Krag Gouge

[Plain Old Dave]

I am new here, but have been around other forums for a while and have been a Krag shooter for 20+ years. Over that time, when somebody gets a Krag, certain questions always pop up and so on Another Forum I posted the following info. I will make it one post if it will fit.

Operation.

The Krag is a unique military arm in a number of ways, most specifically in the magazine. Proper assembly and loading is essential to reliable operation.

Once the magazine box is opened, cartridges are simply dumped in the side of the piece, preferably one at a time. One at a time will help preclude rim/rim jams; this is one reason the case head on the .30 Krag is bevelled.

The switch on the left side of the reciever is a magazine cutoff. In 1896 and earlier Krags, placing the switch in the Up position allows the magazine to work and AFAIK this was reversed for the 1898 and subsequent models. If the cutoff is engaged, the piece is effectively a single shot with 5 rounds available for emergency service.

If your cutoff is not present or is set properly and your Krag still won't feed, carefully inspect the side plate on the left side of the reciever. If it is not completely seated, rounds will not be forced over far enough for the bolt face to engage them and push them into the chamber. If it is not completelyseated, take a wooden mallet , screwdriver HANDLE or 2x4 and tap it into place. Once flush, tighten the retention screw and check occasionally. It's not unheard of for shooting to work the screw/plate loose.

The Krag also has a unique method of bolt removal, as follows:

1) Open bolt far enough for hold-open pin to hold bolt open if your piece is so equipped.

2) Using left index finger, apply pressure to extractor nose/hook. Most extractors don't have enough tension to require appreciably raising from resting position.

3) With Right hand, raise bolt handle to full 12 O'clock position. This will cam the extractor out of its position. If you have a peep sight installed, move cautiously as there may not be enough room for the extractor to clear and if so, removal of the sight will be required. Some aftermarket peep sights replaced the magazine cutoff spindle, and if so this is pretty simple but I'll let somebody else detail that procedure. If this step does not work, repeat Step 2) with more pressure.

4) Withdraw bolt from piece.

Shooting and accuracy.
The US Krag is in my view one of the finest military arms ever made, both in fit and finish and accuracy; Krags owned the National Matches and won the Palma Cup before they were outlawed by fiat in FY1907. Illegal for competition after only 9 years, and the M1 is still legal after 70+ years. Hm. A few comments are in order before I address Krag accuracy.

As with any milsurp, bore condition is EVERYTHING. A smooth shiny bore with sharp lands and grooves is always going to be more accurate than one that presents wear. However, some pitting will not destroy practical accuracy with hard cast lead bullets or jacketed bullets. The Krag was designed around a 220 grain roundnose jacketed bullet and her freebore (space between the beginning of the barrel and the start of the rifling) is considerably greater even in minty examples than a barrel cut for pointed bullets.

As I said, Krags can be VERY accurate. However, from time to time, one will turn up that will either keyhole or do odd things. A couple ideas present themselves:

1) Throat erosion. While I am unconvinced that this is the major issue the US military insists it is (and I have been a weapons technician for the Navy for nearly 20 years), the early powders used when the Krag was the Service Rifle were highly erosive; the hot gases erode the barrel steel. In other words, a Krag barrel may present so much freebore that in order to get even acceptable accuracy the handloader MUST seat to such an overall length (OAL) that the rounds will not feed from the magazine. Phil Sharpe discovered this before WW2 and documented it in his classic Book Of The Handloader. One tack for the adventurous handloader with a Krag bore who wished to stay within published specs for OAL would be to find bullets with as much bearing surface as possible. Usually, heavier, roundnose bullets give the best Krag accuracy.

2) Bore diameter. Between the erosive powders and early technology (indifferent barrel steels and no gauging to ensure uniformity of bore diameter), Krag bores can vary considerably in diameter. In the mid 1930s, Phil Sharpe had documented Krag bores as tight as .3075 and as open as .3125. With 60+ more years of bore wear, even with modern non-corrosive priming and modern non-erosive powders you may see even more bore diameter variation. Slug your bore and you may be surprised to discover your .30-40 Krag that won't hit the broad side of a barn is a STUNNINGLY accurate .303-40 Krag.

3) Jacketed bullets. I have owned my '96 sporter for 20+ years and have shot probably thousands of jacketed bullets through it and the bore is still as well defined as the day I got it. Your milage may vary, but that's my experience.

Reloading and ammunition is a good place to comment as any next.

For the last 10+ years both Remington and Winchester have produced .30-40 Krag ammunition as a "seasonal" item; that is, they only produce it for a couple months out of the year if they make any at all in a given year. Ammunition is accordingly somewhat scarce, and given the ammo makers' military commitments to the GWOT I don't see Krag ammo going into full production any time soon. Usually, though, I will see the ammo vendors at gun shows have a box or 2 in the $30 price range. Accordingly, the serious Krag shooter should consider handloading.

Midway or the other major reloading suppliers like Graf's should have brass, and as an emergency measure you can make .30-40 Krag out of .303 British. Many moons ago when the situation was reversed (.303 ammo= hard to find) and Krag shells were at every hardware store, that's how people shot .303s. As an aside on brass, there is absolutely NO reason to ever make a Krag handload with a Magnum Large Rifle primer. Plenty of load data out there that uses standard large Rifle primers and the magnum primers will increase chamber pressure. If you DO choose to make Krag brass out of .303 British, I believe you'll have a VERY short neck, but it does beat hollerin' "BANG!" real loud all to pieces.

I started hoarding Krag ammo and brass when Winchester quit making the old 180gr RN factory ammunition. I have a good deal of 1950s vintage yellow box Western .30-40-180RN I found in a hardware store in Clinton,TN in 1992, and 15 Silvertips in the white box with the big old X on it, and I have a box of 100 brand new Krag shells that eventually I will have to start using once my brass wears out. The old yellow box Westerns are some of the most powerful, accurate ammo for a Krag I have ever seen. I have some brass that has 5-6 reloads on it and is still good. Starting to get a couple occasional neck splits, though.

A lot has been said about the Krag's "weakness" over the years, and while it IS true that the Krag and the so-called "low number" 1903s use the same method of heat treatment in their steel, Krags do not have the unsafe reputation the early 1903s do. The .30-40 Krag is a substantially lower pressure round than the .30 M1906. SAAMI spec on the Krag is @37K PSI as opposed to @45-50K+ for the .30-'06, and this goes a long way toward explaining the 15+ year case life I am seeing. Most of the cracked bolts reported in Krags in my view can be traced to the abortive attempt to make the Service load 2200 f/s instead of the original 2000 f/s. After reviewing data with modern powders that present 35K+ PSI with 220s at 2100-2200 f/s, one can only wonder how much pressure the M1898 .30-40 generated ESPECIALLY in the subtropical Cuban and Phillipine climate; hotter ambient temp will increase chamber pressure. This bears emphasis: The lower you keep your Krag handloads in terms of pressure, the longer your brass will last and the safer you'll be.

The Krag and match shooting.

While given her limited service history and 'low velocity' load, one might think that the Krag would not be particularly suited as a match rifle. In fact the Krag was the rifle of choice for nearly an entire generation of service rifle shooters; from around 1894 when the first Krags were issued until the 1903's first official appearance at Camp Perry in 1908 the Krag was the military rifle to beat. The 1901 sight was the envy of the world's military and most of modern Highpower shooting finds its genesis in War Department General Order 61 issued in April of 1903 and the Krag.
The National Rifle Matches had been fired for many years at Sea Girt, New Jersey with the Trapdoor Springfield. However, March 1903's General Order 61, authorizing establishment of the Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship and the course of fire for the National Trophy Matches, made ANY single shot arm impractical; 2 strings of 5 rounds each in 20 seconds is impossible with a single shot arm. Even before this, Krags were apparently in use at the National Matches, and those that "saw no advantage" to the Krag apparently weren't from New York. Following is directly from the September 16, 1900 New York Times:

Although the state rifle team of New York did not come in a winner this year at Sea Girt, it made an excellent showing with the inferior Springfield rifles of .45 calibre, against the .30 calibre Krag-Jorgensen rifle used by the New Jersey men, equipped with the best of sights and possessing advantages in every way.

I have previously mentioned 1907, and the reader/shooter might well be confused by a Model 1903 rifle not being adopted as a match rifle until 1907. Consider:

1) M1903 Serial Number 300,000 was produced in 1907
2) The documentation I have found indicates that the Peacetime Army was only 190,000 strong in 1917
3) If we assume that there was roughly 1 National Guardsman or State Militia member for every active soldier, that puts us at a requirement for roughly 380,000 long arms to re-equip the Army
4) Conclusion: The Army's official "service rifle" per General Order 61 (the order that authorized both the Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship and the National Trophy Matches) was not the M1903 until some point in FY1907. Further, COL Brophy states the 1903 was first considered the "official rifle" at the 1908 Matches.

General Order 61 issued back in 1903 was apparently interpreted at the command (brigade/division/squadron/ship/whatever) level to mean that the matches were to be fired with what was in the armory; until FY1907, this meant Krags for the vast majority of the uniformed services.
This should not be taken as evidence that there were no Krags at the 1908 National Matches, as the 8 August 1908 Pittsburg Press newspaper states that the President's Match ..."must be fired with the Krag or the New Springfield." Further, I have found a May 1909 newspaper article where the Marines were just being issued M1903s and have seen documentation indicating the Corps and the Navy did not completely transition to the M1903 until 1911 (including a pic of USS ILLINOIS Sailors at the range at Gitmo in 1910), a February 1915 newspaper article indicates the War Department had just ceased issuing Krags to "civilian clubs", I am sure we've all seen the pic of the first unit of the AEF to arrive in the UK in 1917 with Krags at Stack Arms, and I own a 1917 vintage Remington 220gr FMJ round headstamped "RA 17". This is a military headstamp; civilian Remington ammo of the era was headstamped "Rem-UMC" along with a caliber designator. Even after the close of the Great War and 1919's experimentation with the M1917 rifle, Krags continued to be competitive; I have seen a 28 March 1919(!) newspaper report fron the Los Angeles Times for a California highpower match where a Krag-equipped team placed third with the "obsolete" Krag. Even NOW, in 2010, the Krag is still competitive against all comers.

In 2009, the 3rd place in the Vintage Military Rifle Match at Camp Perry was fired by a Krag shooter with a score of 288 with 3 bulls eye's. The winner only scored 2 points more.

In 2007, the 2d place in the same match was fired by a US Krag, then with a 284 with 7 bull's eyes. The winner there was only seven points up.

These Krags out-shot Finnish Mosin-Nagants, Swiss Schmidt-Rubins and Swedish Mausers.

Not a bad showing for an arm that debuted over 100 years before the match. As an interesting side note, the first round ever fired at Camp Perry was a .30-40 Krag.

Modern "Match" ammunition also finds its beginning in the Krag. America's first smokeless powder repeater had pretty serious teething trouble in ammunition, and the civilian shooting community rose to the occasion, both through corporations like Winchester , the US Cartridge Company and Remington-UMC and through private "gun cranks" like Dr. Walter Hudson and Horace Kephart. If only in using less erosive powder than the issue cartridge, I submit that at least the US Cartridge Company's "Match" ammunition was superior to the Frankford Arsenal product, and every rifle shooter that reloads using gas-checked cast lead bullets owes a debt of gratitide to the Edwardian era highpower shooter.

In closing, while the Krag had her teething pains like ANY new arm, these were ironed out and the Krag became a world-class match rifle; Gas Trap Garands, the infamous M1 7th round stoppage, and non-chromed M16 bores and the M16 Forward Assist spring to mind as more modern examples of teething trouble. The M1 went on to be the "greatest battle implement ever devised", the M16 is currently the longest serving battle rifle in American history, and the Krag was the world's envy on the target range. With a proper-sized bore, or even better a barrel made by the legendary riflesmith H. M. Pope, and decent ammunition, the Krag could (and did) beat all comers in the Palma Matches and apparently stayed competitive with the New Springfield at least through the World War One era. The 1903 was not equal in sustained accuracy to the Krag until the advent of the "tin can" ammunition in the 1920s and was not consistently superior until the advent of M1 Ball in 1926. With modern components, the .30-40 Krag is definitely capable of sub-MOA accuracy and is still competitive against all comers in military rifle shooting.

Hope all hands found this informative. Enjoy your Krag and safe shooting!

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