Anybody know why they were considering .276 caliber?
Love ‘em too. Got two myself.
The .270 caliber bullet riding on the same powder makes a hell of a weapon. Fast, flat & hard hitting.
Favorite rifle evuh!
Well, except for my Springfield M1A in .308.
What ever happened to the rifles that were supposed to be coming home from Korea?
My Dad talked about “M-1 Thumb”.
“Anybody know why they were considering .276 caliber?”
I loved the M-14. Once you humped the thing long enough you never noticed the weight.
Look at the ballistics of the .270 and 30-06. The .270 is flatter shooting when you compare bullets of similar weight.
I think it boiled down to we had a lot of .30-06 ammo, and didn't want to change. Note that the US military is still looking at .270 or 7mm bullets for their next cartridge. The 6.8 SPC for instance.
~7mmx50 (.27) has been shown over and over by numerous different studies, starting in the 1920's, to be the perfect military round.
Curiously, the 7x57 Mauser had it right from the very beginning.
I love my Garands though.
About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to fire a Garand M-1 and a German Kar Mauser at Ft. Meade’s Rifle Range. Both rifles were the standard infantry rifle of that time.
There is NO comparison!
The Garand, though heavy and lovingly cared for didn’t rattle or make noise, outside of its sling and stacking swivels.
There was no slop between the metal to metal components and furniture. The clip of 30.06 rounds needed some force to insert with the thumb of my left hand.
The magazine/charging cover snapped back sharply with little help and the Garand SOUNDED like something forceful, authoritative and intimidating when squeezing off rounds for sighting and dope. The recoil with a properly adjusted sling was there. To relax and ride up. Then fall back into where it had been before. An absolute dream to shoot!
The Kar, on the other hand rattled wood to wood and metal to wood. With noticeable slop and looseness in the travel of the bolt.
A less than satisfying lock between bolt and barrel. A less than confident feel when squeezing a trigger that didn’t break evenly or consistently. Though, after settling in. The rifle did have decent, relatively tight groupings at 100 yards.
I don't know if it is true, but I read somewhere that the .276 Pedersen also had an ever so slight taper to the case which would make extraction easier than with a straight walled case.
There were also crew served machine guns developed in the same caliber for the same reason. But as said upthread, millions of stored 06 rounds dictated the final decision.
Garand’s original design was a 10-round gun- the smaller .276 facilitated that.
When I arrived at Fort Knox in ‘69 I,a kid from a middle class Boston suburb,had never even *seen* a firearm let alone fired one.However,I soon came to realize that rifle range was the only enjoyable part of BCT.We qualified with both the M-14 and the M-16 and I felt much more comfortable,and scored higher,with the M-14.
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.
It’s one of the sweetest firing weapons.....
The .276, or thereabouts, is nothing to sneeze at. And notice that after WWII, when the Brits were considering the EM-2 bullpup, yep it was a .276/.280.
Sorta puts you in mind of the Remington 6.8 SPC cartridge for the M16A2/M4, doesn't it?