Proto M-14

Am Shooting Journal ^ | I McCollum

[w1n1]

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States spent 12 years looking for a successor to the M1 Garand rifle. The following is an examination conducted by Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons.
Here is a very interesting prototype Winchester Select-fire Magazine-fed version of an M1-Garrand. Now, this was obviously part of the development program process for the M14 rifle. While there are good references out there on the Springfield and the Remington corporate versions of the different rifles that ended up as part of the M14 project, there doesn't seem to be much reference material out there on the Winchester guns, and this is one of those.

I can't really tell you the where and the when and how this proto did under trials, but we will take a close look at it, and I can point out a whole bunch of very interesting features of this particular prototype example.

The first thing I want to mention is that this gun is really light. You look at this and you expect it to weigh something like twelve or fourteen pounds. Because it’s got the big 'ol bipod on the front, presumably it's maybe heavy barrel, it has a selector switch -which you can’t see because it's on this side of the gun-, magazine fed– in reality, this thing is at least two pounds lighter than an M1. I bet this is between seven and eight pounds; I don’t have a scale to weigh it on, but, what's actually going on here, there’s a lot cut away on the inside that you’ll see.

The bulk of this flash-hider bipod assembly is made of aluminum, the butt-plate is made of aluminum, there might be some magnesium parts in there somewhere, they've cut every ounce possible out of this gun. And it's really an impressive gun to handle as the result! One of the first– the most obvious difference, is that a pistol grip has been added. This didn't involve any actual modification to the trigger group, this is actually kind of like the Baretta BM59 Garand modifications where they’ve added a pistol grip to the stock. Read the rest of this Winchester Proto M-14.

[Lurker]

Does Ian know you’re ripping him off?

L

[Bonemaker]

What was wrong with Beretta BM59?

[Spktyr]

The fact that the M-14 was designed in 1954 and the BM59 was not known to the US until 1958-59?

Also, after the FAL was almost selected and the Infantry Rifle service trials were rigged against it to favor the US rifle in 1953-54, there’s no way in hell they were going to allow some “damn Eye-talyan” rifle design in - especially not as they’d have to pay a license fee to Beretta and the FAL design was being offered for free.