Nice sporter. I wouldn't do a thing to it except hunt the bejapers out of it!
More than one "old time" writer mentioned the utility of the cocking knobs on Springfields and Krags for defecting errant escaped gasses away from the shooter's eye. Dual purpose appendages I would say.
The reason headless cocking pieces gained a bit of a following "back in the day" was to speed up lock time. I've had them on both Krags and 03's and can't honestly tell a difference for it's saving a couple milliseconds of lock time - but they do look cool. (The Armory even provided headless cocking pieces on some Krag carbines, M1899's I think, with a knurled surface to give fingers a purchase. I have one laying on my desk beside this laptop as we speak. It'll go into one of my Krag sporters eventually.) What they found was it was too much of a good thing: primer piercings increased due to the added striker speed, and without the cocking knob there to do its thing... My theory is it was as much to do with crappy primers back then as anything else.
