Remington 1903 Build..

[Rick the Librarian]

You consulted a date of manufacture table that is wrong - the one you looked at lists ALL Remington M1903s as "1941 manufacture". In reality, only a relative handful, about 7,000 (out of 348,000 or so) were made that year. Your receiver dates to about November or December, 1942.

A correct stock would be a "straight", non-grasping groove with pins, not stock bolts, with an FJA stamp and a high hump handguard without a capsule-shaped fixturing slot on the inside. Such stocks, while not as easy to obtain as they were a few years back, can still be found. As BAR suggested, you can find a M1903A3 stock with pins, which would be an acceptable substitute.

ALL Remington M1903s had straight stocks* - the earlier ones (to ca. 3,030,000 or so) had grasping groove stocks, but all the rest had non-grasping groove straight stocks. When the Remington M1903 was being designed, there was some thought of making them 1903A1s, but it was quickly rejected. Although the M1903A1 with Type C, full pistol grip stocks had been adopted in 1929, the Remington M1903 was a "throwback" to a straight stock. This, by the way, was the start of the misunderstood and misapplied term "M1903 Modified" that you see used to describe later Remington M1903s - which was actually used by the Army to describe ALL Remington M1903s.

The "Type" nomenclature" used by T.R. Findley is another term that has no basis in fact. Findley also does a lot of business stamping bare stocks with fake markings

* - Actually, the M1903A4 sniper rifle with scope used with a Type C or Scant stock, but this obviously lies outside the scope (no pun intended! ) of this discussion.