Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 10 rounds rapid

A rather good demonstration of how fast bolt actions can be worked for close quarter battle: 10 rounds on target in as little as 6.15 seconds, here:

https://videos.full30.com/bitmotive...fec7494b8f5c094973e457268851/854x480.mp4

I remember learning the technique of tripping the trigger with the middle finger while working the bolt with forefinger and thumb from my father. It works.

Of course, an assault rifle should do better, or a submachine gun - I've used them - but there'd be plenty of blokes who survived when the chips were down by reason of their ability to put rounds on target in a hurry with a bolt action. These blokes for example, with SMLEs:

Best military bolt action ever made. Give me a "smelly" over a Mauser or an 03 ANY DAY

Back in the early 1990's when cheap, mil-surp, .303 British could be had for about 10 cents a round, delivered; I had read about that stuff and got pretty adept at it with my #1 Mk III. Hard to do much aiming when working a #1 Mk III bolt that fast but lots of rounds can be put down range in a very short time. Always gave the gun a quick swab out with a few wet patches before I even left the range followed by a thorough cleaning as soon as I got home. I've heard too many horror stories about that old, military, cordite .303 ammo and I didn't want to risk it. Bore looks mint to this day.

I have been a military collector for a long time, and my heart still belongs to the garand. Having said that, the enfield is often overshadowed by the garand or the mauser, and it took me a long time to realize the superior weapon it is.
They are not really made for magazine switches.
but they hold ten rounds, the garand eight, and the mauser five.
they can be fired really fast if you have the technique down.
they had interchangable length of buttstocks.
and they had a quickly changeable bolt face as the gun wore, unlike the others that would require an armorer.
About like a .308 in power.
Interesting enough, at one time i was in email contact with a guy in germany. He was a german sniper among other things, and had been in the sand box. He also shot hipower competition in germany. He liked a model of 1917 winchester, but a lot of the competitors prefered the enfield, over what you what expect, the mauser. He said they just worked better.

you can still find good ammo now and then. I tripped across a bunch of Fn ammo a few years ago.

This is deceptive. Clearly, that bolt action was in full semi automatic mode.

Score?
Did he hit what he was aiming at?
Was he even aiming?

Not related to rapid fire, but I believe LEs got a bad reputation for accuracy after they were neglected by Americans who didn't clean the bore properly after firing the cheap and widely available corrosive-primed surplus ammo (as they also did with Springfields and Finnish Mosins). Most of the surplus LEs that came from the England, Canada, or Australia were probably in good shape because of the cleaning regimen dictated by those militaries. Rifles from the rest of the world were probably a crapshoot. Firing good ammunition from a LE with a good shiny bore will show that most of them are surprisingly accurate.

I've had quite a few Lee Enfields. I paid $60 for the first one. It was a very nice No 4 MK II. The shop where I bought it was also selling 250 round machine gun belts of .303 ammo dated 1952 for $50. (white canvas belts) I went through 2 of the belts of ammo before they sold out of it. It was hotter than hell and would slam that brass buttplate into your shoulder when you touched off a round. I have no doubt that it was equal to .308 ammo. After going through 500 rounds of that machine gun ammo I bought some typical .303 surplus of some kind and it felt watered down,..as did commercial ammo. I bought a case of Greek ammo that was advertised as being berdan primed and discovered that it was boxer primed brass. I used that brass for a long time.

I spent quite a bit of time shooting cast bullets in the Lee Enfields. My favorite load was a .308 diameter 180 grain flat nosed bullet from an RCBS mold. I patched it with 5 tight wraps of teflon tape and pushed it to 1800 fps with H4895. From a rest I could group it into 3 inches at 100 yards all day long using the issue tangent sights.

Funny story about shooting those cast bullets,...

I was at the club one day shooting my favorite Lee Enfield off the bench,..a very nice No4 MK II. A guy showed up with a very nice scoped Sako .222. We talked for a minute and he talked about how the Enfields were nice rifles but not particularly accurate due to their 2 piece stocks yada yada yada. I just nodded along and let him talk. I don't think he had ever seen a patched cast bullet,...especially not one patched with teflon plumbers tape.

My targets were a piece of paper with a circle on them traced around a pack of Skoal with a felt tip marker.

We shot for a little bit and I put two magazines of my patched cast load inside the circle on my target. He couldn't put 5 shots into 5" with his pretty little scoped Sako,.......just couldn't shoot fer chit.

He didn't have much to say after that.

My first bench rest set-up,......cobbled together out of a piece of 4X4 and some junk that was rattling around the machine shop. I shot a lot of rounds of .303 off of it.

one of the things that has to be reconized with the enfields is bore diameter can vary quite a bit, and the chambers are not all the same. It's not like most of them spent their life in a rifle rack.
Savage was making them for the british, and not all of them got sent to britain. Few years ago some of the savage enfields were released and they were basically brand new rifles.
Major difference between one of them and another one dragged around the british empire.

That's why they were so suitable for using patched cast bullets. A standard .308 diameter bullet was the perfect base to use to make a bullet the proper diameter to fit an Enfield groove diameter by wrapping it with teflon tape. 5 tight wraps of teflon tape would bring a .308 bullet up to .317.

‘Nother Enfield fan here. Currently I have a hardly-fired ‘50’s production “Irish” No. 4 in my safe.

The last one I had was one of those,...a 1955 Fazakerly. One of my neighbors always admired it. He had owned an old beater Enfield when he was younger. He helped me cut up a couple of trees that an ice storm had broken down in my yard a few years ago so I gave it to him. I had moved on to playing with other rifles and it had just been setting in my safe.

He lit up when I handed it to him.

I first got to shoot the SMLE back in the 70s as a school cadet, when they and Brens were in high school armouries all around Oz. They had long since been replaced for military service other than cadets, and not long after we also transitioned over to the L1A1. I've always had a soft spot for them, and ended up snagging a good one when my school sold theirs off. I have to admit though that the No 4 (which Australia didn't adopt) has better sights. I've owned and used both since I was a teenager, and as I've got older the better sights of the No 4 have become more and more of an advantage. It is worth mentioning that Australians and others developed quite a range of peep sights for the SMLE for target use though, and a few of them took these to war too.

A couple of you have mentioned cleaning after corrosive-primed ammo. FWIW the way to do this, if you ever have to do it any more, is to use boiling water. This dissolves and removes the salt, and other fouling. You can pour it into the breech using a funnel, but the easiest and most effective way to do it is to put a saucepan of boiling-hot water on the floor. Hold the rifle with the muzzle in the water, the butt up by your thigh, and push a cleaning rod with a loose patch on a loop, down from breech to muzzle, stopping before the patch emerges from the muzzle. Pull the patch back and it will suck hot water into the bore, and you pull up until the patch is almost out the breech. Repeat this a few times, pumping hot water up and down, and you'll see all the fouling discolour the water as you do. After a few strokes push the patch all the way out of the muzzle, remove it, and pull the cleaning rod out. Hang or stand the rifle muzzle down (out of the water of course) and the residual heat will quickly dry it. You then just oil it and you are done.