Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming December of 2016 Premier auction. And I have an awesome one here to take a look at today. This is a rifle that is really almost unknown, this is a Turner prototype. It is a semi-auto conversion of a Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, an SMLE. This was actually manufactured in 1941 by a guy named Russell Turner, who is an independent gunsmith and tinkerer
and inventor who lived in Pennsylvania. And he developed this for the Canadian government. And in 1941 it was actually tested side by
side with the M1 Garand by the Canadians. Now Turner is a name that we do recognise, he
also submitted a prototype to the US M1 carbine trials. And that prototype and this rifle
have a lot of very definite similarities. Their method of assembly is similar, their locking system
is basically identical, this is a long stroke gas piston with a ... tilting bolt that actually locks
to the side rather than top or bottom. Which is a system we don't see very often, it
was in the Czech ZH-29 and not very much else. Now apparently when the Canadians tested this
they were looking especially at cold weather tests, or at least that's where this one ended up, and according to Turner's notes on it, it was tested
at 25 degrees below zero and performed perfectly. He said the Garand actually had problems at that
temperature, which I can believe. We know that a lot of the US guns did have problems at very low
temperature from anecdotal reports from the Korean War. What's interesting about this is he actually
designed this with a 3 port adjustable gas system. And according to him, in the very,
very cold weather in the Canadian test they put it on to the third, the largest,
gas port and it ran flawlessly, so. Ultimately however, despite working well,
the Canadians apparently decided it was too complicated to be considered for formal adoption. But really it's a cool rifle. I'm a little
bit torn, it's a very complicated rifle, the Canadians were right about that,
but it's also a pretty nice handling piece, and as far as semi-auto bolt action
conversions go, really kind of impressive. So why don't we go ahead and tear
this down, and take a look at the insides? Alright, this thing is a gnarly mess to
take apart, so I have already disassembled it and we're going to go through the function starting
here, and then slowly reassembling it bit by bit, so that I only have to do this once
because this thing really is a mess. Turner's entry into the Light Rifle competition ... honestly,
it wasn't that much simpler of a gun mechanically. It had pretty much all the same functional parts,
but it was a much simpler and easier gun to take apart. This thing is - oy. In fact, why don't I start with
the last bit that I was not able to quite get apart, and then we'll move backwards from there. Alright, so this is a side locking bolt.
It's a tipping bolt, but it goes into the side. So there's a recess cut in the receiver right here,
the bolt pushes into that when it's fully in battery. That's what locks it. When the gas piston, right here, pushes
backwards, the piston arm and bolt carrier (sort of), here is going to go backwards, and then this link pin
is going to pull the bolt in against the bolt handle there. That unlocks it and then the whole
thing can travel rearwards, like so. Now we have a couple of cool functions.
There is this lever combined with this little tab, these function with the magazine
to give you an automatic hold open. Now, with no magazine the gun doesn't lock open. However
I can push this button in and manually lock the bolt open. This button actually pushes on that lever
on the inside of the gun and locks it open, it's not just latching it against the side. Then in
order to release the bolt I push this thumb tab forward. So it's easy to grab the handle here, push
that forward, and then the bolt will close. That's actually pretty cool. Now of course we won't go into the ... trigger
because the trigger's not installed yet. The safety is right here. This is fire, that is safe. You'll notice there's a little round cutout down here, that's because this is kind of taken after
the original Enfield safety, but modified. And this one only has this 90 degree travel. The original Enfields had closer to 180 degree travel, and the stock here was cut out for the original Enfield safety which is no longer there. You can see this little arm right here moves, that's what's effectively locking and unlocking the gun. This does lock the bolt completely, so once that's on safe I can't open the bolt. Now the rear sight is right here. Got a big easy to work with knob right there
that gives you your ranges, so it starts at 200, cranks all the way out to 1,000.
That would be 1,000 metres, assuming that this was made for the Canadians
not for the US, which it was. What that's doing is just camming the rear sight up and down. Pretty easy there. Then this knob, (just going to raise the rear sight to make it a
little handier), this knob then allows you to
adjust your windage back and forth. So that's good. The sight is adjustable, which is
nice, but you're not going to accidentally bump this. This is a fairly stiff piece to move. What you want to be
able to move more easily is the elevation knob which is easily accessible, easy to grasp, that's a good thing. Now people are going to notice this little lever and ask
what that's for. This is actually not particularly important, I'm not going to pull it out because
it's a pain in the butt to get back in. This is actually just a pin that
holds the ejector in place, so. This piece right here is our ejector,
and then this little lever has a ... pin going down into the receiver. If you pull this
out you can then remove the ejector and replace it. This isn't actually a lever, it's just a detailed
disassembly bit, so we'll leave that alone. There's a little undercut here that allows you to lift
up, so I'm just going to put a screwdriver in there, let it rest on its own weight, and then we have a little spring-
loaded tab here which I can push back (there we go), and that allows
me to pop up the side plate here. However, ... (you can see that it's locked in
place there), this I cannot get out. I don't know exactly what elements I'm missing. We do also have this lever here which I will pop open. That has to be open, as far as I can tell, this will come up, and it will come back a little bit,
but once it gets to there it's just jammed in place. So I really wish I could get that piece
off to completely open up this piece, but I've been poking at this for some
time now, and I can't get that one apart so we're going to have to leave it as is,
like that. Now, what would happen is you have the bolt handle here. Once this plate's
off, you can then pull the bolt all the way back and it will come free of these
tracks, this track right in there. Then that bolt handle is going to
pivot up off the right side of the gun, so it's just going to lift up like that. If we look closely here you can see
that there's the nose where it locks in. It'll pivot on that rounded surface right
there, and right here you can see two tabs. So this centre block with the milling marks
on it, that's the front of the gas piston, this is the bolt handle which is
going to come off as a separate piece. But I can't do that because
I can't get this side plate off. But that's what would have happened. If
you're curious about exactly how this bolt works, I'd say take a look at the Turner
Light Rifle video we did recently which is exactly the same in principle, and I'm sure
looks pretty close to the same, except slightly smaller. Alright, so out at the muzzle end of
this thing we have a couple of pieces. I have the gas cylinder here, kind of like the gas cylinder
on a Garand. We have this locking tab, plug, block here. And a gas piston. This is really cool,
this is actually an adjustable gas lever. So you can see there are three holes drilled in there. There is one hole, right there, in our gas block. And this piece can be adjusted forward and
back, and it's got three settings for the large, the medium and the small gas holes.
That allows you to adjust the system. So then our gas cylinder sits over the top, like this, locked in place with this block. That little
button on the front is a spring-loaded wedge. (Don't want the pin to fall out.) That sets right here, this piece is
hollow which allows you to poke a thing through like that to depress this plunger, which allows you to take this piece out. Then you can push this piece forward in its rails,
and it comes out when you pull the gas piston back. That complicated enough? Alright, in order to reinstall the gas cylinder,
the first thing I actually have to do is put the bottom half of the stock back on, because first the stock goes on, then this shield piece
goes on which is what locks the stock in place. That has to go on here, underneath,
before the gas cylinder can go in. So we're going to start with the stock. That just drops nicely in like that. You notice we've got a big open space here to
allow travel of the operating rod, we'll cover that with this cover plate in a minute.
But first, now that we have this in place, let's go ahead and put the gas system back together. So first off, the stock's on here, and I have
locked the bolt back which keeps the gas piston all the way retracted and out of our way.
Now I can put this guard in place. There we go. That's going to be held in
by two screws which I'll get in a moment. Next, I have my gas cylinder
which is going to sit right here. And then it's going to pull back so that these
two little tabs run into two little rails right there. Now that's in place. And then lastly we have this
plug, which is going to sit just like this in this space. And that's what will lock the gas cylinder in place.
This button at the front of the plug is spring-loaded, it snaps into a hole right there, which
prevents it from sliding out. However, this lug in the front ... functions both
as a bayonet lug, just like on an SMLE, and it's hollow so you can push a pin,
or a cartridge in the original case, through there to depress this plunger for
disassembly. Push that in, that snaps in place. You'll notice we now still have our adjustable
gas system, so I can slide that between its three detents, leave it in the middle one for now. Still have our original sight wings like an
Enfield, we have our bayonet attachments there, and then we've got this little bit of metal reinforcing. Alright, now we have our
op rod cover plate right here, we need some space for this op rod to travel,
so the stock has to be cut out to allow for it. And then what's left as a cover, if you
made that out of wood it would be too thin and it would just break very quickly,
so instead we have a metal cover plate. Turner really liked these spring detents,
so he's got another one at the front there. You can see that would be operated by the tip
of a bullet, stick that in there and pry it open. And then there's a little metal
reinforcing tab here where it goes in place. So this end is going to lock right
there, and that just snaps down into place like that, presto, we have a cover over .... some of this. Not all of it, but it's better than nothing. Alright, lastly we have the trigger and magazine assemblies. And let's start by taking a look
at how the trigger actually works, because it's kind of unusual and kind of cool. So the trigger moves very smoothly, and
you see that as I pull the trigger lever itself I'm using this little tip right there
to roll this thing up and down. This is our actual sear engagement surface.
So when I pull the trigger, that drops just a little bit. When I fully pull the trigger it's going to come back up. So that's our semi-auto disconnect to make
sure that it does in fact only fire once per shot. Now we do also have a magazine release, sort of. You can see that's a spring catch
there, it's working against this spring, which will hold the magazine in place. This gun was not designed to have detachable
magazines, this thing is re-fed by stripper clips, and you'll see why in a minute. Now what's pretty cool here
is that this is actually the hammer. So that surface right there is what
the trigger is locking open against. So this front surface on the trigger
holds against that surface on the hammer. And it's only the trigger group that's holding
the hammer back. If I close the bolt on this, you'll see that that hammer is going to go forward. So right now the bolt body is holding it open
until the body is far enough forward, right there, the hammer is going to drop.
Now right here we see a safety mechanism, in that the firing pin is right smack in the centre of the
bolt. You'll notice the centre of the hammer is cut away, that's both so that it can straddle
that spring, right there in the middle, it also means that if the hammer
falls while the bolt's not locked, like this, it's going to fall on either side of the
firing pin, but not actually hit the firing pin. Only once the bolt has locked into the side,
like that, now the firing pin is actually right here in line with one
of those two hammer legs. So that's your out of battery safety. If the bolt's not locked
and the hammer drops, it simply won't hit the firing pin. That's a pretty cool design there, subtle and clever. And actually kind of similar to the way that this
safety is set up in the Reising submachine gun. At any rate, and now that we've got that sitting there you can see this tab which is going to
engage with the follower of the magazine. It's been cut out right here, and
this ... tab added to the follower. What that means is that when the
magazine is down nothing happens. But when the follower comes up,
indicating that the magazine is empty, that tab will push up on this tab,
which will cause the bolt to lock open. You can see that it's also
pushing this tab on the outside. ... This gives you this double functionality of you can lock
the bolt open with this button or with an empty magazine. Now the trigger group itself has this front lug. Once again, we have one of Turner's
little bullet tip activated detents there which is going to sit in this
hole in this front lug, like that. That's what allows you to remove
the trigger guard from the rifle. So I'm going to put the lug in first, it's got
a screw that holds it into the receiver here. And it also holds the stock firmly in place.
Right now the only thing holding the stock in place is that metal shield right here at the front. Now that we have the front locking lug in
place, now we can put in the trigger guard. This has been cut out right here at
the back and we have a cross pin there, so that is going to set in position there and snap in right like that. Now lastly, the magazine, which is like an Enfield
magazine a little bit finicky. There we go, presto. ... When I open it, the magazine is
empty and the bolt is going to lock open. In order to close the bolt with the magazine
remaining open, I just depress that button, which is going to force this tab down, which pulls
the magazine follower down, and releases the bolt. So while this may seem like a
nightmare to disassemble, and it kind of is, and I'm sure there are people who looked
at the internals of how that was assembled and just cringe, because I mean the welding
is really crude, and a lot of the machining there's just massive amounts
of tooling marks left in there. However, ... basically this is a
one-off handmade prototype and how do you judge the effectiveness of this? Well, apparently it actually did reasonably well in trials. This is to me the sort of thing where you kind of cobble one
together like this to make sure that everything works right, and then if it does, then you can put in
the time and the effort and the money to ... simplify things, to make the disassembly
more say military, soldier friendly and simpler. And fix any issues that come up in testing, because
there will always be issues that come up in testing. But in general I would honestly rate this relatively
highly, now that's without seeing it actually function, make sure it actually works. But what it has done is
give you a semi-auto conversion of a bolt-action rifle that's actually relatively clean. ... There isn't really more junk hanging
off this than there is, say, an M1 Garand. Where a lot of the semi-auto conversions of
bolt actions are just really awkward clumsy rifles. This handles fairly well. By replacing the entire bolt mechanism he's reduced the amount
of travel, so yeah, this comes back a little farther than a regular Enfield receiver, but not that bad.
You can still get a good cheek weld on it. This is definitely a large step above
something like the World War One era couple of Enfield conversions that have
just these weird kludged on gas pistons. The Charlton actually is like that, although it's
contemporary to this, it's a 1940's conversion. So, I would say Turner actually did a pretty good
job on this, despite all of the flaws that we do see in it, especially looking at it today. ... I expect that the Canadians
looked at it and realised or decided that while this is a conversion of an
existing rifle, it's an expensive one. It would take a lot of work and money, and they'd
probably be better off either sticking to bolt actions or going with something that's a little more proven
and designed from the ground up as a semi-auto, like the M1 Garand had they wanted a semi-auto rifle. So you know, lots of kudos to Russell
Turner. This is a really slick rifle honestly. Pretty cool, I would love to see
more information on its testing, I don't know if that's available out there, but it's
definitely something I'm going to be looking for. And honestly, if you'd like to own this one yourself,
of course that's why it's here at an auction house is that it's being sold. So if you take
a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page
on this piece, where you can see their pictures and their description. And if you decide
that you really need to have it yourself, (and who wouldn't, this is a really cool piece), you can place a bid over the phone, or over the
internet, or here live at the auction house. Thanks for watching.
Always upvote Ian and forgotten weapons !
If you end up being my secret santa... just sayin.. hint hint nudge nudge...
I know a elderly man that has a Lee Enfield converted to semi-auto in .30 carbine. It is very complicated and came out of the military establishment in Suffield Alberta.
There were a lot of crazy conversions like this back in the day. The NRA Museum has an example of a Springfield 1903 that someone after Rube Goldberg's heart converted to a semi-auto. Remarkably ingenious and completely impractical but 100% cool.
Wow what awesome rifle! I have heard of the Charlton but I never heard of the Turner conversion. It would have been so cool if we actually adopted these!
Doesn't the Lee Enfield have a mag restriction because lf this conversion that never got adopted?