New to me No.5

[Peter Laidler]

As a little bit of history........ Now you know that I am going off at a bit of a tangent........
There was always a dire shortage of No4 Mk1 fore-ends in Ordnance in the early and well into the 80's, even for the conversion of fore-ends for the L42's. That's why they were were relegated to converting ex Mk2 fore-ends - badly - to fit to many newly converted L42's and later as spares for the same rifles. The quality was absolutely dire.........

The reason for this, as explained by the Equipment Manager responsible for trying to sort out this palava was that just previous to the L42 programme getting underway, all/most the Mk1 fore-end stocks had been taken away and sent out to contract for conversion by civvy contractors - to No5 spec in order to fulfill Far East demands.

That's the reason you could get new converted Mk2 fore-ends for the L39's and retro converted poorly to Mk1 spec for the L42, but you couldn't get Mk1 fore-ends for love nor money! And that's the reason why you'll find FTR No5's with ex No4 fore-ends.

Sorry to go off tangent with more useless info that you probably knew anyway