Low Serial number Eddystone-Any Problems???
Guys there is more to the cracked receiver problems than identified above. I used to work in the US Army Small Cal. Weapons Lab, Picatinny Arsenal, NJ and worked with a guy that used to rent a room from a guy that was third shift plant foreman at Eddystone. He related that there was no heat treating expertise for lack of a better description in those days. The guys in the forge room judged the correct heat by "looking" at the steel billets in the gas furnace.
That is the good news guys. Now here is some of the bad news. The guys in the forge room were paid piece rate, i.e. the more you do the more you make. Well they were supposed to heat the billets to between red and bright red and pull them out with the tongs and place them the trip hammers. Three hits first position, two hits the second position and one hit the third position.
Well the good ole boys in the forge room found that if they turned the furnace up a bit more and took the billets to white hot they could stamp the billet one time in the last position, turn out more forgings, make more money and ............... well you know the rest.
Only problem is when they went to white the steel was burned and the granular structure was not rearranged correctly to give it maximum strength. This supervisor was continually having to go in and turn the furnace down on the third shift so no telling how many thousand they made.
I am also in possession of declassified
British
Ordnance notes from WW1 and I have a set of Remington receiver drawings for the Pattern 14. For you technical types the material callout on the bolt is for 3% nickel steel on the bolt and 3 1/2% nickel steel for the receiver. No heat treat callouts are listed. The bolt drawing number is RE-B-10 and the receiver drawings (called the "body" )is RE-B-8
There are numerous revisions (as the war progressed) relaxing tolerances here and there.
The declassified reports from the War Production Board identify a fairly large number of catastrophic failures in the barrels from all three manufacturers. Basically if you read what I have read you would be very leary of ever firing one of these. To give any doubting Thomases a better vision of what happens read on.
Seems the barrels ( all manufacturers) wanted to split starting at the muzzle and worked their way towards the receiver.
Apparently the barrel life was only expected to be 6000 rounds as that is as far as they were QA tested.
There is page after page of QA problems identfied from all vendors. From the notes their Ordnance Board wanted to cancel the contracts and the onsite Brit Army QA guys were inspecting to SMLE standards and rejecting (if memory serves me) a very large percentage of the rifles. The only reason they did not cancel the contract was they were afraid the US would get offended if US vendors were rejected and they wanted us in the war so they took them till we entered and then production shifted to 30.06 for us. There is no reason to assume anything changed when the customer changed.
Contrary to popular belief the guys that work in the arsenals are not direct blood descendents of John Browning, John
Garand, or anyone else that ever made/designed a gun. Most of the guys in the arsenals (including guys I talked to at Colt, Smith & Wesson years ago) did not even know what they were making, they were just shown a job grinding, polishing this or that and they had to make so many to get so much money and anything they can get out the door is money in their pocket. My friend told me they drained the Water Shops pond at Springfield Armory years ago and found over 500 receivers in the mud that were screwed up during production and thrown out the window.
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As indicated above it is best to relieve the built up stresses by cutting a groove in front of the receiver on this design prior to barrel removal.
Under no circumstances are gov't 03/l917/P14 barrels to be rechambered for magnum calibers. That is unless you want to lose your fingers when the barrel fails. Barrels tend to fail at the 3 and 9 o'clock orientation. Occasionally one will fail in the 12/6 o'clock orientation. Imagine this!!!!
I have seen cracked receivers upon rebarreling. Some machinists want to force receivers onto threads. Best to be able to hand screw the action all the way onto the threads to relieve any internal radial stresses from oversize threads.
I have some P14 actions and l917 actions and the barrels have come off everything after stress relieving by cutting slot in front of receiver. The actions I prefer are Rem and Win. but also have some Eddystones. Haven't seen any problems yet but then again no longer do them up in magnums (after I read the reports).
Also be advised there were two diameter strikers used in l917s. Both sizes were issued in Armorer Field kits as replacements. All the P14s are the small diameter. I chuck them up, drill them out and replace with l917 strikers with very small clearance. Generally .001" larger diameter than the striker nose when possible. I have seen P14 with excessive striker protrusion as well and have seen several pierced primers.
The good news is l917 strikers are perfect replacement extractors for the pre 64 Model 70 Winchester. They just have to be fitted.
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The Eddystone heat treat process was sometimes not very carefully done, and some of the receivers are too hard. When the barrel was installed, and tightened excessively, as was supposedly the case, the receivers sometimes developed small cracks.
When the sporterizing of military rifles was common after WWII, this cracking was usually discovered at the time of rebarreling, and the cause was attributed to the working of the metal as the rebarreling was being done.
Many gunsmiths refused to work on Eddystone manufactured rifles, although there seems to be no record of catastrophic failures, as there was with the low numbered Springfield and Rock Island 03s.
Crack detection is common in the automotive engine rebuild industry, and I suspect that any engine shop with magnaflux or one of the other crack detection processes could perform it on your rifle, and I believe the expense is not great.
PM
