Comments by "Ken ibn Anak" (@kenibnanak5554) on "Experimental Primer-Actuated Semiauto Springfield 1903" video.

  1. LoL, if only we still had factories that made stuff here.
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  2. Weird.. Weird that they were still making 03 rifles in 21. I would have thought with the end of WWI they would have had literally millions of spare ones sitting in their arsenals with no need to keep on churning them out. Clearly someone somewhere lacked budget oversight. Primer setback or not, I would describe this as being almost straight blow back. Yes, sure the bolt head turns. Still it is essentially blow back and the turning of the bolt head is almost an afterthought. I am also noticing how easily the plunger of the recoil spring in the stock moves under finger pressure. For a 30-06 I would have expected something more stiff. My point is that BAR magazine or not, I am not sure the movements cited are sufficient to handle a full pressure 30-06 cartridge. Has anyone done a chamber cast? I think firing this in .30-06 would be a lot like firing the Thompson rifle with really energetic ejection. Looking at the timeline I note in 23 the Army choose the less powerful .276 Pederson for more experiments in semi-auto leading to the M-1, To me this gun raises lots of trivia questions.
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  3. Yeah I know. 03A3 It just seems weird to weird to me they did that with so many rifles on hand at the end of WWI. All through the 20s and 30s we gave bolt action rifles away by the boat load, apparently for no other reason than to justify turning out more bolt actions.
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  4. That was exactly how Springfield Armory operated. They considered making excess rifles preferable to laying off their staff when they had enough rifles. Noting also many of the earlier 1903s had to be recalled and trashed due to the heat treatment issues.
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  5. I don''t know of course and speculation, but I suspect a combination of no crimp and simply giving a few hundreths of set back room in the breech would allow any primer to move. I see such movement sometimes when I fire 442 Webley ammo in a revolver or rifle designed for one of the other thicker rimmed .44 cartridges such as 44-40 or 44 Special. Being thin rimmed the primer of the Webley round has room to set back and sometimes they do. <These are BP loads in modern brass so the safety risk isn't really there.> So in this rifle, if at lock up there is a hundredth of an inch of space behind the cartridge (and no crimp) I would expect the primer to set back. A no-go headspace gauge could tell us of course, if we had the rifle to play with. :)
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