I know I am starting a firestorm, but I want to know about Savage chambers

[jdmcomp]

I have always been told that the Enfield chambers, especially the war years guns, had very loose chambers. (Now begins the firestorm of howls) Does anyone want to give an opinion as to the dimensions of Savage made rifles?

I do own several SMLEs of various makes and to shoot and reload for them expect to need to keep the brass segregated to maximize reloads. Just want to know if the American guns were tighter then the English (or for that matter, my Lithgow).

Let the flood of protest begin and thanks in advance.

Information

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[Thunderbox]

First world war No1s had deliberately enlarged chambers designed to cope with the conditions, but most No4s tend to have fairly tight chambers. I've never noted any dimensional differences between any of the five original No4 makers; probably at least half of surviving No4s have a replacement barrel from a different factory anyway.

[Peter Laidler]

Savage were simply contractors, contracted to built rifles to the specification laid down by the UK Ministry of Supply. Everything they did, with few exceptions*, was subject to close scrutiny. The chamber spec was exactly that of the UK made rifles from any of the other factories. If this wasn't the case, then how would their spare parts, including barrels, fit into the system?
* I can only think of one general exception

[vintage hunter]

Would that one general exception be the two groove barrels?

[jmoore]

No protest from me. I've found that SMLE's generally have somewhat similar chambers, P'14 their own peculiar version, and No.4's sort of a third, but they all vary to the point of poor interchangability between each subset.

However, over time I have found that certain rifles have visible enough idiosyncrasies in their fired brass to make sorting them out of a mixed bag no great trouble! My "firstest" No.4 Mk.I(T) is particularly easy to pick out due to a small irregularity on the case shoulder/neck junction.

Mind you, the oddities of .303"SAA chaambers are no worse from a functional standpoint than my various .308"Win/7,62x51 chambers. Again, some few rifles will interchange pretty well, but others really, really, really don't! Shoulder datum might be close (and there ARE different standards for different weapons in this one caliber), but the rest...

It really does pay to keep the brass from a rifle dedicated to that same rifle if at all possible. Pain in the buttocks- that it is.

[Bruce_in_Oz]

Chambers were given extra "allowance" in WW1 for mud clearance. I understand that this process was taken a little too far on the Ross rifles.

This business took advantage of the fact that the .303 is a rimmed cartridge. With a rimless type, a la the 7.92 x 57, the only clearance that will work (up to a point) is lateral. You can't fool around with the shoulder because it determines "headspace".

According to the drawings that I have seen, copied and loaded into a CAD programme, the nominal chambers from the various models are quite similar and are not significantly different from the SAAMI spec. One area of some variation is in the "small cone" (forcing cone). This changed markedly after the Mk7 bullet arrived. Look for "S C" on your SMLE barrels, just near the rearsight bed.

HOWEVER, I suspect that certain liberties were taken in wartime, especially in the tooling department. It is not unreasonable to assume that chamber reamers would be ground to absolute maximum (and then a bit more) to start a run. Successive sharpenings would eventually bring the tool down to "ideal' size and then a bit more. Ultimately, the finished hole would not accept even the "GO" plug gauge gauge and the reamer would be scrapped.

Anyone out there have the drawings for reamers and gauges for SMLE and No4 chambers? It would be interesting to compare them with the nominal chamber sizes. I ask about this specifically as the traditional Russian military chambering process involves several different cutters to achieve the final chamber shape.It would have immensely simplified each tool, but then dumped the problem on the peasant swinging on the giant-sizes tap handle and dropping in the test gauges.

These days, hammer-forged military barrels are made in one pass that includes the chamber. Hideously expensive machines and tooling; a barrel ready for stress relief, minimal profiling, threading and chrome lining every three minutes, per machine.

And then there is the likelihood that many of the barrels seen in our beloved rifle have been "serviced" by other than experienced Artificers. A swatch of 100 grit garnet cloth on a stick spun by a power drill will make any chamber look shiny. Follow that with valve-grinding paste on a cleaning patch and voila! "new" barrel.

[ireload2]

You can answer this question for yourself by measuring loaded ammo and comparing it to a number of chamber casts.