M1C Sniper Garand

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian I'm here today at the James Giulia auction house taking a look at some of the guns they're going to be selling in their upcoming October of 2016 firearms auction and today we're taking a look at an m1 C garand this was the first adopted us semi-automatic sniper's rifle and it was kind of a dismal failure these are extremely rare and collectible guns unfortunately they're highly faked guns as well and we'll get into why in a moment but let's begin by pointing out that when world war ii started the US had a semi-automatic standard infantry rifle and yet the most the sniper rifles that were actually used in world war ii were all bolt-action rifles well a lot of people saw that as a problem why why are we restricting snipers with this old bolt-action system when we've got the fancy new high-tech stuff for the regular infantry grunt so there was a a project to develop a sniping version of the m1 at Springfield Armory as well as being open to other entrants and ultimately after some experimentation including prismatic scopes and some some interesting ideas ultimately the the decision came down to two different variants the m1 II 7 and the m1 e8 now the e8 was a version that was designed by John garand himself and and team members and that would actually go on to be adopted as the m1 d and we'll take a look at that in a later video the m1 II 7 was a system designed by the Griffin and Hal company a well known sporting rifle manufacturer out of New York and theirs was adopted as the m1 see now there was a lot of the Springfield Armory was not happy about that decision they thought there were a lot of problems with the m1 seed design and they had some good points now the way this system works is basically just a scope rail screwed onto the left side of an m1 garand receiver the advantage here was it required basically no other modification to the gun except a couple holes in the receiver and you pin on a it was three holes for screws and two holes for tapered pins and you put the pins in to hold the mount in place tighten down the screws stake them in place and done and then you have a detachable scope base which we can take off like this so you can carry this around in a protective you know container can mount it on with presumably no loss of zero when you need to shoot lock it down presto you're good to go the problems with this really the problems all came down to cost and accuracy and it seems that actually political machinations had a lot to do with probably had a lot to do with the adoption of the m1c so the problem is let's start with the first problem which is these scope basis had to be installed before the receivers were heat treated because once they're heat treated they're very hard and they're much more difficult to drill accurately so Springfield which by the way is the only manufacturer of M ones that made sniper rifles Springfield would send receivers to Griffin and how before they'd been heat treated Griffin and how would Mont this rail and send it back to Springfield who would then heat treat the whole assembly now you might be wondering what you know how complex is this if they have to send you know Springfield Armory the nation's premier military firearms facility can't handle this scope and installation themselves well no it wasn't hard at all it was five holes drilled in the receiver and three of them tapped it was a very simple process which is kind of what points to politics being the rat being some of the what was going on in the background Griffin and he'll made a nice chunk of money doing this work that was really actually quite simple work now maybe there was some patent or copyright stuff involved but it seems more likely that some senator managed to get involved in the appropriations process and decided to be really good for his district in New York if Griffin and how got this nice lucrative contract to do this now this annoyed the snot out of Springfield Armory because in addition to it being kind of insulting that they weren't being able to handle drilling a couple of holes it was also a big hurt just a big obstacle in their production process they had to take things out of the production line send them to New York 150 miles away get them back put them back into process it was annoying it was inefficient now so there was a second problem involved with this mount a rail mounting system and that came up with accuracy testing with the early guns it was discovered that there were major accuracy problems with a lot of these early guns and some testing revealed that the reason was that the steel composition was a little bit different between the receiver and the scope rail I mean that's not shouldn't be surprising they weren't intended to be made exactly the same and the rail and the receiver have different requirements for strength and flexibility and durability and all that sort of thing the problem was they were being permanently fixed together screws pins and stakes and then heat treated as one unit and the heat treat would affect the two different compositions of steel slightly differently and you'd end up with a little bit of warping between the two parts which caused major accuracy issues so after that was discovered they realized what they had to do was send the receivers to Griffin and Howe who would set the screw set the rails in place but not stake the screws they'd come back to Springfield where the bases would then be removed and at this point they started serializing the bases so they knew which rifle I went to Springfield would remove the base heat treat the bases and the receivers separately and then reinstall them and stake the screws down at that point and this is kind of a stupid process to have to go through but once they figured that out okay they were able to address that accuracy issue there was another accuracy issue that came up that turned out the the tolerances on the scope base and the scope mount weren't really all that well done and they led to looseness there were there are a lot of these scope mounts that just didn't hold a zero well so they had to fix that and they went back and adjusted the tolerances adjusted the engineering drawings fixed that problem as well they discovered that the flash hiders if they weren't nice and tight those would actually cause the rifles to to shoot worse now if they work tight if they were done well and properly they could actually enhance the accuracy of the rifle but if they were loose they'd mess up the barrel harmonics and you get a rifle it actually shot worse than without the flash hider on it so they had to fix that all of these things led to basically the m1 scene ever being issued World War two the guns were adopted in 1944 but it took them long enough to get all these production issues worked out that the first few rifles were just barely being shipped out and issued in the Pacific when the war finally ended they were never used in the European theater because it just hadn't figured out how to get them quite right by the time the war ended in Europe no so that is the m1 see now I've kind of made it sound like a pretty lousy rifle all that aside once they got into the field you know what there they were there were durable scopes they were effective rifles one of the other here I go again one of the other problems with the m1 sea because they were mounting these rails on bare unassembled receivers there was no way to tell how accurate the rifle was going to be when you picked it out to be a sniper rifle put the rail on and then the whole rest of the rifle got assembled then you got to test-fire it and see if it was a nice accurate gun or if it was a piece of junk and a lot of them were pieces of junk relatively speaking they may have met standard m1 infantry rifle accuracy requirements but not good enough for a sniper rifle an infantry rifle was about a four minute of angle gun the m1 see requirement was three minute of angle which is still not something that most people today would consider an accurate rifle so a lot of these guns had to go back and be reworked there are a lot of little specialty things you can do to an m1 to make it shoot better and a lot of that work had to be done to these things before they would really be effective sniper rifles that said they were in service for quite some time while they didn't see use in World War two they did see use in Korea in total about 8000 of these were manufactured by the end of 1945 and then actually about half of them were unmanufactured the the scope mounts were removed the holes were plugged and the rifles were reverted back to standard configuration I believe in the late 50s unfortunately that led to a lot of those surplus scope rails becoming available on the commercial market where they were used to in many cases make fake m1 see snipers with all that in mind let's go ahead and take a closer look at the rifle we'll take a look at some of the specifications of the scope and cheek patent a couple of the other accessories so of course one of the obvious distinguishing features here is that the scope on this rifle is offset to the left and of course that had to be done because the m1 feeds from a solid eight round clip that has to go straight in the top of the rifle there's really no effective way to single feed the m1 so if you're going to put a scope on it you can't have the scope interfere with your loading so the answer was to offset the scope to the left now in order to facilitate that they added a cheek pad to the rifle it's a leather G pad what's kind of unusual about it is if you're used to add on cheek rests on scoped rifles normally you think of that as something that comes up over the top of the comb here to lift your eye up to scope level well on the m1 see the level of the optic is basically the same as the level of the iron sights this scope is low is able to be mounted very low because it's offset however obviously it's mounted off to the left so the purpose of this cheek pad is not to raise your cheek but to move your cheek to the left and that's what it does now if we look at the mount you can see the two levers here on the side if I rotate those forward I can then slide the scope off the front of this dovetail rail that works nice and smoothly that actually worked pretty well it's a nice stable mounting platform as long as the underlying rail is in good shape and the fit between the two is good you'll you'll be able to hold zero when that scope comes on and off you'll see there are two pins here and then three allen head screws if we look on the inside of the receiver you can see all those things coming through on the inside now standard army practice was to peen those screws in place so they wouldn't back out this particular rifle is a Marine Corps rework that's why those screws are not pinned this has a 1950s barrel and if we look right here you can see it's marked it's a little hard to see there you go si fifty-two so that's why this one isn't pinned in place I should point out there are no special markings aside from this Marine Corps we work on a standard m1 see you won't find anything special it's not going to be marked m1 see anywhere it'll just say us rifle caliber 30 Springfield Armory which is the only of the m1 manufacturers that made sniper rifles and the serial numbers will be between 3.2 and 3.8 million that's really all you can say there are some known blocks of rifles because the receivers were sent in small batches each time but that's that's more in depth than we're going to get into in this video now the scope that was used with this was a Lyman Alaskan which was a commercial rifle scope designed in 1937 and first introduced in Lyman's catalog in 1939 and it really was a very good scope for the day it was a two and a half power scope these had a 35 foot field of view at a hundred yards they had a 5-inch eye relief which is pretty nice that's long enough to be comfortably shootable you're not going to jam the scope into your eye shooting this we have windage and elevation adjustments here on the scope and and one minute of angle adjustments I should I should mention now there are there were some commercial Lyman Alaskans that were used early on but the standard scopes fall into two different categories the m81 and the m82 were their designations you can see this as an m-80 - the only difference between those two is the reticle so the m82 is what the army preferred and that has a single vertical post reticle the m81 was the commercial version of the reticle which was a simple crosshair I should also point out the difference between the commercial and the military scopes was this sunshade added to the front and this rubber eye cup added to the back so that's the reticle of the m82 it is a very very simple just a single vertical post zoom back out of the scope here you can see this is offset enough that you could still use the iron sights if you wanted to now let's take a look at these adjustments because this is this makes this works on a commercial hunting type rifle but it was ideal for a military sniper so if you want to make any adjustments the first thing you have to do is take off this threaded cap once that's out of the way then we have a little dial here you can see this is pretty small and there are those numbers our minutes of angle so each each of these little white hash marks is two minutes and you have clicks in between so this has one minute of angle adjustments on both elevation and windage they're quiet they're kind of subtle you can feel them but you cannot hear them there I'm assuming I can just barely hear them in fact I think I can feel them more than I can hear them and it's not going to come through the microphone so this isn't is not a super easy user-friendly system to adjust also the magnification is relatively low two and a half power however what this scope did have going for it was durability the Lyman scope was a durable piece a rugged piece it was well weatherized that's something that we really take for granted today that your scopes not going to fog up in you know inclement weather but in the 1930s that that wasn't that was more of a novel feature than it has become today so these scopes were good at all of those things from a basic military point of view this is a scope that would work it would always work it would keep working you could use as a backup weapon if he needed to and that was more important to the military than having something that was the most had the most potential precision for a sniper so we'll also take a look at this flash hider obviously this was seen as a a more specialized requirement of a sniper to conceal the source of muzzle flash a bit and this flash hider is a pretty simple thing it's just a clamp on accessory it snaps on to the bayonet lug and the muscle and it's just a plain hollow cone if it's raining by the way and you have one of these on your m1 don't carry it muzzle up as one of the early manuals points out it will act like a funnel to direct rainwater down the bore of your rifle which is a problem and to fit this you just slide it on it's held there held there and that little spring latch loops around behind the bayonet lug and holds it in place so you can see this hider comma flash comet m2 as I mentioned Aberdeen did some studying on these flash hiders and discovered that if they were loose kind of like this which most of them were they would contribute to some significant accuracy problems with a rifle now if they were a nice tight fit you didn't have that issue but this is part of the reason that when the m1 C was in production the acceptance rate on first run rifles was only 40% so more than half of the m1 C's that came right out of the factory were immediately rejected and apparently the rework success rate was even less was only about 20% once once a rifle got rejected only about one in five of them could actually be restored up to the level of accuracy that was required for service adoption well thank you for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video these really are very cool interesting and collectible rifles even if they didn't really fill the sniper rifle role quite as well as everyone had hoped back when they were being manufactured there very few of these out there it's especially difficult to find ones that are true proper provenance authentic and one season and that's why I took the opportunity to take a look at this one today because it is so if you'd be interested in adding this to your own collection definitely the highlight of any u.s. World War two collection or m1 garand collection I'll take a look at the description text below you'll find a link there to the James Julia catalog page on the rifle where you can look at their pictures in their description and if you like the thing you can place a bid by phone or come up here and participate live in the auction thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 352,106

Rating: 4.9711604 out of 5

Keywords: garand, sniper, sniping, ww2, wwii, world war 2, world war ii, history, usmc, army, united states, en bloc, m1e7, m1e8, m1d, m1c, 1903a4, 1903a1, m1903a4, m1903a1, m82, m83, m73b1, m84, flash hider, cheek rest, mrt, 30-06, jorea, korean war, cmp, odcmp, valuable, rare

Id: Cn8EEypC31M

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Garand]

Those are so cool. I'm always tempted to get one of those or an M1D from the CMP.