High # 1903

[cplstevennorton]

Receivers built in this serial range were built as replacement parts.

In the docs at this time, I see large quantities of loose receivers going into long term storage and being shipped to other Armories to be used as replacements in rebuild.

So, the easiest way to understand this is, this receiver was fabricated to be used as a replacement part. Not much different than when SA manufactured any replacement part such as say a firing pin. Army Ordnance did not see any difference in a receiver than they did in any part on the M1903 at this time. They were just building parts as spares.

Right before WWII, there were orders to Armories by Ordnance to assemble any M1903's they could build completely out of spare parts that were already on hand. So these rifles would have been built out of a mix of new and refurbished parts. Whatever the armories could have dug up.

I do not remember ever seeing any orders to build "New" M1903 rifles in 1945 and I do not believe there were any. At this time, they were declaring the M1903 was obsolete and were in the planning stages of how to get rid of them all. Now they were rebuilding M1903's at this time getting them ready for long term storage and DCM sales, so if a M1903 had a unserviceable receiver for any reason during these rebuilds, loose receivers such as this would have been used. But I have not seen any evidence they were building any new M1903s at this time, only repairing the ones they already had.

The short answer is there is no real way to know when or who built that rifle, unless someday that specific serial was found on a document describing when it was built.

But I think the real key to understanding this is, we have all seen those armory packs of spare parts that Ordnance put in long term storage to be used at a later date. Those spart parts were built not with the idea they would go into new rifles at that moment. They were just built to be used at replacement parts at a future date. This receiver was built in an era that receivers were regarded the same way.