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...I thought most everyone of our vintage in Canada has owned, shot or borrowed a milsurp .303 British rifle.
My Dad bought a Husqvarna. 270 in the early 50's and so did the other serious hunters( 30/06 or.270) .This was the beginning of the end of exclusivity of the .303. and the 30/30 In our little town.
This .303 British taught me something...that headspace was a thing and you should slug the barrel.

That was a long time ago. With the arrival of cable tv around 1970, we started becoming Americanized, and what was good for the US became good for us. 303s began to disappear.

Unfortunately, 303s have received a lot of bad press about headspace. Virtually all of it was unwarranted.

What many thought was excessive headspace was in fact, a long chamber. With any rimmed cartridge, headspace can be absolutely perfect, but if the chamber forward of the recess where the rim sits is long or incorrectly cut, the cases stretch and this is misidentified as bad headspace.

I gave up trying to explain it when the Internets became popular. Overnight, we had a pile of experts, 14 yr old swat team members with 20 yrs experience, etc.

What about the Cooeys? I have a 22, good friend Dwayne sold me, and a 20 gauge single shot.

Steve;
Good afternoon to you sir, I hope the day's been treating you fine and this finds you well.

Thanks for confirming what I'd long suspected regarding the longer chambers of some of the .303's.

Anymore when we're playing with one and we want so save the brass, it's a simple matter to open the case neck up to .338", then just neck it back down so it's a snug fit when the bolt is closed. Some of the brass has lasted for a couple decades now doing that, I'm going to guess less than 10 reloads, but possibly as many as 8?

A more observant hand loader would have kept track of that detail Steve, nonetheless I must confess I didn't....

Anyway, I'd discovered that method getting a 1901 made Winchester 94 chambered in .30WCF running without stretching the cases too, too badly and it worked on a couple Lee Enfields just fine as well. Of course one must keep the brass for that particular rifle separate and not move the shoulder back during resizing - but you knew that I'm sure.

Thanks again sir and all the best to you all.

Dwayne

Here's a history of the Cooey plant from the Feb 2017 issue of Calibre magazine.

https://calibremag.ca/cooey-canadas-gunmaker/



There are a couple of other things that few know about Lee Enfields. The first was that the original plans called for a .314 barrel. Mass production wasn't as precise back then as now, so some leeway was allowed when manufacturing the barrels of new rifles coming from the factories. The second, from at least the 1950s until the present day, almost all commercial bullets made were .311/.312. - 0.002 to 0.003 (or perhaps even more) undersized. These two things made some Lee Enfields very inaccurate, despite many of the surplus gun barrels being in good shape, or even unfired. One can only imagine how poor some of the 303 military ammunition was. Add inconsistent powder quality or burn rate, or varying amounts of powder put in the cases on the assembly line, and you have ammunition that only can be described as sheit.

After they were surplused out, you could have a VG/Exc .314 or .315 barrel shooting .309, .310 or .311 bullets. At any rate, with the undersized bullets, not all would obturate, catch the rifling and seal the bore.

Some bullets, like Rem CL bulk 180s and 215s for example, were .310 diameter. A compromise that meant reloaders could use them with their 303s or 7.62x54Rs. Depending on your rifle's bore diameter, some shot well, others were bad. I had two No 4 rifles with excellent bores, but one was maybe 0.002 larger than its cousin. The same load and 215 gr. Rem CL shot less than 2 inches with one rifle. No better than 3.5 with the other.

I made thousands of 200 gr. .3135 bullets and they all shoot around an inch at 100 yd.

Before Ruger did their run of 303s a few years back, I chatted with Clay Smiley at Prophet River. He wanted to get a run of them imported in to Canada. Later, JB had one for testing. I honestly thought that Ruger would use a .311 barrel, but John said that they were .314, meaning that Ruger used the original plans. The Ruger No 1 isn't a high volume seller, but years ago I believed that a 30-40 Krag would have been a great chambering. a rimmed case that used .308 bullets. Of course, fewer people are interested in CF cartridges with rimmed cases these days.

It was the reason I made a 30-303. Bullets are plentiful, and there are many more weights. And for me, I got to keep the rimmed cases. When you pair that with a new barrel, it shoots very well indeed.

In all my days I never danced with a .303. Seems like I missed a real adventure.

Steve;
Thanks kindly sir for the additional information on the barrels.

While I might have read that somewhere previously, I must confess it'd slipped the cogs of my memory.

Over the years we've actually had a couple No 4's we were experimenting with shoot unbelievably small groups with .308" bullets. I'm guessing they must have bumped up with the correct powder combination, I can't say that part for sure, but they did shoot really very well.

Thanks again sir for the information, it's much appreciated.

All the best to you folks again.

Dwayne

DigitalDan:
Good evening once again to you sir, I hope the day treated you acceptably and this finds you well.

One of the reasons I think that we Canucks played with the various .303's so much is that they were relatively inexpensive and in the Saskatchewan farm country I grew up in were about as common as tractors - which is to say it was an odd farm that didn't have one or three.

When I was a kid, my first one was a Pattern 14 which was $15 bought from a buddy. The various SMLE Mk III's were more common when I was young than the No. 4 and the Jungle Carbine the least common. Why that is I can't say.

Anyways up into the '80's it wasn't uncommon to trade SMLE's for between $25 and $75 depending on condition, but then used 94's were $150 in those days too and I picked up a few Mauser 98 actions for $50 and less then.

While I've said this previously, I've no clue how many .303's I've had as we used them quite often to sweeten the pot on deals on everything from cars and trucks to farm equipment, so hopefully I can be forgiven that lapse in memory.

All the best to you folks down there sir.

Dwayne

Dan, the adventure continues.

With cast bullets, there is fertile ground to chase whatever you want.

About a decade or so back, I wandered into an old general store on the main drag of Bryson City, in the western part of North Caroline, between the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and the Nantahala National Forest, as well as between Northern Georgia and Southern Tennessee.

Not what you would normally think of as Lee-Enfield Country. In the small hunting section of that general store was a shelf of the usual rifle fodder, 30-30, 270, 30-'06, but by far the greatest number of boxes, by a factor of 3, were of newly manufactured .303 British soft point hunting rounds.

I asked the old man behind the counter about that, and he just shrugged. He said it was locals buying it.

Funny old world, sometimes.

I would believe that. Here's why.

Most hunters go with what is inexpensive and works. If something like a 30-06, 30-30 or a 303 has a long, successful track record, hunters go for that.

It's made better when relatives and friends have used them for years as well.

I often laugh reading some of the campfire posts. So many posters chase the latest craze. It makes companies and their ad men smile. Whether it's a new cartridge or a fancy, expensive scope, many folks are on it like a hungry dog on a bone.

The successful hunters quietly go about their business with their old fashioned or underpowered cartridges. For some unknown reason, they manage to harvest game regularly, despite a lack of the latest, greatest things.

Strange, eh?

I remember as kid (early'60s) I got my hands on a cartridge pamphlet from CIL. Their velocities for the 303 weren't that far off the 30.06 or 308 .Not like Remington or Winchester. The 303 has about the same internal volume as a 308. In fact I use 308 load data for my P-14 303. I picked up some Woodleigh .312 215gr bullets when we was in Australia .

^ ^ ^ THIS ^

one of my distant relatives used a. 303
that I assume was an Enfield. He didn't
have any problems with putting meat in
the freezer with it
His only problem was finding ammo in
our area at a decent price

Some years back we were up the Alaska Highway . We would get, " you should have been here last year " then they would tell me some number their group had gotten. I always stop and BS with other hunters And a lot of our conversation was just that.. Sometimes some truth slips out, though . But when they tell what a great area it had been, it may have had a ring of truth to it. As you might be back as competition next year. I think the hunting was much better then.

On politics, I'm your classic working class hero.

I enjoy it , if something offends you don’t read that thread pretty simple. I do get surprised every so often by some of our southern neighbors opinions on various topics but I still figure everyone is entitled to their own.
I have a fairly big group of relatives in OKC and some in Wyoming. So I’m always got a vested interest in how things south of the 49th are going.

It's still going on, comerade. The ebb and flow continues.

Poor Steve. He is scared of Moose Jaw. For good reason .

Time for bed now. And thanks for proving our points.

Back in the early 70s as a kid I bought my first center-fire rifle.

It being the usual quick and dirty "sporterized" No.4 Mark 1, wearing it's original butt-stock with the handguards and hardware gone, and the fore end wood shortened.

I bought it at the local "Army & Navy" store. In those pre-FAC and pre-PAL days they were stacked in a paper barrel like broomsticks. The clerk wrapped it in brown paper and I took it home on the trolley bus, as I was living in Edmonton long ago. No ID needed thanks.

What a deal, I thought. So inexpensive. Of course, the barrel was shot out, and accuracy was quite poor, but it did go bang. I thought that all .303 rifles were probably inaccurate after that, even those with good barrels.

However, I chanced to buy a NOS Full-To-Rebuild Mark 3, from Ishapore Arsenal in India, with a brand new barrel. Although a mixture of stocks and fore end wood, it shot like a house on fire. I regret that I ever sold it.