Am I missing something!

[Bruce_in_Oz]

And the wryly amusing part about the "fitting" of a No1 fore-end to the original "bedding"spec, is just an academic exercise these days.

All that fiddling about inside the fore-end was to tune the rifle to standard Mk Vll ammo; a commodity in rapidly dwindling supply. So, it only really applies to purists who have an otherwise "pristine" and matching (apart from the nose-cap") sporter with, fingers crossed, a reasonable barrel.

Finally, with the No1 rifle, they were essentially "hand -fitted". getting a barrel, body (receiver) bolt and bolt head to assemble such that left and right helical locking surfaces have the specified bearing / contact, the bolt head fits the bolt body without excessive "overturn" and teh whole bun-fight headspaces to PROPER spec, is a problem when using pre-loved parts of unknown provenance and ZERO access to the special gauges used to assess the components . It can be done, but, if you have a body that will NOT headspace correctly, it usually means that the locking surfaces are worn beyond tolerances (and the surface hardening is no longer in existence, to boot.

Without the correct metrology, (a "Master" or "try" bolt), unobtanium exemplified, it is a bit tricky. Just to make it more interesting, unlike a No4, No1 rifles has ONE, count 'em, ONE standard bolt-head which was allowed to have a few thou variability in length, but were NOT marked for size. IF you ever find Lithgow-made No1 bolt heads with a letter code, they MAY be post WW2 production of incremental "longer" bolt heads introduced to squeeze the last bit of life out of the old warhorses, before the general distribution of the L1A1 rifle. If you have bolt heads with a letter"M" properly stamped on the "lug", that indicates "Mild steel", case-hardened, as opposed to the plain ones which were made from "malleable cast iron", which is just another variant carbon steel in the No1 series. Unless specifically approved by the Ordnance boffins, there were NO "alloy" steels to be used in the construction of No1 rifles. No4 s are a different beast, altogether.

However, we persevere!