Given I know very little about actual gunsmithing, I'm curious why you wouldn't just set the barrel back a turn, cut a deeper extractor groove, and run a reamer in after the headspace exceeded a #5? I can't imagine the bolt-heads were anything but a quick fix for wartime expediency. The barrels are still threaded like a normal action.
djp;
Top of the morning to you sir, hopefully this finds your part of our province as still and sunny as it is here.
So to you or anyone who's interested in getting acceptable case life out of these old war horses, I'll share what's been our solution for SOP on all LE actions.
I start with virgin brass and open the neck up to .338" using a .338 Win Mag sizing die.
Then the case is run into a standard .303 British full length die - but just far enough to create a false shoulder on the case. One wants the bolt to just so close on the case and we still should be able to see the secondary shoulder we've created.
Load and fire with normal loads and just treat the cases like a rimless from then on and don't resize so the shoulder is moved back down ever.
We've had this method work on a few rifles now - one in particular that would wreck cases so bad with the initial firing that two reloads were all we were getting afterward. Now using the method described above we're at 5 and counting - and the cases look fine.
Hopefully that made sense and was useful information to you or someone out there shooting a Lee Enfield.
Dwayne
