Posted on 05/18/2012 11:00:10 AM PDT by Mikey_1962
I’ve never heard that it was “meant” to be loose like that...I assumed it “just was”. In full retraction the bolt is held stable only by a little stub of the bolt body and the locking lugs, whereas further forward there’s more of the bolt body, receiver guideways and charger bridge to hold it steady.
You load the M-1 with an 8 round clip. You push the clip in with your thumb, the bolt closes, and you get your thumb out of the way while the bolt closes- hopefully.
When you are not paying attention, you forget to remove your thumb in time and the bolt slams into your thumb. It happens to everyone ONCE. It does really hurt.
I’ve never had it happen while loading a clip...only when closing the bolt on an empty chamber—when you HAVE to put your thumb into the “line of fire”.
(And if it only happens ONCE, then there’s two people out there who’ve gotten away with not getting it, at MY expense!)
Archy is Seldom Seen, but High Impact.
...from Wikipedia:
"At the time of its introduction, the .276 Pedersen was a solution to a significant problem. The US Army wanted a general issue autoloading rifle that would fire the .30-06 cartridge, but such a rifle was prohibitively large with existing designs such as the Browning Automatic Rifle and French Chauchat. A weapon of the same weight as the M1903 needed to fire a smaller cartridge. Pedersen's cartridge was viewed as a compromise as it was underpowered compared to most military rifle cartridges. This decreased recoil energy made possible a reliable, lightweight semi-automatic rifle with existing technology. Despite these early problems with semi-automatic designs, Garand's design was eventually able to handle the .30-06 cartridge; the need for a lighter caliber dissolved. The Pedersen rifle was unsuitable for the .30-06 and it, too, was dropped."
The Pedersen design involved a recoil-operated toggle-top bolt, much like a Luger pistol. It operated on a delayed-blowback principle instead of a locked breech design, which is probably why the standard .30-06 cartridge was too powerful for it. It also required dry-wax lubrication of the cartridges to enable reliable extraction of the spent cases, which the Army testing board found unacceptable. So while the rifle design was found unacceptable, the board was impressed enough with the .276 cartridge to continue working with it.
The only “serious” competitor the Garand faced was Melvin Johnson’s recoil-operated rifle of 1941, which actually did see some limited service with the Marines and OSS.
The Pedersen T1E3 was a delayed blowback operated rifle that used a toggle link lock (similar to the German P.08 Luger pistol); the Garand T3 was a conventional gas operated rifle. The .276 Pedersen T1E3 had a major drawback: it required lubrication of the cartridge to work in the action of the T1E3. Frankford Arsenal developed a proprietary dry lubricant so the cartridge would not stick in the T1E3 chamber due to its lack if primary extraction — a problem not shared by the Garand T3 rifle.
Tests held in 1929 showed the T1E3 and T3 rifles superior to other candidate rifles. Improvements were requested, including a redesign of the T3 to accept the .30-06 caliber. The Board ordered 20 each of the improved Pedersen and Garand rifles for testing.
The Army's infantry Board tested the T1E3 and T3E2 in 1931. It reversed itself and switched from favoring the T1E3 for production to the T3E2 design. One reason was the T3E2 (Garand) rifle only had 60 parts and the T1E3 (Pedersen) had 99 parts. The Board also recommended the rifle caliber be upped to .30-06. The .30-06 caliber Garand rifle was designated I1E1. Army Chief of Staff, GEN Douglas MacArthur, recommended the .30-06 caliber due to the huge amount of ammunition on hand and the likelihood of war in Asia.
The Infantry Board met once more in January of 1932. The Board decided to drop the T1E3 Pedersen from consideration, the T3E2 (.276 Garand) continued in limited procurement, and the T1E1 (.30 Garand) continued in development. Four years later the improved T1E1 rifle (T1E2) was cleared for production on 7 November 1935, and type classified as the M1 on 9 January 1936.
Between its type standardization in 1936 and its replacement by the M14 rifle in 1957, approximately 6,25 million M1 rifles were made. Producers were Springfield Armory, International Harvester (Korean War), Harrington and Richardson (Korean War), and licensed production by Beretta in Italy for NATO.
The .280 “controversy” led to all manner of problems decades later.
Along with the new .280 cartridge, the Royal Small Arms Factory design staff had created a revolutionary new rifle, the EM-1 and EM-2 “bullpup” designs. While both cartridge and rifle offered a lot of promise, Prime Minister Churchill wisely saw the need for a united caliber among NATO forces, and rejected the .280 cartridge and the EM rifle program in favor of the 7.62x51 cartridge and an inch-adapted version of the Belgian FN-FAL rifle design (the legendary L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle).
The design staff was very resentful at being rejected, as can be imagined...and about twenty years later, when the development committee for the L1A1’s replacement was formed, the head of the committee was one of the design team veterans of the rejected EM program. And instead of adopting an established design from another country, he decided that, by gum, the new British service rifle would be “an EM rifle”!
After a long series of developmental problems, engineering ineptitude, pirated design details, rigged tests, and suppressed complaints from the end users, the descendant of the EM-2 design replaced the L1A1 as the L85 Individual Weapon (better known as the SA-80). Their first major combat use was during the First Gulf War, and they were a disaster. The German arms firm of Heckler & Koch had to be called in to redesign the rifles and make them, if not ideal, at least more serviceable.
As the debacle of the M-14 rifle program contributed to the closing of Springfield Armory in 1968, likewise the grand scandal of the SA-80 blew up the reputation of RSAF-Enfield and led to its eventual dissolution soon after the SA-80 program was completed.
Don’t forget Winchester as a Garand producer!
Interestingly, the Japanese went through many of the same designs as Springfield had studied in the 1920s, during their own desperate effort to develop a semiautomatic rifle. (The Japanese Navy’s design team finally settled on a near copy of the Garand, and began production in 1945; it is believed that no more than twenty of the rifles were completed before war’s end.)
The Winchester M1 Carbine receiver was different from other producers, such as the Inland Division of GM. The operating slide guide and spring were contained in a tube that fitted in a trough in the bottom right side of the receiver. By contrast, the Inland Division receiver eliminated the trough and tube by making them part of the forging. A simple bored hole replaced the tube to hold the spring and guide. Interestingly, the original wooden M1 Carbine stock was replaced by a hand carved Vietnamese replacement.
The M1 carbine story is a testament to American ingenuity and design, when you consider that of all the companies (ten in all?) that made M1 carbines during WW2, only one (Winchester) was an established gun maker.
It’s one of the sweetest firing weapons.....
Sell me one?
Just imagine if the lighter, trimmer .276 Garand had been adopted and gradually improved over the next 60 years, like the inherent design deficiencies of the AR have been fine tuned away (almost) over the past 40 years.
Imagine a lighter M14/21 chambered for .276 with a shorter barrel and a synthetic, collapsible stock.
Sad all that was lost due to excess inventory.
Me.
I took a look at the Wikipedia link, and immediately caught the comparison to the Japanese and Italian 6.5mm cartridges.
A brief thought I had was “why wasn’t the Pedersen round revived after WW2 for something like the T48”. If the .276 Pedersen really was similar to the 6.5mm rounds I mentioned above, that might explain a lot—both the Japanese and Italians found their 6.5 cartridges lacking on the battlefield, and began transitioning over to a .30 cartridge.
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