1st 1903 Acquisition

[ssgross]

Remember, not all receivers were bad. In fact there may have been far fewer embrittled receivers than good ones.

Now here is something fun and interesting you retired gents with more time on your hands can do...let's find some weather data from the months of production before they put the new sensors in the furnace. Count up the overcast/cloudy days to get an estimate on the percentage of possible defective receivers. Hatcher clearly states in his book (will find the page number if I can find my copy) the heat treat was poor on cloudy days when the furnace workers let them get too hot when judging the temp only by eyeballs. If someone can source the data set (lots of antique weather observations have been digitized - unless it was too hot back then and they have been purged as a result), I'll volunteer to write a parser for it and try to compute a real estimate.

[rcathey]

Are you sure you don’t have that backwards?
Steel temperatures are hard to judge in bright sunlight.

[ssgross]

Are you sure you don’t have that backwards?

I might, and defer to someone who has actual experience judging temps
Either way, the problem of producing a good estimate is solvable, and interesting.

My copy of Hatcher is somewhere, and I'm pretty certain of my reference to weather/cloud cover variations affecting the judging of the heat treat.

We have a pdf copy of Hatcher on this forum...https://www.milsurps.com/content.php...an-S.-Hatcher)

Alas it's not searchable. If Badger is interested, I can convert some of these pdf's to searchable text. It's not fast. I did it for Howe, both volumes, and it took several hours but turned out real well...even got the landscape captions on his photos. Funny, I search on my computer for what I want, but still find myself going to the bookshelf and thumbing to read it. Producing good indexes back then was expensive and time consuming.

[ArtPahl]

My Hatcher's Notebook is only a few feet away from this computer. Page 215: "the 'right heat' as judged by the skillful eye of the old timers was up to 300 degrees hotter on a bright sunny day than it was on a dark cloudy one."

[ssgross]

Perfect! So then I guess added brittleness is caused by higher than desired temps.

[enbloc8]

Yes. Clark Campbell described the metallurgical implications well in his book...going from memory, the steel was "burned" and the carbon driven out, so that while it looked normal, it had the properties of cast steel instead of forged. And there was no way to fix the problem by reheating.

Based on what the Marines did to keep their low-number rifles in service (because they had to), the key variables appear to be:

*Tight headspace (the M1903 action design does not support the cartridge case head well),
*Ammunition to factory spec with fresh brass, from known-good suppliers (no crap like Turkish or French surplus, or pre-WW2 GI ammo, or pushing-the-limit reloaded cases),
*Do nothing that would either overstress the receiver (e.g. a case head failure, the design does not handle them well) or deliver a sudden, sharp shock (another reason why the Marines kept the headspace tight, and banned use of low-number rifles for firing rifle grenades).

---------- Post added at 10:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:48 PM ----------

Something that jumped out at me about how quickly ammunition *can* go bad was a passage in LTC John George's "Shots Fired in Anger".

I have multiple rounds of .30-06 from WW1 and older (and some .30-40 Krag as well) with case necks that had split due to age and trapped stresses. Well, LTC George mentioned how, while his regiment was in camp getting prepared for overseas service, he wanted to prepare a course for them to improve their marksmanship. He managed to procure a large lot of World War I ammo from supply, and made mention of how much (less) ammo they had left to work with after sorting out the rounds with split necks...and this stuff was only twenty-ish years old!

[cplstevennorton]

Defective ammo was a huge problem. Large lots of ammo was destroyed for how bad the ammo was.

The whole reason they decided to replace low number receivers in rebuild, was because of how they might respond to defective ammo.

Now one thing never covered in the books was how barrels also could respond negatively to defective ammo and burst. This is on high numbers as well.

There were more barrels that burst than there ever was receivers that failed. In fact in 1927 they had stated they had so many barrels fail, they redesigned the ramp of the barrel to give added support to the cartridge case.

[browningautorifle]

Defective ammo was a huge problem. Large lots of ammo was destroyed for how bad the ammo was.

I guess realistically we had just started using smokeless powder and it was still being perfected. Not that surprising but for sure not a very well discussed fact of that time. The whole discussion revolves around single heat treated receivers or "Cooking" them...

[1903Collector]

I guess realistically we had just started using smokeless powder and it was still being perfected. Not that surprising but for sure not a very well discussed fact of that time. The whole discussion revolves around single heat treated receivers or "Cooking" them...

Jim, was the .30-03 the first US true smokeless powder cartridge? I hadt even thought about it, yet I knew Portugal didnt have access to smokeless powder until...'97 was it!?!? I guess this makes sense since the previous US cartridge was the .30-40, right? .30 calibre - 40 grains of black powder? If all this is true is it is a "duhh" moment for me as it now seems pretty obvious!!!!

[browningautorifle]

was the .30-03 the first US true smokeless powder cartridge?

I thought it was either the 30-30 or the 30-40 Krag? 30 cal and 30 or 40 grains respectively. Both were smokeless from the start though.

Someone here will tell us. Smokeless would have been in it's infancy though.