Abandoned test of Australian #1s.

[ireload2]

>>>I have excerpted notes from a January 1969 report from RSAF Enfield of a test they carried out, firing 75 x 7.62mm NATO oiled proof rounds through a No 4 barreled action 'without any serious damage to the body'.

Notes continue: "In the course of this test, two bolts were fractured, one on the 60th and the other on the 75th round, but that 'the bolt failures were such as would be unlikely to cause injury to a firer'. The military proof pressure used at the time, was 28 tsi radial, using one dry and one oiled proof cartridge per rifle. Clearly, this 'torture test' was several orders of magnitude beyond what any No 4 rifle would ever experience in routine use."

If anyone has a copy of the full report it would make an interesting addition to the technical library.

It is also worth adding that if an Enfield bolt head is cracked due to failure/overstressing, which is not that uncommon, it can simply be replaced with another, and that the main full-length locking lug on the No 4 bolt is quite massive." Not only that, but there is a hell of a lot of metal behind the locking shoulders in the receiver.

See what happens when the dainty little lugs or shoulders on "modern" rifles with no additional safety lug, unlike a Mauser, fail.

But wait, there's more!! P. O. Ackley did a bunch of tests way back when. With a SMLE action set up for .30-40 Ackley Improved, the following results were obtained:

57gn Hi-Vel#2 - 150gn ball projectile - High pressure, Primer OK
52gn 4198 - 150gn ball projectile - Leaky primer
50gn 2400 - ditto bullet - Bolt wrecked, receiver bent.

He noted:" When this action gave way, the receiver itself bent down at the rear, allowing the front end of the bolt to come up out of the receiver ring, thus allowing the bolt to be bent and to be broken. The locking lugs themselves did not give way".

Australian XP 7.62NATO No1 rifles were subjected to similar abuse to the No4 above, (and this is with receivers "modified" to accept FAL mags). The one I got to play with in the late 1970's had stretched a bit , again, more on the right than the left but had not shattered, . Not surprisingly, the project was abandoned: I suspect that factors of "logistics" and professional pride also contributed to this abandonment.<<<

Who abandoned the testing of the Australian XP 7.62 NATO No 1 rifle tests?
What does the term in quotes "logistics" imply?

Information

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[goo]

good thing ishapore 2a1's have improved metalurgy (i hope)

[Bindi2]

Read S.A.I.S No 19

[Alan de Enfield]

This looks to be just a "cut & paste" of the thread that was closed down.
Hopefully its not going to go the same way.

[Peter Laidler]

In the nicest way possible Ireload, I'll let you into a little secret. The others won't thank me, but it's this. There's been a bit/quite a lot of off-forum emailing regarding your posts and it seems as though the forumers ..., not me of course, I'm far too polite....., have got the drift that you are here for some combative or argumentative foruming. So you might find that many of your points won't be answered or opened.

In the nicest way of course..............

[villiers]

This is Germany calling:

I´ve been getting the thrill of dicing with death once a week when I go to the range with my LE. Don´t spoil it for me now, Ireload by giving up your most interesting postings!

Lord Haw-Haw

[jmoore]

[ireload2]

In the nicest way possible Ireload, I'll let you into a little secret. The others won't thank me, but it's this. There's been a bit/quite a lot of off-forum emailing regarding your posts and it seems as though the forumers ..., not me of course, I'm far too polite....., have got the drift that you are here for some combative or argumentative foruming. So you might find that many of your points won't be answered or opened.

In the nicest way of course..............

Peter,
It is not a surprise to me that cliques and sycophants exist. In fact I expect it but not so much in forums that are technical in nature. There is a title that for some a few of the comments that I have seen here. It is called the
"tall poppy syndrome" and the "crab bucket syndrome". Some of those comments have been made by the same posters on other forums so I chalk that up to the individual. If the forum is open only to a single party line of thought that is too bad. I normally respond only in the tone that is posted or that I am responded to. If a poster goes out of his way to start a controversial thread then he might not like the response. I did not participate in the thread the cut and paste came from. The original thread began with reference to a report. I was simply trying to get past the reference to the real report and the facts.

All intended to be civil and factual.

[Thunderbox]

Australian XP 7.62NATO No1 rifles were subjected to similar abuse to the No4 above, (and this is with receivers "modified" to accept FAL mags). The one I got to play with in the late 1970's had stretched a bit , again, more on the right than the left but had not shattered, . Not surprisingly, the project was abandoned: I suspect that factors of "logistics" and professional pride also contributed to this abandonment.<<<

Who abandoned the testing of the Australian XP 7.62 NATO No 1 rifle tests?
What does the term in quotes "logistics" imply?

To anyone with either a military background or experience of defence procurement projects, the Lithgow 7.62mm story is completely mundane and uncontentious: someone kicks off a low-budget pilot conversion project; they convert some No1 receivers that are already well-worn from service use; they proceed to destruction test them with proof rounds - establishing very little at that stage. Long before any serious project work is undertaken - eg devoting resources to determining an accurate relationship between receiver "previous service life" and subsequent conversion life, or looking at the whether Lithgow's post-1941 spot-hardening was a factor c.f. other receivers, etc - someone higher up the funding food chain says "we are about to buy x thousand L1A1s; stop wasting money on that dead-end project that'll never be used anyway." Hence, like the L8 saga, the project comes to an end before any serious work is done. This probably what the writer means by "logistics" - the project gets axed because it becomes irrelevant to the military authorities.

The Lithgow trials are a prime example of where a few scant lines of genuine documentary information have been taken out of context, interpolated, exaggerated and turned into a whole overheated urban myth which now endlessly reverberates around the Internet, claiming victims with each retelling and/or reinforcement by similar wisdom (vide British NRA proclamation on 155gn bullets...try asking them where their evidence comes from..).

[Son]

Just to add a little more to Thunderbox's posting- the trials were conducted in 1958. The request was made by the RAAF for Lithgow to attempt to convert existing rifles to the NATO round for airfield defence use. They ended up being a hybrid between the No6 (the dozen built for the test were made from existing No6 rifles) and the SLR (which was already in production at Lithgow) supplying the rest of the parts.
Read between the lines- the RAAF bean counters didn't want to spend their allowance on new SLR's, but had to comply with the new NATO standard round. The factory chucked a few together, blew some up in testing, and sold SLR's to the RAAF.