Milsurp After Hours

I heard a suggestion last night that I am curious to see has any basic in fact. A friend of mine has stated that some Enfields where fitted with barrels from Vickers maching guns, giving them 6-groove rifling and I believe a reverse twist. I've dug through Skennerton, and can find no reference to this happening, and I also would have thought that it would have been a pointless exercise, unless they hoped to gain something from the rifling differences.

Does anyone here know of such a thing happening?

Nick

Hi Nick

this chestnut has come up before, the best take I have on it was that the idea was mooted but never executed, or if it was no example has surfaced to my knowledge, not that my knowledge means anything.

I have a 6 groove barrel on an early No4 MK1 Savage, LH twist. Evidently they were experimental when they were exploring the pattern in relation to the US manufacturing systems, hence the No4 MK1* evolution.

Hard to believe a Vickers barrel was ever fitted to a rifle: that would involve completely remachining the profile, rechambering and rethreading - it would be very difficult to get the resulting barrel to breach up and index correctly. Hardly worth the effort, compared to simply cutting rifling in a normal barrel blank.

During WW2, No4s had 2, 4, 5, & 6 groove barrels approved. A 3-groove barrel was trialled and approved, but never produced. The No1 rifle also had a 4-groove barrel approved at the same time (found on some Dispersal rifles).

Perhaps it was just that some experimental enfield barrels were rifled using the machinery for cutting the rifling on Vickers guns (is this possible?) and the story has become distorted in the retelling.

Just an idea.

Tom

Thank you very much gentlemen. I had thought along similar lines to brewstop, that it was just more effort than it was worth to remachine a Vickers barrel to fit. Interestingly there is no mention in Skennerton of either 3 or 6 groove rifling. Well, none in the index, and its a tad heavy to trawl through on the off-chance. Either way, I'm glad I didn't put money on it.

There is a teeny grain of truth there, some No 1s were fitted with Vickers barrels. The late Sgt. Frank Cliffe and I fitted two with such barrells as target rifles just for the fun of it.

The barrels were turned down at the muzzle to take a normal foresight etc. Chambers left alone except for cutting an extractor groove and the original profile left untouched. Forends were, of necessity, gouged out considerably and one piece handguards made from old forends with a special rear retaining clip that engaged in the water packing groove in the barrel.

Heavy rifles and accurate enough but no advantage over the normal Lithgow heavy barrel. Forget what eventually happened to them, no licences in those days

So all this rumour, conjecture and speculation is your fault then Eoin.

Well, Frank and I can take a bit of credit but I've heard of other Armourers using Vickers barrels on rifles but have no details.

We did rebarrel some sporting L-Es with them but they were re-profiled and had tighter chambers cut. The Vickers chamber was on the generous side. We had a ready supply of barrels and it wasn't hard to 'divert' one when necessary.

Six grove barrels were manufactured in Canada using the broaches from the Bren gun barrels. Normally they were used on the later No.4's dated in the 49 to 52/3 run, but some have also surfaced on late 45... Here is one of the broaches used for the Bren barrles

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v76/6 ... C00023.jpg[/pic]

Now that is an interesting geegaw for an Enfield collection.

Thanks for sharing.