Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Mausers and Military Rifles SMLE No.2 Mk IV

I'm not really into Enfields but when this one fell into my lap I couldn't turn it away. .22 rimfire, single shot, British Army training rifle, 1936. A more complete description can be found in the Rimfire Forum.

Excellent training rifle.

The SMLE was converted from 303 British to 7.62 NATO at Ishapore.
THAT version is quite handy for civil unrest.

Those are nice rifles. The nice thing about the 22 trainers is they rarely suffer from abuse due to firing or barrel wear. Handling marks are the norm.




The Ishapore 7.62 rifles were not conversions. They were built from the ground up as a 7.62x51mm rifles. And No 1 MkIIIs with any 303 markings were gunsmith or private conversions, not Ishapore.

That is definitely cool. Never seen one before. So when the empties are ejected, they just fall in the magazine box? Turn the rifle over and dump them out? 😁 sounds like a very good shooter.

You can either turn the gun upside down and shake the empties out of the box or you can unlatch the box and dump it.

NEAT!
Are the vernier gradations on the rear sight matched to the calibre??

Is this barrel lined, or a custom-made barrel and bolt?

I couldn't have turned that one down either. Congratulations Gary.

I don't know about the sight graduations yet, Jeff. Aside from initial function testing in the backyard I have yet to work seriously with it. If my quest for a Parker-Hale 5A rear sight pans out, I may never learn about those sight graduations.

The barrel isn't lined. They did that trick on a bunch of SMLE's initially but segued into made to order .22 barrels, or so I'm told. Somebody with more complete knowledge is welcome to correct me. The bolt is .22 rimfire-specific, and is a bit odd compared to a .303 service rifle bolt. The offset rimfire firing pin is contained in the (removable) bolt head and is smacked by the centrally located striker rod in the main body of the bolt (which I suspect is a standard service rifle bolt body, but with an altered blunt striker rod). Near as I can tell, the receiver is a standard service rifle receiver and lock-up is achieved with the standard service rifle locking lugs on the bolt body. I'm curious to find out if there were different length bolt heads that interchanged to achieve proper tight headspace, as were employed in the .303 service SMLE's.

I have one of these and they are very fun to shoot. My kids like it because they can shoot a full size Lee Enfield and no get knocked over. As far as I know they never replaced the graduations on the rear sight, there was just an equivalent for the new caliber.

Nice rifle!

FWIW when I was a young lad our high schools had cadet units, and my own school not only had an armoury with SMLEs and Brens but a miniature rifle range (25 yard) down behind the football oval, for the cadets to practice with training rifles like these. By the time I was there the school rifle range had fallen into disuse (other than as a place to have a discreet cigarette) - probably because it was directly across the street from neighbouring houses. We'd go to a full-size range instead, and on camps we'd shoot on military ranges with L1A1s.



There were not different length bolt heads made to be interchangeable to achieve proper headspace on SMLEs. This was a later innovation, introduced on the No 4 series, to save time and the need for skilled workers in the factory when they were being produced.

Interesting. Do the No.4 bolt heads interchange with No.1 boltheads, because I jockeyed headspace on a couple No.1's back in the day when those bolt heads were floating around the gun shows a dime-a-dozen, and I've never owned a No.4 in my life.

No, the No 1 boltheads are quite different from the No 4. No 1 boltheads are interchangeable with each other, and can vary slightly in dimensions due to engineering tolerances, and so you can go through a box of them and try to find one which will give you the headspace you want, but they weren't intended to be swapped around like that.

With the No 4, one of the production engineering innovations was to make boltheads in specific lengths. The idea was that this would allow the assembly of the barrel to the action to be achieved by a semi-skilled worker, simply screwing the barrel into the receiver and then using different sized boltheads to get the headspace into spec.

This was in contrast to most other rifles, including the SMLE, where you needed a fitter to adjust headspace when fitting up the barrel, with a fixed-length bolt assembly.

One furphy, which seems mainly confined to the US, is that the different-length bolt heads were intended to be used to adjust headspace of rifles after they've seen a bit of use, on the supposed basis that this needs doing every now and again with Lee Enfields. This is not correct. It is true that LE's, especially wartime production, can tend to have fairly generous chambers, and sometimes generous headspace, but that is how they were built - mainly to make sure they got to the troops in sufficient numbers and worked when they got there, even with dirty ammunition, and with no thought to use as a sporter or with reloads.

Thanks! We really do learn something new every day don't we.

As an aside, that's also why Savage 1899/99 bolt lengths are all over the map. They were fitted at final assembly exactly as you described was done with No.4's.

Not an expert and this may have been posted before but I am told India never manufactured a number 4 only mark 1 with improved steel. I think its British manufacture because on long branch Canadian manufactured ones as a shortcut , to get the bolt out instead of the tab you depress at the back of the action to get the bolt out there is a slot at the front of the action on the rail just in front of the action which allow the bolt head to be lifted and then slid out.