History of WWI Primer 045: British Long Lees (Metford and Enfield) Documentary

hi I'm Rob from British muscle orders a FiOS asked me to reintroduce this episode as together we noticed some outstanding issues the first was in the handling of the 3d files unfortunately the wrong magazine was paired with the long lee-enfield rifles shown in the animation this has been fixed and is the only change to the video feel free to fast forward to the time listed on the screen if you've already seen the rest the second is the somewhat erroneous mention of the issue and use of spare magazines for the long Lee Medford and Enfield rifles to clarify when the magazine rifle was issued in the early 1890s the concept was indeed for every man to carry a spare magazine for one reason or another this decision was rescinded and in 1891 these 8-round spare magazines and the pouches to carry them were withdrawn from service in effect the spare magazines were withdrawn just as the British Army was react with itself with its new rifle so in fact the concept of the spare magazine never really solidified and was certainly never used on campaign as some of you may already know this episode is focused on the world war one period use of the long lee-enfield rifle now I think Elias may in the gang have done a fantastic job with this one and quite frankly I can't wait to see what's in store next now if you'd like to learn more about the use of early british and empire small arms feel free to stop by my channel british muzzleloaders thanks a Thyssen me like so many other powers during the Great War Britain would have to reach back into inventory and dust off previous small arms for emergency use luckily their last rifle wasn't all that different from their current one [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this didn't shot this is a rifle magazine lee-enfield mark one let's get it over to the light box weighing in at nine and 1/4 pounds and an overall length of 49 and 1/2 inch and this is a very large infantry rifle it chambers the 303 British cartridge and it carries ten count them ten in its detachable box magazine now of course like all of these shows we must start at the beginning and for that we're gonna need to roll the clock back to the early 1880s and which will find that Britain is actually a little bit behind the curve in terms of small arms technology the Empire was at the time fielding the single-shot martini-henry rifle a robust and battle-proven implement it will get its own episode in due time it was however beginning to outlast its initial design for those of you who have been watching the show you'll know that by the early 1880s we're looking at a lot of different models of repeating rifle coming on to the scene and so a single shot really isn't necessarily cutting it now as part of this and this is something we've said before but I think it's worth revisiting just a bit and part of this was because of the siege of plum nough in which the Ottoman Empire was equipped with the Peabody martini this is of course the same rifle that the British are feeling although with a different cartridge they were paired however with the winchester 1866 lever action repeating rifle these two guns combined that gave the Ottoman defenders a unique advantage when paired with proper tactics you see at longer ranges they use the same old routine they took the troops and line them up had them point their big long guns and shoot way out into the distance to try to hit them as they came in now normally what this would do is cause a lot of mayhem but at some point cavalry or a piece of you know infantry that's just gone around the situation whatever there'll be pockets of concentrated forces that will get closer to the objective and those will then put pressure on the defenders who will have to pull back or REE maneuver and basically you're looking for a breakout if you're the attacker okay now that gives you an opportunity to flank well what can you do to prevent that breakout well you keep your volume of fire up sure but at some point you know the rhythm gets off somebody gets in or another strategy is tried what do you do when the enemy starts to close in and you're still single loading and taking your time with each shot that's what the Winchesters were for so the Ottomans made good use of this strategically by having most the infantry shooting nice and long and bunch of guys aren't with Winchester repeater still hold your fire until they get here and they marked it out where they want it to be I've started different measurements in terms of yardage 200-300 the point being though is they knew once a man crossed a certain line he was theirs to shoot at and so anytime there was an attempt by the Russians to make a break out for this sort of thing no they just got shot down by the Winchester's now ultimately the Ottomans would lose this conflict but it lasted quite a long time against numerically superior forces and so it raised a lot of eyebrows you see Europe now wanted a rifle that could do both roles one that could shoot at range and if necessary be used in emergency for rapid close-range defense in this age of repeaters we're going to see time and again that most nations wanted to hold on to what they had a lot of them had deep investments in their current designs and they've gone through a lot of trouble to get to a reliable breech loader I mean these are not hundred-year-old technology at this point they really had only been around for 20 30 40 years depending on what they had adopted and so there's a lot of recent memory of things going awry in small batches not working out and then constant updates of a current design and so they really wanted to avoid introducing entirely new rifles so most nations when faced with the difficulty of adopting a repeater would try to take their single-shot breech loader and work it into a magazine rifle and this was no different for the British as a matter of fact they would with trying to make a multi-shot martini-henry and they would also work on coming up with a more modern smaller bore cartridge in this case I'm skipping a lot guys there's a lot of martini-henry history that we can cover separately but the the big story is before everybody's going to true small bore just before smokeless the British are already investigating small bore which means you know smaller than 50 Cal so they're looking at a 402 black powder cartridge to get a little more velocity and still a good smack these experiments would ultimately lead to the Enfield martini in an a version with a magazine and a B version without and they were made in fairly large numbers actually really large numbers but they would never see official adoption in the field while the martini action was rock-solid it just did not cooperate with being paired with a magazine this would take a while to sort out though and so know that while we're talking about our rifle today in the background a lot of this was being dragged along in terms of the martini all the way through the 1880s as I said at the time 402 is a fairly small bore at least for the British and it presented problems like anything else when trying to do a small bore black powder when mainly fouling in a black powder rifle you don't always burn all the powder and it's also fairly caustic and it builds up in the rifling and then you get a couple dozen rounds out and your accuracy goes to crap so they really needed a way to keep these guns from clogging up for as long as possible and thankfully for the British while they were looking at this in early experiments they had the help of one William Ellis Metford his father was a physician by trade but an avid sportsman intruder by habit he was educated at Sher Bowen school and apprenticed as an engineer he would be employed by Wilkes Somerset and Weymouth Railway after graduation in 1853 he would recommend a hollow based bullet to pritchett for the Enfield rifle becoming the famous 455 pritchett bullet in 1857 he would move to India with his wife at the height of the mutiny where his knowledge of bullet making came in handy returning a year later he'd bring back ammo lingering illness that would follow him until his death for our story today what we really care about though is that Medford would develop a form of polygonal rifling now in this case it's shallow and it's less of a trench and more of a valley it's a rounded edge and importantly it performs well with black powder without clogging up and fouling nearly as fast but it's still tremendously accurate now when you're considering a smaller bore black powder cartridge that is an enormous benefit and so his rifling pattern would be rolled into those martini-henry or rather Enfield martini trials now because those trials lasted for so long into the 1880s alongside of what we're about to talk about that means that Medford rifling was right there the whole way through ready to be picked up and used at a moment's notice all right do you guys have all of that bagged up okay put it to the side for a moment because we've got to go over and back a bit and pull up some more information for this to make any sense so getting back to our main point the British needed a repeating rifle and through the 1870s they would try a number of designs on small batch basis just sort of seeing if anything would really flush out for their troops in that period the only thing that really stuck out and sparked any imagination was the winchester 1866 lever action like the one the Ottomans had now this is a terrific little rifle or carbine but realistically for the British it just wasn't strong enough or simple enough for field use so Wow inspiring it still wasn't what they needed so the will might have been there but the means certainly wasn't yet but in 1879 something very interesting would come through the door it was mailed over by one Colonel Frank Hyde of the sharps rifle company and it had been produced by a man named James Paris Lee born in August in 1831 in Scotland Lee was the son of a watchmaker and jeweler who was also a bit of a collector gathering antique swords and guns his family would emigrate to Canada in 1835 and settle in what is now Cambridge they would adjust that family name from Lees to Lee now I have to stop right here and say that despite this man's famous name I cannot recommend anybody follow exactly in his footsteps because it's a miracle that he lived long enough to get this rifle invented because due to his love of firearms James Parish Lee would invent his own well invent assemble his own muzzleloading black-powder rifle at the age of 12 and in the process he was overly generous when drilling for the hole where you would normally have a pan but in this case he just had his brother lighted for him while he shouldered the thing this is a genius written all over it doesn't it folks now of course we don't know what happened to the brother but James took one on the chin and needed a little recovery now if that wasn't enough of a lesson later on he would try to hasten a campfire by dumping gunpowder on it this resulted in months of recovery as well and probably painful burns and at the age of 16 he would manage to drop a gun that he was handling and loaded and in bed five rounds of shot in his own heel as a matter of fact those would stay with him for some 50 years before being surgically removed and unheard it greatly improved his disposition somehow surviving long enough to be school that he would apprentice in the watch trade and moved to Toronto in 1850 starting his own business in 1858 he would move to the u.s. specifically Wisconsin here he would begin to focus down on firearms experimenting with repeating magazines he would develop a conversion system for the Springfield muzzleloading rifle which saw 1,000 orders placed during the great southern rebellion unfortunately the war ended too soon for Lee and he would lose quite a bit on this investment moving to Milwaukee he would set up shop with the help of some investors there he'd parade a number of unique early ideas that we simply don't have time for today however what we do care about is that in 1878 he'd applied for a patent on a fantastic magazine receiving it in 1879 Lee had law in something so ubiquitous today that we take it for granted the vertical lead detachable box magazine is the grandfather to basically all modern firearms but why is it so important well let's compare it to a prevalent system of the day the tube loader as the number of cartridges in the tube loader drops the point of balance shifts and the general vibration at the front of the gun shifts meaning a gun sited empty will have a slightly different point of impact when full with the Lee magazine the cartridges can sit at the center point of the rifle meaning balance remains the same as it empties it also changes nothing about the barrel harmonics with this patent in hand Lee would be able to release his first production rifle but as usual friends at Remington Arms weren't as interested because they were busy trying to interest the military in their own repeater the Remington keen this hammer fire bolt-action hybrid warrants a lot of attention but fell short of military approval so we don't have to go into it today it would however temporarily keep Remington from investing in Lee's new design as they did not want to compete with their own product so Lee would head over to the sharps rifle company and they would produce the first of what is now a famous design the model 1879 it is said that Hugo borchardt himself helped refine the ability to inexpensively produce the magazine these would go on to be sold in China Spain and Argentina but most interestingly there was a contract for 300 to the US Navy now you might be wondering why that picture said Remington right at the beginning well that's because the sharps rifle company went bankrupt before finishing that contract and so there were a pile of unfinished parts and receivers laying around and at the same time the keene had not been so keen and Remington's well they're no fools they're not too prideful at least not back then they would take Lee up on his design and finish that US Navy contract now the model 1878 and unn and I highly recommend that if you have some time after this episode you go and take a look at our friend Ian's video so that you can really see the birth of what would later become our rifle today now like I said one of these guns would end up in British hands and it must have been the straw that broke the camel's back the beaver log that finally gave way on the dam I don't know but basically by October of 1879 we're seeing a new committee in Britain known as the machine gun committee I wonder what they were looking into also started to take up the question of whether or not they were going to deal with a repeating rifle and in March of 1880 they would get approval to start an actual trials program to see if there's any merit here whatsoever one sergeant in three enlisted men of the 123rd Royal Welsh rusev years would be enlisted to test the following rifles for corporate check a Hotchkiss a winchester 1876 thatly rifle of ours the Gardiner rifle the green rifle and the vet early they would also test two additional systems the crank a quick loader and the Mayhew cartridge holder neither obviously survived the trials for long our star the remington lee was fitted with a martini-henry patterned barrel five rounds single-stack magazine and chambered for the 45 caliber Gatling cartridge for these tests in May of 1881 of the test Winchester's had a cartridge detonate in the tube injuring the shooter from this point Center fire tube magazines were dismissed from the trials so goodbye Winchester crow upon check and Hodgkiss the vet early he managed to skirt the rules by being a rimfire cartridge but this had its own problems and so it too would fail out the gardener gun was a bit outdated and had several failures Gardner himself was busy with his machine gun and declined to update the gun so there weren't that both the green and the Lee would hold their own each facing issues with extraction but both generally being seen as worth further investigation I should also mention a couple mousers were brought in although these were more for comparison tests and often fitted with different magazine systems to see you know what are we doing are we separating out the action from the magazine is the is the magazine good and the action bad or whatever and this is before by the way the Mauser 1889 so we're not looking at chance for britain to adopt the mauser yet because the 71 which is what this is probably going to be as some version of isn't that impressive by this point in history so what exactly came of the test well there was a preference for the Lee on several points for starters it had the best balance of the bunch and it fed reliably it was strong overall and especially because of its symmetrical locking lugs it suffered only three real points of concern which were poor extraction and some nervousness about the clock on close action plus there were some ammunition issues but that really stemmed from the cartridge rather than the gun now I know that all of you are reasonable viewers who would never start frothing at the mouth the minute anybody questioned or complimented or debated cock-on open versus [ __ ] on close that would be insanity of course it has happened before and so I should probably talk about why a historical person from over a hundred years ago might have been concerned about a certain style action that some people are a bit obsessive about look [ __ ] on clothes and by the way it should define us a little bit better I'm sorry guess the cocking piece in the bolt needs to come back now does it come back when we're shoving the bolt forward so in other words we push it forward it gets snagged on something and then the spring is compressed as you bolt forward or is it that we have a camming surface so two diagonally opposed surfaces and as we rotate the bolt up it forces the spring or cocking piece back therefore compressing the spring so that's your choice it's either on the upstroke of the bolt after firing or on the in stroke of the bolt before firing all right not that good now a lot of people who prefer [ __ ] on clothes are gonna say that it's faster because they whatever they say it's faster I think that has more to do with stroke and the actual degrees rotation of the bolt but there's an argument there for it they're also going to argue that it's much simpler mechanically to get done and it doesn't require these sort of polished surfaces interacting with each other so that they can't grit up it's actually pretty valid now a problem with [ __ ] on clothes at that time and understand that this is has to be contextualized is threefold one is torque so you lack a little bit of extra primary extraction with a [ __ ] on closed system because if you're opening up a [ __ ] on open and you're putting this extra muscle into it that's transferred as torque it's minimal honestly but it's there so you get a little more on your extraction initially with a [ __ ] on open action now to there's some concerns about what we're doing sort of ergonomic Lee and when we're doing it because if you have a [ __ ] on open you shoot at something you then open the bolt and you're opening it either into your chest or up on your shoulder and you're tilting away after firing now granted if you're firing multiple shots before after doesn't matter but for the first thing some people get worried now if your [ __ ] on close that spring tensions kicking in as you're closing the bolt so you're up you're closing your bolt and now you're pushing away to the left there's a disturbance in either system the question is when do you want it that's more preference now the third issue and the most important to the British at that time when they had not and I want to make sure this comes through they do not have a lot of experience with repeating rifles okay so one of your big concerns especially when you've just had you know like a chain detonation and a tube loader because if centerfire cartridges is you don't want to double feed one cartridge into the back of another that's already in the chamber and I know it's like it will just don't leave one of the chamber and by the way this we all know this we all know and don't leave a live one of the chamber then try to bolt again but you're talking about barely literate troops who have never held a repeating rifle before on the dawn of repeating rifles they're terrified of double feeding and getting an out-of-battery explosion so if you have a compound closed system in their mind as you're pushing close that spring tension dials up and as that spring tension dials up you're less likely to feel a snag in the magazine that's going to cause a worse Jam or you're gonna throw your full weight into it because you're trying to snap that thing closed you know all that pressure is there on the clothes stroke well when you go to foot you're going to hit that primer that's already in the chamber because you forgot about it because you don't know what you're doing and then we're going to have a problem those are the three concerns with cock-on open versus cock-on closed and why the British at that time preferred cock-on open I'm sure I'm going to hear a lot in the comments because even with all that there's a million other opinions about this the report was done and the committee moved on but the Navy was chomping at the bit for a repeating rifle they were not content to make do with the single loading martini any further under naval pressure a subcommittee was begun in August of 1882 and invited a number of designs into a set of limited trials beginning in November of that same year this time we would see designs from Mon liquor Chaffee Rees Jarmon Spencer Lee and Owen Jones plus a brief reconsidering of the Gardiner gun oh and of course our remington leaf now this series of tests would result in the formation of an actual committee instead of a subcommittee and wonder why it's taking so long to get off this single shotgun anyway the full committee would go ahead and start looking around but at that same time coming over from America was a new gun the remington lee model 1882 this gun was actually trialed by the US Army and even adopted in China there was a significant refinement of the lead system and would generally impress the British but they also thought they could get a bit more out of the gun if they could let their own people at it they fitted a Henry Barrel again and again chambered it for forty five Gatling eventually it would get a magazine cutoff fitted to the left side of the action not the right like we'll see you later a separate variant was also produced using a hopper style Bethel Burton magazine system in this way the action was found to be reliable excluding the magazine so both the Leigh rifle and the Leigh magazine could be considered independently alright so at this point it's looking pretty good for the lead unless you happen to take into account that in the British system anything could be going on at any time whether you're aware of it or not and so as the trials on one side sort of stagnated some preference and steam was building up behind a completely different gun the O and Jones now this is a gun that actually is built off of the martini system so it seems warm and familiar with dozens of variations the Owen Jones was really getting a lot of scrutiny but ultimately that dropping Blanc would let in debris and it's sudo pump slide action was complicated and delicate compared to our lead well it looked like nostalgia was actually gonna win over common sense anyway because the Navy began to push hard once again and the go-ahead was given to produce 5,000 of these things but something just wasn't right in production stalled sometimes in history there is a lone hero and that man's name is Arbuthnot our bar but not our foot I don't anyway colonel are but something over there was the superintendent of royal small arms factory Enfield and when the Navy came knocking for the Owen Jones he said hey do what you want I'm not putting my name on it and I'm not going to be responsible for what happens which is the surest way to get a entire branch of the government to go what do you mean you're not put your name on it so this would kick off a series of trials between the Lee and the Owen Jones now the Owen Jones had a hopper style magazine on the side and therefore to make it more equitable they went ahead and ran the same thing and produced not a lelee but a Lee Burton with the magazine hanging off the side in the hopper style 150 of each were ordered and they were pitted head head and ultimately our friend the lead prevailed you see it was simpler less prone to jamming and easier to clear when it did parts replacement was simpler the magazines were easy to use in the Lee system despite not even being Lee magazines they had better extraction the bolt on the Lee was shorter and easier to throw then that awkward slide action on the Owen Jones and as always the falling block of the martini would still invite debris into the action so there you go the Lee rifle was the clear winner in the last man standing now I'm sitting at the tail end of 1886 we can finally see the British Empire adopt a repeating rifle late to be sure but hey patience gets you the best Oh what is that some sort of overly complicated Austrian monstrosity sweet get it in here seriously they just kept kicking that can the poor Navy was never gonna get their damned rifle all right so the Shula Hoff ultimately and I'm not giving away too much turned out to be too complicated and expensive to produce but it reinvented one big question that kept haunting the British over and over and over again which is what kind of magazine system are we gonna go with here we have three options we have a fixed magazine that's permanently in the rifle like we see what the mousers later on and then they also have to argue like well we got the Lee that thing's sweet it pops right out we can carry extras and pop them in that's good and then somewhere in between there's something that you'll eventually see on things like the Ross rifle where you have a semi fixed magazine that maybe popped in and out easily by an armorer but not by the individual soldier there's some weird benefits there but it's not worth discussing let's get to the far end so on the fixed magazine the magazine is always with you it's always ready to go you can't lose it it's very hard to damage from the outside but it adds weight to the rifle and if it malfunctions because magazine systems weren't entirely reliable back then and they were still sort of undiscovered country if it malfunctions boom the gun malfunctions it now for the other part of that is especially in British doctrine they really wanted to control the troops by command and individual action was highly discouraged so the idea that you had a ready-to-go magazine always attached the gun and you could slip in an extra round or two and the CEO wasn't paying attention and there's some reason that really didn't like that now if the detachable magazine system was used and by the way I have to point out at this time one key factor of the Lee magazine that worried the British is that you loaded the magazine off the gun not on it like we're so used to where you could pop it in and thumb them in or take it out and thumb them in no no no it's only really easy to load off the gun loading on the gun was weird and didn't work right so with a detachable system you had to fumble for the magazine and attach it if you wanted it but conversely the commanding officer can always just to look over and tell whether or not you're firing singularly or not so there's a strong benefit there you also have a sort of rapidity of loading if you have detachable magazines that has not been sorted out by a clip system yet on the fixed magazines so that's a plus basically this is getting tossed back and forth as hard as it can go the matter was really not quite resolved when coming back from America yet another gun was introduced this time the remington lee model 1885 and this gun allowed you to load easily through the open action or with the magazine removed and for some odd reason that settled the whole issue for the British now I do not have a remington lee 1885 to show you but I do have an 1899 so let me make some room this gun came out later it was Lee's final attempt at a military rifle with his action and it doesn't have nearly as many updates as the Lee Enfield did so whereas the 1885 would have been a black powder rifle with a slightly different bolt head that I'll show you in a moment the main features we care about are still here so a bit of an anachronism but I think it'll work for our purposes so let's take a look at the pre Lee Enfield leave oh there we go and I should clarify this gun being 1899 came after the adoption of the Lee system in Britain but again the real big important things we're gonna see here today so if we take a look boy is that familiar we have a [ __ ] on close action hmm we have rear locking lugs and on this particular gun we also have front locking lugs as a matter of fact let me get out my pet in the plastic pokey hand there we go front locking alright now this was not on the 1885 this was an attempt to strengthen it later on so what you need to do is ignore these guys and pay attention to these back here because this outer rib and the nub up underneath these are the locking surface on the pre british leave and british lee now we have our detachable magazine which is releasable right here and down we go this one's modernized a bit by being foldable out of sheet steel but same basic idea at single stack alright that's important and again we can load it off the gun for on the gun now overall this is a very good very advanced military system and it's unusual in that we have an advanced magazine system and an advanced bolt system both of which are simple and reliable now I will point out a lack of extras you're not seeing mechanical safety on this and you wouldn't have on the 1885 either just a half [ __ ] position and then full [ __ ] to get what you want but overall again very impressive rifle system for the time 1885 - a few little features from this gun sorry guys somebody loan me your 1885 alright so the British are impressed very impressed but there's still something missing it just doesn't quite line up to their doctrine and that's when they unleashed Joseph speed he'd come to the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield at age 25 and was employed as an engineer here work his way up to manager by 1891 and after our date here but for now he was furiously taking out patents on improvements for systems like the lead most importantly well maybe not most importantly overall in the terms of every little improvement he did that might actually save a life or take one most importantly to the British he developed a magazine cut off that would fit this gun and therefore allow a soldier to single load the gun with no magazine in place okay so we can sit here and use it like this with this guy in our pocket or alternatively we can fit this guy so fast and then pop open that and we're good to go alright that cut off is the final piece for the British to actually go ahead and say you know what detachable magazine done we're fine with it all the kinks have been worked out of the system so we just have to go pair it up with our new 402 cartridge that we worked on with the martini trials because we liked that one and what else could possibly change hey did you see what that guy Rubin was doing recently it's pretty fascinating yeah he's some Swiss dude with great ideas about small bore cartridges moving at high velocity I mean he also has developed some jacketed bullets with the help of his buddy Hepler and his own testbed magazine rifle that honestly seems pretty sweet so that leads the British to experimenting with his rifle which they ultimately reject and a new point two nine eight of an inch small bore high-velocity cartridge that is making them question the 402 now we've talked before about the benefits of high speed flat shooting ammo so no need to rehash the obvious here the only hang-up is the black-powder fouling it's a good thing that we have that Metford pattern rifling because that already tidies it's up before it becomes a real issue all right I feel like what we're seeing time and again is hey hey hey meanwhile the Navy is pounding their fists in anger and we still have a single-shot rifle when the rest of the world is moving on so at this point we have the action figure it out we have the magazine figured out both of which are very advanced we are eyeballing a new small small bore compressed black powder cartridge it looks like it's gonna give us a good go we're settled in it's time probably for some proper full-size troop trials because look at some point whether it's perfect or not you have to and I'm sorry for the pun pull the trigger so are we finally ready Britain to pick our next repeating rifle off the French yep that's right folks smokeless powder has been invented and the Empire is still sitting squarely on top of the single-shot large bore black powder martini-henry we've beat this revolution to death but if you really need to know about it go back to episode 1 and deal with our terrible microphone quality all right the 402 cartridge is definitely out and the fir this like 298 well we're rounding that to a hardpoint three-inch we're going with that and we don't have any smokeless powder but well do compress black powder for now that'll get us through what we're developing and then it'll somehow sort this out on the backend but we have got to catch up because now it's on and so also back in the US Lee is going to improve his gun again in 1887 with a stronger separate bolt head which you might have seen on this guy because he's from the future and ultimately a gas shield and things like that all right we know we have to do too bad we're on the rails so welcome to ordnance procurement and development because we had already put out orders to go ahead and put together 300 Lee's with Lee magazines and Lee's with Burton magazines even though we've already basically made up our minds because again one hand and the other and they're all chambered in 402 which seems pointless at this juncture but it's April of 1887 we have no time to turn this and we've already started these things let's just see what happens okay as a matter of fact the 402 was so close to adoption that thousands of martini actions had been made out for trials and the expectation that they'd altima Talebi issued and therefore compatible with the latest cartridge they were so numerous that a conversion program was put into place to retain for them for the old five 77450 cartridge as a reserve arms preventing them from being completely useless all right we're getting closer it's getting more tense but we're getting closer now the Burton mag did not fly the Lee mag did done okay so we got a lead with Ali and we just a few more tweaks right okay so let's let Joseph speed in there he's gonna add things like a long-range dial sight that we'll see in a minute we're also going to see some improvements to the magazine spring and general layout of the gun to use manufacture it's a great man to have around also about this time we'll see what would become the pattern 1888 sword bayonet worked up now this is a two edged poker and would stay with the rifle pretty much for the course of its life until we see a new pattern a gun and shortly thereafter a new a bayonet in our next episode all right the British definitely know they're behind the gun now because they are speeding up as a matter of fact they push for general global trials even though they haven't worked up their own smokeless powder yet so they have to go with a compressed black powder in a point 3:03 inch for this is the birth of a very recognizable number and they're gonna have to just sort of go with what they got and run the trial with a cartridge that they're not even expecting to truly adopt they're just getting close to so since it's still black powder and they don't know anything better to experiment with it's Metford rifling all right so let's get them together and get them out to the far corners of the Empire the 1888 trials guns would make it to Egypt Canada Ireland Bengal Bombay Madras good old rainy England and were additionally carted around by naval forces where everything happened to go for just over a year small improvements stacked the bayonet log in nose camp were combined and the ejector and cocking piece simplified magazine capacity was up from seven rounds to eight single stack and a left-side thumb safety was devised for the gun and a wooden handguard fitted during the trials as we said these guns were in a 303 bore but the cartridge is not the one we think of today this was 303 Reuben a nearly straight walled rimmed case interestingly the committee head heavily tested a rimless configuration and found it superior but were strongly discouraged by the then superintendent at Enfield John Rigby so we had one man save the day another one create problems for the next hundred years the ribbon cartridge used a split ring to hold the bullet firmly in place at the case mouth this would during trials fail on occasion and caused massive damage such as bulging barrels or even bursting so they would change the shape and develop what would become the 303 mark one cartridge which after the later adoption of smokeless powder would change names to avoid confusion they used to compress black powder palette to drive a lead bullet with a cup or nickel jacket which sadly tore easily in the mark 2 in July of 1890 thus benefited from a thicker jacket with more turnover at the base better securing it to the leadcore the interior of its case was also varnished to prevent corrosion from black powder neither of these rounds used the candle or or crimp and so many a bullet was left behind when a live case was extracted all right ladies and gentlemen at this point I want to make one personal announcement which is that I am working from a pseudo script it's basically a large document of notes that I then commit to easier temporary memory and try to string together in a sense a cool fashion and when we did our amazingly long Lewis gun episode we reached 24 pages total now we have not gotten to our first gun today and we are on page 17 as I type that almost crying to myself the other night and now as I sit here reading it again I almost want to shed a tear this episode was a titanic effort in just gathering resources and research and material so I hope you're enjoying it because at this point we can now say that we've had several approvals for the trials gun but ultimately it makes it into the British list of changes December 1st 1889 so may I present to you the magazine rifle mark 1 which would later be restructured to rifle magazine lee-metford mark 1 it featured a single stack eight round magazine and unique loos front sight which we'll cover in a moment an initial order of 200 thousand for roughly 5 pounds each would be immediate but of course that would grow the government Arsenal's at Enfield and spark Brookwood of course produced the rifles alongside the commercial concerns Birmingham Small Arms Company and London's small Arms Company Britain's first repeating rifle had finally landed it sported a very familiar left-side safety switch but it's not quite the same construction as the one we'll see later the gun was issued with one magazine secured to it by a chain to prevent loss this would later become a simple loop a second was issued for rapid emergency loading soldiers then just carried a bunch of loose cartridges so that they could refill the magazines now this first model the Metford mark I do not have one here and there very uncommon to come across because production was sort of slowed especially in the beginning years because there are so many small changes that came about right after its adoption now these are little tweaks that don't amount to an advancement of the designation of the gun and we'll talk about those in a moment but let me give you an example so this gun benefits from one of those changes which is that the handguard here used to be square fit and tight and therefore when troops wanted to clean under it and if you've seen marks video you know you want to look under there once in a while they would take their bayonets and pop them off and crack them so in order to solve for that case of ingenuity they would go ahead and undercut them so that you could just put your fingers up here and pop it off so just little things like that that don't make a big difference but they kept slowing down production in November of 1891 the first British smokeless round would follow this boxer prime cartridge performed much more admirably plus it smells great they fixed that bullet problem with the crimped case mouth and this would see several upgrades but we're only going to hit a choice few in the next two episodes all right things are finally looking up for the Empire they've adopted put this somewhere so it's out of my way and we're not quite ready for you yet but you can stay there they've adopted a new repeating rifle and they have their first smokeless round this is going to be good but something is it's just nagging us a bit does anybody else notice that that front sight is just a complete pain in the tokus you see this is the lose sight which I'm sure somebody won't tell me I'm mispronouncing and should seem familiar to you if you've handled a later French Bertier but basically uses a wide front sight block with a central tiny notch this is meant to allow quick Grouse sighting and then if necessary use the notch for fine sighting well wonderful in theory it wasn't all that instinctive and that front sight right that little notch would take a beating and get mashed and deformed so it was time to give it up for regular old and much preferred Barleycorn front sight Envy rear notch at the same time they'd adjust the rear sight which had a slight tangent component to it on the original mark 1 the rear sight could be adjusted in one of two positions either 300 or 400 yards now they'd go ahead and provide a slope ranged from 200 all the way up to 500 yards these changes in the removal the safety from the left side sorry they just didn't seem to care for it would result in the mark 1 star other changes would include moving the unit marks from the butt plate which we're getting ground off during drill practice onto a unit disc in the stock a piling swivel improvement for making a rifle teepee and some mags spring in striker spring upgrades plus they rounded up some of those sharp edges on the guns so you don't get an ouchie this model did not last long however because James Paris Lee was added again this time he had developed the double stack magazine meaning the lee-metford could have ten rounds instead of eight and still have a shorter magazine I should note there is at least one patent from 1883 in the US that describes a double stack system held by one a Louis but it looks like Lee gets the credit here this would kick off another series of trials in a small batch of trials guns with the new magazine found satisfactory all the faults found in the endeavor would be rolled into the lee-metford mark 2 these guys had wider foreigns with no finger grooves a combination front barrel band a nose cap still no safety present besides the half cocked position they now sported brass butt plates with deep tangs for the unit marks ditching the discs the lower swivel was moved from the front of the trigger guard all the way to the back of the buttstock the magazine cutoff and bolt cover were both simplified into serving as their own Springs instead of having separate Springs and the magazine was linked by that simpler swivel like I mentioned before and the bolt head attachment screw was ditched replacing it by a head that is threaded directly onto the bolt body now at the same time the British would give up on the cleaning raw the full-length rod the length of the barrel with the jag on it from moving patches and the other they decide nananananana this is too complicated let's go with a pull through rope essentially a bore snake which we're used to today now the problem with that though is you still have use for the rod-like let's see this stuck case and this is early days for smokeless ammo so that happened so they would replace it with a half-length rod with no jag or you know serration - it was just a rod that would be able to be threaded into another half length rod so bar your buddies and then that gave you what they called a clearing rod so that you could punch out a stuck case this would stick around for a while but we'll see it wander off - now at this point I need to mention carbines which is a whole other episode unto itself and really not as relevant for World War one because you're gonna see upgrades to this gun but not necessarily to those guns so we'll save it for another time when we have the energy and I can actually get more than three hours sleep so one big thing that we need to talk about though is that the cavalry in demanding a carbine form of this gun also demand the safety the army was perfectly content with just a half [ __ ] position at this point they aren't worried about a manual separate safety but cavalry no no they want it they want to carry chamber hot flick and go and they've been whining about it whining on the old martini-henry that they had no option for this for that either and it just irritated them to no end so now they had a new gun they were sure as heck gonna get this safety and they would attach it straight to the cocking piece right there this little guy was rolled into the next long rifle as well and that was the only real change because a new problem was rearing its head and would need addressing very soon you see that Metford rifling had been trialed on a black-powder cartridge and unfortunately the new cordite rounds were burning them up the erosion was so severe that generally took fewer than 6,000 rounds to ruin a rifle which sounds like a lot don't get me wrong but why settle for that when you could get double the life out of it Royal small arms factory infield would spend some time experimenting with various patterns of rifling and ultimately come up with something new they would adopt a 5 groove hard shouldered pattern with a bit more depth than the Metford now I'm oversimplifying this issue and the solution the truth is Metford rifling goes all the way back to the 402 cartridge in before it was designed for lead project also earlier smokeless powders had their own problems that would add to this issue but the shortest scene is possible story is that Metford rifling was good enough for black powder but not for smokeless paired with the new government and field pattern rifling that made this the lee-enfield mark 1 it was approved in November of 1895 and was otherwise identical to the magazine lee-metford mark 2 star and that ladies and gentlemen is this gun here we made it together I hope everybody's awake because we're ready to show this thing off let's get a closer look BAM alright guys close your mouths suck up the drool we got work to do so at this point I kind of got to make up for not showing off a Metford now let's go by the book so we've got a bolt-action repeating rifle it loads from a detachable magazine that has loopy doop there and a loopy doop here later on they would ditch the linking well link on this one it never had a chain it would just have a single swivel loop looking things they would ditch it later because the doctrine changed away and we'll talk about that another time but originally you would have had this permantly attached to rifles so you couldn't lose it and a spare mag that you could then click in and this would hang loose and then you'd have to switch back in hand load if you got that desperate but hey at least you had not 5 but 10 that's this twice 10 there you go 10 rounds to work with so you know 20 rounds 4 2 mags you're getting pretty good you should probably find some cover by then and be able to reload now we have a separate bolt head that is threaded on I don't actually want to take this bolt apart because it has the dust cover and as a matter of fact I should probably turn off my patented plastic pokey and so that I can show you guys the details so this cover right here is a spring onto itself it's clipped in at the back and it rides in these two logs that's up under them a little bit in order to get this off it's a complete pain and honestly I can show you these features a little bit later in the episode just fine so if I bolt this guy forward we're gonna see that the cocking piece comes back because it's [ __ ] on while you're trying to show this and not be in my own way [ __ ] on close so they're clocking piece stayed in our bolt went forward and then we have our safety here and that's just a flick up which is a little bit of an awkward hand stroke but when you're ready to fire it's just tack and ready to go so beautifully positioned and fairly simple all it is is a half moon in there that turns in the path the cocking piece you'll get to see that in our animation in a moment now the other interesting things on this gun would be the magazine cutoff which again is a spring unto itself in order to use it there is a nub right there and that's what's sort of holding it in place if I tug on it if I push down and over we are now into the mag so that's a good visual indicator that you can leave your detachable magazine attached and if you have your co over on the right side of your line he can see whether your mags open or not and control single or repeat fire now let me get this closed up and being cocked on close I can hold the trigger and let that down nice and easy and by the way guys I know a lot of people will say things about keeping everything D cocked in your collection and a lot of people will actually pull the trigger and let a cocking piece down rather rapidly every time they store it because in their minds they're preserving spring tension I just want to say compressing or uncompressing the spring that's where the wire comes from leaving it compressed doesn't really shorten its life by any significant amount compared to the this stroke you just did to release it so cocked or not cocked it's not a big deal it's not wearing out the gun all right so let's bring back and look at our ladder sight not the later tangent sight we're used to on a model yet-to-be-named so first of all like I said before we can adjust this in a tangent position so I can run this slider up and then boom we're getting a little more creep or we can flicker all the way up and do our range sights all the way up to let's do some reading I've got a 1 in the Nate which means we're at 1,800 yards fairly optimistic on this little guy but we could take it one step further because if I flip her around this one has what is known as a dial wandering style site or a lot of people call it the volley site because it was used for volley fire by troops on mass so you flicked this rear aperture site up which is just a little hole through there and then we would go back over here and adjust our plate now this has a number of ranges marked along the backside you would set this pointer to your range and then look through your aperture site at this notch that brings your gun to a very high angle so that you can just sort of lob shots you know down on some target in the far distance now these are extremely optimistic in their utility and ultimately as we will see will be dropped from not immediate next models but some models down the line now I would like to point out one thing this has no provision for clip loading it is singularly loaded or you swap out the magazine those are your two options and honestly swapping out the magazine is not a bad option that's a very modern idea because it's certainly how we would do it today anyway there's only a couple other little things to look at guys you've seen these sights and things like that and this one as you can tell would have had a clearing rod half length stopping here going up to the end and there's a hole in the bayonet log mount up here we'll talk more about that in just a moment but since we finally have the gun in hand I think we can turn it over to Bruno and see a clearer animation of just how this thing works all right as we load up this gun and bolt home you'll notice that she [ __ ] on the closing stroke and locks at the rear another thing to notice though is that this has a single pull trigger this is not a two-stage ER there's no take-up you are on the sear the whole way through [Music] the safety is pretty much straight forward twist that Halfmoon into position and boom you've blocked up the cocking piece in there for the action notice that this is a double stack magazine which means that we have to control the feed from both directions you're gonna see a lot of rework done to these feed lips over the years and I recommend reading material for that if you really care ultimately though there's gonna be feeding problems for the life of this gun up until they get it just right and even then if you dig up your magazine you've got problems [Music] alright let's get this over to May and see how it handles [Music] Oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you know that was a lovely day on the range the third attempt at filming on the range after repeated weather equipment and small-arms malfunctions and repeated trips to the repair depot with mark I'm very glad that this episode is now getting done alright so this little guy would not actually last all that long because in May of 1899 the British had it up to here with the clearing rod and would abolish it banishing it to the land of things you wish you could find a hundred years later this resulted in the mark 1 star which had no rod and no corresponding holes for rod that's it I mean they'd also modified the bayonets at it and have to have a hole either but really guys they got rid the holes now this would be the last update for the longley as the primary infantry arm of the United Kingdom instead we'll see another gun step up during our next episode but how did this rifle really fare well in terms of colonial administration pretty good I mean it's definitely as good as the martini-henry in that regard and they get a lot more rounds it's easy to command troops with because everything on it's so visual you know what's going on ultimately it's rugged it didn't malfunction easily this is fine I mean especially if you're just dealing with indigenous peoples that have inferior equipment it's probably probably part of why you didn't feel like you needed a magazine loader in a big hurry anyway right like you're not in a competition with other first world nations at that time for small arms your Britain you're sitting off to the side I mean you're an agitator sure but you know nobody's popping shots back and forth that is of course until you get to the Boer War from 1899 to 1902 the Metford and the Enfield would be pitted against a mix of arms fielded by Dutch speaking African settlers on the veldt in this regard I'm saddened to say a number of problems with the lee-enfield arose you see one common sight in this conflict would be the Mauser model 1895 a gun will actually be discussing in future in detail for now this seven millimeter flat shooter was highly accurate robust and quick loading thanks to its five round stripper clips by comparison the magazine lee-enfield Lincoln off two magazines fairly quickly which was an impressive 20 rounds or so but and after that it was a mess of fingers and thumbs additionally the end fields were shooting wide you see they had fixed factory sights in poor inspection investigation showed up to 20 inches of deflection at 200 yards and when signed it out for six hundred yards ammo was falling up to 70 yards short in open African country this was unacceptable reforms went into effect immediately well almost immediately and one of the biggest issues is just the sighting from the factory was not up to a high enough standard so part of this too is the front sight here is just fixed it's just boom set on that barrel there's no dovetail no adjustment up here it's locked in and so that means that from the factory that's what you got well that's not going to do so Britain would kick off a program where come the factory these would have dovetailed front sights and they would be adjusted after construction on every single gun and every single gun would be test shot to make sure that was within spec that was not being done before at best it was a batch system so that cleaned up a good bit of the issue but there's still more problems this long for stock well if it's swelled or changed any sort of dimension in the heat or cold it changed the bearing pressure on the barrel because it is touching that barrel and that's gonna throw off this harmonics it's gonna throw off your point of aim and we know where this is at so a big part of the improvement of this gun would be just sort of carving out a little deeper I'm setting that for stock opening up that muzzle band just a little bit giving the barrel room to expand and contract but as nice as these little features are they're not solving the major problems with this gun some inherent design flaws if you're looking for extremely long range accuracy also this is a very large and cumbersome gun and the carbine version which we are not really getting into was too short because it had problems with accuracy on its own just from having a short sight radius and short barrel lengths where you're losing a lot of your power from the cartridge Britain was gonna basically need to increase the carbine length and shrink their rifles and it really put in their heads to try a universal short rifle which is something that we are going to talk about on our next episode ultimately that's gonna result in a very familiar rifle but we are not there yet without saying too much I just want to point out that these load from a stripper clip thanks to a charger bridge for those of you who absolutely have to go in chronological order you might want to just pause and wait two weeks or if you're watching this after this has all been released pause and go to the other video but like I said that short rifle became the standard and it's stripper clips - five rounders five to five rep there that was how you're going to fill your mag now with the stripper clip unfortunately there's not really a way to yeah that's not gonna work so what this gun realistically would need is an update to the charger bridge pattern because otherwise you're issuing all your ammo like this now the only other alternative to improving the gun is that everybody gets their ammo and gets one of these has to then unpack all their clips and put it somewhere on their body and load very slowly and suffer the disadvantages of the previous model or we can just get to riveting you see this gun seems to have been approved in 1907 but never really acknowledged until 1914 when it was referenced in regards to updates to new ammunition standards this charger loading lee-enfield could actually be made from either an Enfield or a Metford our photo is actually a Metford with original rifling other than the charger bridge which was not to allow a shallower sight there really wasn't any change to this old gun the process was only applied to guns with double stack magazines because previous attempts to update the single stacks to double had been sort of prohibitively costly and just a pain in the butt the charger loading Lee Enfield marked one appears to have been primarily a naval adaptation which would explain why it tends to sit outside the pattern set by the next two variants here we have the charger loading lee-metford mark 2 approved in July of 1907 this was a much more documented conversion and more thorough again a charger bridge was fitted there was no attempt to add a safety as these were all made from mark 2 Medford's they would be fitted with a new ladder site which sported an adjustable windage dial and was raised enough to clear the bridge without having notch it like that charger loading lee-enfield mark 1 most of those guns would go on into reserve or naval duty as well and honestly what I'm going through the notes on these things there's a little bit of a murky area here there's some obvious differences between the two patterns in terms of what was updated and whether or not site hoods were fixed and things like that realistically these are both earlier versions of an attempt to get one of these into a more modern pattern and they would both give way to a much more standardized form known as the mark 1 star which I just so happened to have here so we are onto our net stray 'fl and our next light box adventure overall length and weight are just about the same we certainly didn't add any length and weight really change that much because for the fact that we put on a charger bridge we took off some other extra fiddly bits magazine capacity is still 10 rounds of 303 Brit well this standard pattern had barely made it into production when the British went ahead and updated their ammo again now I've skipped several very controversial marks of ammunition we're briefly going to talk about them in the next episode for now we have gone all the way up to the smokeless mark 7 cartridge this was Britain's Spitzer bullet point II and fast it used a composite core with aluminum up front and led in the rear although they would substitute fiber in the front during the war the new cartridge meant everything needed new sights and so all the Charger loading conversions would get one last dress up as their sights were modified or swapped out to bring them up to standard now I understand this must seem like a lot of work just to keep an old dog in the fight and we're talking about you know Britain which was a smallish volunteer army I mean nowhere near as big as the armies in Europe and they had a really strong industrial base and good military budget so honestly it's kind of odd that they put so much emphasis on keeping these around when they could have just produced more of what is now the standard short pattern but if you think about it even so that means a couple hundred thousand of these things could be turned back around into useable guns as long as you kept plowing away at the back stock and ultimately that would prove to be a very good idea because they come in handy when war were declared now these guys did see a little bit of use in the war don't get me wrong they wind up on boats and things like that if they were still sitting around but we're talking about all for one there's a lot more of these guys getting out in the field because well they can take the place of a standard service rifle they're just a little awkward but let's go ahead right now and take a closer look at what really marks the difference between the original Enfield and one of these guys all right this gun by the way before anybody says anything is that the far limits of its serviceability this thing has seen a hundred years of hard use and thanks to Mark it actually ran we have an approximate handguard fitted because the original one was lost and we had to go back and give it a nice magazine cutoff which conveniently is marked Union of South Africa even though this gun is not so it's a little janky let's be fair but that's okay because it's gonna show us basically how this gun can perform at the end of its service life because these were used guns in the war although certainly better condition than this if you can't handle it it's worse then I guess you're not gonna like it at its best so let's take a look with our patented plastic pokey hand at what's going on everything back here is basically the same except this guy right here you remember my desperate struggles for ammo earlier well now I can take my five rounder and strip in and then I can take my second five rounder and perceivably strip in although we'll find out that that's not always easy and then we bolt forward and we're good to go so we are caught up with the current service rifle we still have our volley sight and dial and we still have now have an updated rear sight OOP see if you can see that it's the same sight ladder overall except we've added a windage dial now this one unfortunately is a bit worn out so she's gonna tend to walk in normal circumstances this would be fairly tight this guy's just had a hard life again we've got notches on the backside here we can dial this guy out so that we can adjust for windage so that we can aim a little left or a little right if we've got some nice sideways force going and that really brings this site up to at least comparable standard to what we'll see in next week's effort well next two weeks episode again I don't want to give everything away but try to keep in mind because you're going to see some other things later now another addition to this gun is that they were all upgraded to an adjustable front sight which therefore necessitated a protective wings so that it didn't get knocked out of alignment so there's our protective wings and none of these got to keep any of their cleaning or clearing rods they were all put on a single standard of nothing up here and a pull-through cord now with all that covered let's go ahead and get this thing to May and again it's a very rough Pony let's get over to Maine and see what she can make out of this gun on the range [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey the old girls got a little get up and go is still in her the rifle didn't do too bad either so how important was this gun to the war well honestly very initial losses for the British in terms of equipment were devastating I'm gonna see that again in another World War but being able to reach back and pull out you know not tens but hundreds of thousands of guns for active duty out of nowhere you know I mean even if they weren't converted at the time it took to convert them was nothing compared to the production of a new rifle that was vital and so these guns kept Britain in the running during a very trying period before production could catch up to war demands making them fairly impressive sure in a pinch the old Metford Renfield's would have been fine enough for training or naval duty but the charger loaders were worth their weight in well normal guns they would see fairly broad use and while they were supposed to be relegated to the rear they often made it to the front do to complete shortages of the standard short magazine lee-enfield mark three I mean we've already covered that the British were desperate enough to put on Osaka into naval use among other designs anything taking the standard ammunition was above acceptable now these little darlings weren't so valuable that they kept making them into the war you would see conversions from the initial pattern to the updated mark seven sites all the way through the war but you were not gonna see new conversions complete from scratch basically the old met fruits and in fields that weren't converted they were out to wherever they were out usually shipboard these guys were gonna head and field it or upgraded within already being set up for charger loading because factories are better set to just go ahead and do the short rifle that's more important at this time but it doesn't mean that they weren't well valued as a matter of fact I managed to hear a couple of accounts of troops preferring this gun however since I didn't get a name or tight reference I'm not gonna completely claim it but I could see it I mean at least one of the advantage of this gun is that if you have your sites dialed in correctly after the border war problem you can now have this incredible site radius and a nice long barrel firing a nice light heavy hitting cartridge yeah I could see it being very useful it certainly seems serviceable to me as long as it's still in good shape but that's really going to be the last of my opinion because we really need to wrap up some loose ends and reach a stopping point for his part medford was awarded 6,500 pounds for the use of his rifling he stayed on to help and advised in the attempted adoption of that 402 cartridge and later he'd work on the 303 but in 1892 his poor health forced his retirement he would pass away in 1899 James Paris Lee's role was wrapped up before adoption was even finished although like we said his double stack magazine would later shake things up it has been recorded that it received $50,000 'us for his patent plus an additional fifty cents per magazine made until a total of $250,000 was met making a lee-metford rifle a great financial success for him I'm sorry to say that while traveling in Europe in 1888 his wife would die of heart failure in London this would just about break the man and he'd return home to never journey abroad again instead he would spend his time pursuing some more recognized designs in the US like the one I showed you earlier and ultimately semi-retired in Connecticut before passing away of illness in 1904 alright well that wraps us up for this part of the story except we still need to go get an opinion on the two guns that we shot today so let's make room for May and see what she thinks about this and the other one all right we made room once more for me and with a lot of extra effort more room for two guns so if I give you that watch the ceiling and then I'll take this guy would you stop it's not that tall in here guys it's a very small set I could probably just put holes in either wall from this don't poke the gun okay so we're here to talk about the magazine lee-enfield the long in and we have two versions to cover a single Lauder or just whole magazine Lauder and then this guy a charger Lauder ultimately there's not a lot of difference between the two except for the charger bridge and charger loading and the change in the sight pattern so I think we can mostly talk about that guy it's all gonna translate to this one and then we'll get to a point where we can talk about some differences so if you will will you walk us through the ergonomics yes so first off definitely long boy's gonna agree with the thighs now okay you fit it all on frame long heavy and they're actually a little bit barrel heavy too which doesn't really help us shooting but it's still manageable on this guy it's just not fantastic tough to deal with but I believe in you guys y'all can handle it I handled it just fine anyway it's got a two-piece stock which adds in the strength to it which is great because of that extra strength they were able to make the wrist just a little bit thinner so I'm able to get a full finger grip I it's perfect there's a deep swoop right here that I'm able to get a nice good purchase on it pull it right into my shoulder it's fantastic I love this in my pistol grip it's amazing thank you next the mag drop easy enough to pull the mag out popping back in it's a little bit of finesse but you can get it it's still nice and easy the magazine cut off very easy to operate and you saw on camera operated it fine as well not incredibly useful I mean sure if I just want to put one in at a time not have to deal with a mag alright decent enough but in battle like I can't quite see it super usefulness I lost my mag somewhere but other than that you know it functioned well so good job now let's say operating the bolt on both of these is very smooth however on this guy the dust cover it does actually kind of make the operating the boat a little bit a grittier just not quite as smooth it just drags a little bit more so I do prefer operating the charger loader bolt and next but certainly not least I want to mention the bolts on this guy it is sticking out further than say the smelly which kind of tucks under this one is sticking out further I'm able to get a nice decent pinkie under it so I still got enough leverage that I feel like I'm really able to get a good handle on that bull and I'm not losing it into the stock any which is fantastic now last would be the safety guys are giving me such crap about keeping my thumb to the side but look at this I can operate the safety one thumb on the side I don't have to reach around or anything weird like that so man I'll probably get some crap for that but deal with it I can operate the safety on one side with my thumb yeah ergonomics wise it's got a little bit of weird funky bits to it but it's kind of cool honestly there's not a lot to dislike about these guns in terms of handling and ergonomics considering that most of this pattern I mean we just talked about all the upgrades but most of it was sealed back in 1889 and yet we still have this beautiful beautiful deep semi pistol grip stock thin the profiles are fantastic yes it's longer than it needs to be but every gun was longer than it needed to be back then this is a fantastic military rifle for its day and it's why as we get into the great war it doesn't seem all that dated I mean really if you just lop the barrel off especially with these charger loaded or added on it doesn't stand out is anything different than what you'd expect from any other army but let's go ahead and talk about what we get into when we try to shoot this gun sure okay so first things first got a lot of my sights and they're decent but I don't want to get into details in the just yet just wait a moment for that one now I'm gonna aim and of course like I said before it is barrel heavy so the weight management there is just a little more difficult not quite as nice I'm gonna reach around pull the trigger boy do I enjoy that single stage trigger I mean I understand the two stage you've got a lot of take-up and the break is easy on those me personally I just for these single-stage ones because maybe it's cause I've been shooting revolvers for as long as I have it's a heavier trigger pool you can't tell when the break is happening it's just nice and clean and smooth all the way through it's very even in that pressure which I personally appreciate I enjoy that now the recoil on these guys I thought was practically nothing because there's such heavy guns and I mean I've got this decent pistol semi pistol grip down here so I've really got a good grip on this guy and the weights helping so I didn't think the Ricoh was like practically anything to worry about so everyone can handle that one now last but not least again we've mentioned it before this is a [ __ ] enclosed and operating this bolt I want to point out it's very smooth it's clean it's fast I mean you can really handle this guy but the problem is is again I just it's that [ __ ] on close so like I'm having to compress that spring when pushing the bolt forward so I'm having to compress it and push it away from my body as opposed to [ __ ] on open which is compressing the spring when I'm pulling it back into me me personally I prefer that pulling it back into me because I feel like I'm really still able to keep my grip on the gun I'm not losing any of it whereas pushing it away from me I'm losing all of it just a little bit having to basically reset myself on the gun I personally just prefer the [ __ ] on open but otherwise shooting this guy it performed really well it performed fairly well I will say that the barrels on these two however have seen better days they are they're all workhorses so the shots weren't as accurate as I would have liked them to be but they still perform well for their age yeah poor May had to fight the test of time and some of you have probably seen marks video and understand just how limiting that can be but ultimately still decent rifles I mean we're heading to a very positive place in this regard but there's still some more details to work through namely some differences between the two guns now this one over here on the left with may single load only or as issued would have come with two magazines want to fix the rifle and one in your paw by the time the Great War I don't know that they kept both magazines laying around you probably just had the single load the thing so that's the context we're talking about here single loading versus charger loading and so let's work through that difference and of course like you said you wanted to talk about the sights what stands out between these two guns so sites first this guy's got a barley corn with a v-notch whereas the charger loader has a blade in a you just off of that looking between the two I actually found the blade in the you just a little bit taller and easy to read in my opinion again both were decent but this one was just slightly better plus I've got a little like an inch and a half extra site radius right here so whoo that probably did help a little bit and then if I want to I can adjust for windage not on this guy because it's a little bit warm but you know on a good one I could so that's really neat extra extra little bits there anyway charger loading it's a good idea in theory not the easiest and application with this guy because I mean in theory yes I'm able to charge a load of five and five I've got ten there it's great fantastic fun - easy to go however not the best in application because I got five in just fine the next five it was a little bit harder to push it of course I have that previous five already in there popper blows a popper close and then I've gotten through like a couple of rounds rim lock it just it kept happening didn't happen every time but like it took us several takes to really get through ten on this guy like just because rim lock just kept when happened the rims just going it kept wanting to interlock now before any of you just start commenting well I'm able to low tune there just fine sorry Brandon accent keep in mind this isn't a smelly mag this is an earlier mag so just keep an eye on the just keep an eye out for the future episode on that one and there's there's going to be a difference there but anyway I like the idea of charger loading just on this guy in particular I think I'll just put five in there and keep five on my pocket for now yeah I know a lot of you were expecting this to be the speed demon of our series and if you go on YouTube you can find a million mad minute videos and we're not doing that and there's a good reason why these are loners most of the show is loners when we work with these guns we cannot really easily replace them and so we always check our feed we want to see that spent casing coming out we want to know that we had around leave the bore so we don't have a squib and we want to see the next one feed in just fine we don't want any out-of-battery detonation x' or any other garbage I'm sorry guys I know you want high-speed low-drag chest-thumping action that's not this show you can tell by the length of this episode but anyway there's plenty of other videos for you to watch and you can certainly try on your own on your own dollar but let's go ahead and talk about our final and most important question its 1914 through 1918 of some sort and you're given one of these what do you think your chances are you have that one there you're fine what do you think your chances are of making out alive if you're issued one of these would you take it into battle okay so actually give me this guy first okay all right so for this guy I'm actually gonna give him a medium yes because like I mentioned tiny negative things that they could tweak on both the guns here there that's not where it's at like realistically I want a charger loader on this guy and that would bump it up to a 100% solid yes because he performed awesome single loaded ten rounds he shot fine like this guy definitely it's a meeting yes just wish it had charged litters so charger loading Liam field now it also gets a medium yes because of the rim lock problems that we kept consistently running into I mean all they had to do was take the rim off so the guy that decided was gonna keep the runs on there my tiny fists at you sir but realistically they're both still performed well on range even for the Asian wear of the barrels and overall they were still Pleasant and felt like organic shooters to me they really still had a great feel to them so yeah they both get me yes as I would definitely put bet my I phone them I just want to make sure I've got only five in the mag on this one and five of my back pocket yeah I think that's a fair assessment I actually despite the fact that there's no rapid loading on this gun still would really bank on it like there didn't seem to be any big problems and the other one is in the extreme state of decay and it still certainly put holes in paper so it's hard to hate on the lee-enfield even though technically there are some mechanical problems with being a rear Locker and taking all that stress I mean you can certainly see this one's not gonna be the most accurate in the world anymore but by the time of 1914 these really weren't in that rough shape I mean we're dealing with things that have had another century of aging on top of everything else so if they're still doing it in you know our backyard then they Pryor just fine in the trench but that's gonna wrap us up for today I want to make sure that I very carefully say stay behind after the credits for the updates I've got a couple things that I really need to squeeze in there for you all right have a good one guys and thanks for joining us later everyone [Music] hey everybody May here I'll be doing the update this time around while oath is is crying in a corner somewhere this was a very difficult and trying episode as you all know you've made it into it this far at least hopefully hopefully anyway I just want to get some thanks outs thank you of course to our patrons and supporters subscribers you guys are awesome you'll help us keep the show going but I do also need to give out some special thanks peste thank you for the gun it is mine now John also thank you mine now Cadis yours would be in the mail but yes I also want to take a moment to thank my parents you guys have been awesome super supportive of me especially during this weird time of my life where I decided to take on a whole whole new special role I love you guys y'all have been awesome thank you but yea thanks everybody for watching bye bye

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 407,900

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History

Id: P-stGi5PlV8

Length: 92min 10sec (5530 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2017