm thinking of my most diplomatic language now........ er....., sheer mechanical and childlike stupidity, it would be in the public domain by now. Or maybe, the sheer naive amateurishness of it meant that they sealed the files for 100 years!

I could be wrong of course...........

Remember the 'lost' 70 Spitfires in Burma and my bet of £20 to any Forces charity if they found them in a year........ Can you see what I'm thinking? Pure twaddle!

[Thunderbox]

Not one of which I am aware, but there certainly was a wood shortage in England about 65 years ago.

Their huge stands of Ash all went for wagon wheels, artillery wheels, truck wheels during the two Wars. They actually imported Walnut from North America to build rifles at one point.

OTOH, the Aluminum in these likely came from Canada via one route or another. The refinery at Kitimat was the world's largest.

UK managed to build another 400,000 or so wooden stocked No4s after WW2, and then refurbished and restocked about another million or so. There was no shortage of suitable beech.

There was also no need to look at aluminium for stocking up. No1s were obsolete, vast numbers of No4s existed, and the new FAL was developed into the L1A1 with wood as the primary choice for stocking up.


The No1 aluminium forends do not look military in any way. Probably someone had a few cast as private project.

Are the forends machined inside, where the receiver beds - or are they simply cast from a wood pattern?

[jmoore]

Link to an older thread with photos of...?:

Sht.LE Mk.III with metal fore end.

ETA: What appears to be the very same rifle!

[Peter Laidler]

Not so much a shortage of wood in the UK Smellie as we were getting tjpousands and thousands of tons of it from the colonies - such as Canada and the USA (sorry about that you wild old colonial types!). However, we were certainly frugal with our use of it. Truck and gun wheels made from wood during WW2......... surely not!

T/box has numerically hit the nail on the head. But look what we produced in a paxolin type compound for the Bren Gun the later 30's (albeit more expensive to produce than the wooden butt and grips) and you'll realise the sheer childish amateurism of the crude, naff exhibit displayed here. T/Box, Tankie, BP and Skippy will understand the well used Army phrase or saying of '.....what a load of boxxxxxs'

[Bindi2]

(sorry about that you wild old colonial types!). '

Some of us wear that badge with pride. We were a little short staffed about then as well. And i dont think our Coachwood was to your taste either we had enough issues with it.

[Brit plumber]

Rather than these ally bits being a cast copy of the wood forearm, could the ally forearm actually be the pattern to make the wood? I've seen ally patterns where the machine follows the line of it and cuts the wood copy exactly. I wonder if some ones got a hold of some and fitted them to rifles? Just a thought.

[Thunderbox]

Rather than these ally bits being a cast copy of the wood forearm, could the ally forearm actually be the pattern to make the wood? I've seen ally patterns where the machine follows the line of it and cuts the wood copy exactly. I wonder if some ones got a hold of some and fitted them to rifles? Just a thought.

The pattern for No4 butts (in a photo of Long Branch factory) and L1A1 butts (photo from Enfield) show that those patterns were about 200% size scaled.

I assume that forends were probably cut from at least two patterns - an inside and an outside? Given the type of machinery at the time, i imagine the forends were shaped in multiple operations.

[Bruce_in_Oz]

Today's related trivia:

SMLE fore ends started out as a long sort-of rectangular block called a "flitch". These were seasoned for years (with any luck) before machining.

As near as I can understand from the document fragments I have seen, the flitch was trued and then several holes were drilled for clamping and indexing.

The interior was cut first. This is exactly the same as commercial timber stockmaking; it is a lot easier to hold a square-ish chunk of wood on a router table than it is a fancy shaped one. Commercial fibreglass stocks are built from the outside in; an afternoon at the McMillan factory was most educational.

The barrel channel, with its taper and all its clearances for sight beds, barrel bands, etc. was rough cut and then a long, specially set up mandrel fitted with all of the odd-shaped cutters was used to form the final channel profile. The excess wood at either end of the flitch was used to hold the fore end when it went into the copy lathe. These could transfer the external profile from a metal "master" to several stocks at a time. If anyone has a copy of the complete process it would make interesting reading. A picture of the actual machine would be nice, too

Butts were produced similarly. The stepped through-hole for the butt screw and oil bottle were drilled first. This then provided a handy location for the spindle /mandrel that held the butt whilst it was in the copy lathe. I am guessing, but there had to be additional setups for profiling the seat for the buttplate and drilling the hole for the pullthrough weight.

The handguards were made in a single long piece, then separated using a fine saw. Note that, at least in Australian manufacture, there was an allowance for the front handguard to be made with a parallel barrel channel instead of the specified barrel-matching taper. This meant that the front handguard channel could be made by using a router and table instead of a fancy and expensive, long tapered cutter and specialized table. The only downside was that this method resulted in even less timber supporting the front cap than on the standard model. Bonus trivia: the front caps seem to have retained the tiny thread in the mounting holes even when riveting became the normal method of fixing them to the handguard.

Slazenger (Aust) used the same timber and techniques on the L1A1 furniture; the laminated handguards required a bit of new technology.

[smellie]

After reading some of the comments, I took mine apart, just to see what I could see. I really do think that folks are jumping to conclusions too quickly.

For one thing, the aluminum fore-end root is a very nicely-done casting. It was cast vertically, with the long, thin section DOWN and with a Sprue of decent length, sufficient to give a solid casting at the vital REAR part of the fore-end where it fits the rifle so closely. Whoever did it had a GOOD casting-shop and they really knew what they were doing. There had to have been a wood pattern for this casting: aluminum has close to 2% shrinkage in castings and this thing bolts up almost solid..... and it shows NO evidence of hand-fitting. As well, the Reinforce for the Middle Band is in its correct place and this stock has THREE additional Reinforces in it. This thing was not just jumped together; it was designed. The Triggerguard fits rather loosely; this is proof that an oversize wooden pattern was made before the casting was done. Once in place and bolted-up, though, it fits tight.

I think this is a subject which deserves serious investigation. In my opinion, too many people are jumping to conclusions too quickly. NONE of us have seen absolutely EVERYTHING. Give you an example: the SMLE rifle went into production more than a year AFTER the demise of dear Queen Victoria, so there is no chance of possessing an SMLE with her Royal Cipher. As well, Edward VIII was never crowned, the Government was destroying rather than building rifles during his short reign and Enfield already was being shifted-over to Number 4 production although the process was far from complete. So there is no chance of having an SMLE with an Edward VIII cypher. I have both here, sitting side-by-side on a rack. Sure, they don't exist, but don't tell THEM that; you might hurt their feelings. The Victoria rifle is an SMLE (Converted) Mark IV and the Edward is one of the small number made at Ishapore in 1936, during his short reign. They might both be surviving anomalies, but they DO exist and they are here for anyone dropping by to examine, should they so wish. Exactly the same holds for this poor, ugly old NRF. I just have to find it a Mark III Ross buttplate and screws so it doesn't look positively naked when it has guests.

If one rifle had appeared here and the other in Hargrave (7 miles, about the distance from Dover to Folkestone), I would shake my head and ask, "Allright, what was Johnnie Miller doing in 1946?". Johnnie Miller was a local character, a gifted machinist, who operated an entire machine-shop on equipment which was antiques when I knew him, 50 years go; he could have made this without help, although anyone else would need a shop and crew. But the rifles didn't turn up 7 miles apart. They appeared in Brandon, Manitoba and in Toronto, well over a THOUSAND miles apart: think London to Reykjavik.

They are BOTH Birmingham rifles, both post-Second-War FTRs, they both have 1945 barrels, they both have Enfield Inspectors' markings, they both are numbers-matching and they are as identical as pennies in a roll, right down to recycled Ross butts and their Suncorite finish. That adds up to LOT of coincidences: too many to ignore, by my lights.

They are worth some serious investigation.