M1-puzzle. Impossible or not ????

[Patrick Chadwick]

A friend showed me an M1 with the bolt out of the action. Everything else correctly assembled, just the bolt was out. He told me the carbine had been lent to someone who claimed that, while rapid firing, the bolt had suddenly dropped on the floor.

OK, I know it sounds very, very improbable, to put it mildly. I try hard to avoid words like "impossible" or "never". I dismantled the gun, checked it out vs. my own carbine and Kuhnhausen. As far as I can tell, it is perfectly OK. No broken edges, gouges, bent op-rod or excessive wear to indicate that anything untoward had ever happened. I wiggled the bits left, right, up and down, and I cannot get a bolt out of the fully assembled carbine action.

Am I missing something here? Some obscure conjunction of components that could permit a bolt to come out of a carbine while firing?

It would not be the first time that someone has fiddled around with a mechanism, been unable to put it together again, and then handed me the mess with the claim "it got like that all by itself".

But before I tell my friend that he was fed a fairy story, I ask the carbine experts - could it possibly happen?

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