How Well Do 1917 Enfields Shoot?

[Gandolf]

Hi All,

I was at a gun show today, and saw a 1917 Enfield that had a very good bore. The lands and grooves look sharp and crisp right up to where they join the leade. The bore looks a bit dark, but looks like it has hardly been shot.

The stock wasn't great, but the price was reasonable, I thought, as the guy was asking about $450, and I think would take $425. The rifle, overall, looked pretty good. Not excellent, but good. Eddistone action, Winchester barrel I think.

The question is how well do 1917s shoot cast bullets. Is the price reasonable? The seller seems like a good guy, and would answer any questions that I have, I think.

I didn't see an easy way to adjust for windage on the receiver sight. Does it have any, and does it adjust easily?

I really want an 03A3, but the Enfield was tempting.

Thanks and regards,

Gandolf

[Charley]

M1917s shoot very well. IME, the average M1917 will outshoot the average M1903 or 03A3. Good castshooters. My M1917's favorite load is Lee's 200 grain RB, over about 18 grains of SR4759. Light load but very accurate.
Windage is adjusted by drifting the front sight, but I've never had to do it.

[mooman76]

I have owned a couple ant they are good shooters. It's hard to say on the price without seeing it and you did say the stock wasn't that great. There are allot of these around but most have been buberized. I'd say if it has the original wood that it is a fair buy but if it's been buberized I'd look around some more, they are all over in fact I would like to get an unaltered original some day as well as a 03 but they are quickly getting out of my price range (with the original wood).

[NoDakJak]

During the past sixty years i have owned at least a dozen 1903s and A3s. The 1903's are one of the finest rifles ever built but with the rather crude peep sight and two groove barrel the o3A3 will usually out shoot it. I have owned almost as many 1917s and they outshoot all of my Springfields. That is with jacketed bullets. At this time I have never put a castbooolit through either model. If the rfle has a replacement barrel check it closely. Various manufacturers made 2, 4 and six groove replacements. At one time I had a bunch of new 2 groove barrels that were produced by "Johnson Automatics". They have a reputation for superior accuracy with cast boolits.

[Le Loup Solitaire]

These are solid, well made rifles and the price on them keeps climbing. Some folks don't like the cock-on-closing feature of the bolt, but Gun Parts Corp sells a gizmo that eliminates that. Replacement stocks are also available for rational prices as are spare parts if you need one. There were 3 manufacturers of these rifles; Winchester, Remington and Eddystone. The Eddystones were made by the Baldwin Locomotive Works which was owned by Remington. It was all milspec so all the parts were/are interchangeable and a lot of that went on so a very high percentage of rifles are mixmasters. The barrels are 5 lands and grooves of equal size so lands take up half of the bore. As a result of this feature, boolit design choice should be the same as for the O3-A3 that has 2 groves, that is a boolit with a relatively short body and a longer nose section. The lands in the bore of the 1917 positively support and guide such a design and several makers of molds offer other choices that also shoot very well with boolit bodies and nose sections of equal length. The steel and the actions of these 1917's are very strong and many conversions have been done over the years to much larger calibers than .30 As far as accuracy goes they can and do shoot very well. If you have to adjust for windage, it has to be done by drifting the front sight blade. An easy way to do this is with a front sight adjustment tool that is made for the SKS rifle. These are quite cheap and a little filing gets them to fit the 1917 and move the blade. One item to watch out for is being in a hurry and inadvertently sighting in on one of the front sight "ears".... guaranteed you'll mis the whole township. LLS

[DonH]

Slug the barrel on that 1917 if you buy it. This rifle was designed for and originally made in .303 Brit (Pattern 1914). When the US version came out they used the same barrels but with .30-06 chambers. Rifles which may have been rebarreled prior to WWII may have mor standard .30 cal barrels.

[StrawHat]

Slug the barrel on that 1917 if you buy it. This rifle was designed for and originally made in .303 Brit (Pattern 1914). When the US version came out they used the same barrels but with .30-06 chambers.

Interesting, never heard that mentioned before.

It is a great rifle.

I had two P14s and two actions for P14s. Wish I still had them!

[DonH]

A friend who has spent lifetime in precision rifle shooting spent the last few years competing with milsurp bolt actions in local matches. He did not beat the AR or M1A shooters but was close enough behind them that they should have been embarrassed. Any way, John had a 1917 Enfield in really great condition. When he got it to shoot to his satisfaction it was with .311 dia. Sierra match bullets. Knowing that the WWI 1917s had the same 5 groove rifling and direction of twist as the .303 1914, I casually mentioned my suspicion that the barrels maight be the same. A gunsmith friend who is full of history of 20th century US martial arms. He was there ahead of me and confirmed what I suspected ( and quoted a source of the info). That those barrels shoot well with jacketed .308 bullets is not so surprising as many rifles of that era had greater variation than .003 when they tried to get them the same.

I described my friend's experience in the past tense because at present he is suffering from terminal cancer and has sold the Enfield along with his extensive notes, etc. This gentleman is a PhD, professor and department chairman at a relatively liberal university all the while maintaining his conservative gun-owning and shooting lifestyle. The shooting world will be diminished when he takes his leave.

[nicholst55]

The fellow who picture I use as my avatar, Sergeant Alvin C. York, used his M1917 and an M1911 pistol to win the Medal of Honor in WWI. He reportedly could put two bullets through the same hole on the rifle range, on more than one occasion.

[Freightman]

Saw the same rifle and if I could sell a couple of mine I would have baught it, but funds are tight now and the gunshow will be gone before I get the funds. The thing is I know the man who owns it and if it don't sell today I still have a chance.

[Bret4207]

I have seen in print somewhere a test of the '17 vs '03 vs '03A3. IIRC the '03 beat the others, but I got the impression this was the expected, if not desired, result. Thing is there was another test about the same time frame, mid-50's, and the '17 just trashed the Springfields. Not having ever had a '17 and an '03 or A3 to put to the test I can' say for sure. I know the '17 had an awful lot going for it. It was very robust and stout. I don't wonder if that bulkyness and weight was a turn off for those old boys brought up on Krags and '03's.

[DonH]

There were two really big problems with the 1917 Enfield rifle. The first was that it was not made at the Springfield Armory. The second was that it was not designed at the Springfield Armory. In that era, primary arms for the military were not contracted out. The men who ran the Springfield facility and officers in charge of procuring weapons were a fraternity and as jealous of their own interests as they were those of the militery. That is not to say the arms they designed or produced were not good. The Pattern 1914 rifle as designed by the Brits was probably the better rifle, as well it should have been with the designers having had the luxury of studing all those which came before it. All 1914s and 1917s were manufactured in the uSA by Winchester and Remington (Remington owned Eddystone) on machinery provided by the British government.

To suggest that the 1917 Enfield WAS a better battle rifle than the '03 Springfield would bring an outcry from diehard Springfield fans. That point COULD be argued. What cannot be argued, and seems to not be widely understood, is that there were so few Springfield rifles as to relegat the '03 to a minor role in WWI. I don't recall the exact number I recently read but the number of '03s on hand amounted to less than 1/4 the number of rifles needed by the end of the war. Put more succinctly, our doughboys mostly fought our part of WWI with 1917s.
Reasons for this were many but it was mostly due to our propensity to cut our peacetime military to hardly more than a border patrol. That combined with a president ambitious or foolish enough to declare a war we had no army to fight and you have take what you can get to fight with. To the credit of US sporting arms makers, Winchester and Remington suggested that the rifle they were already making at rates far beyond the capacity of S.A could be without to much difficulty be adapted to use our .30 cal ammunition. If not for this our troops would have to have been armed with French rifles (our arty boys fought with French cannons as we had virtually none). It was bad enough that the majority of them had to be trained by the French. Yuk!

So much for ramblings on history (which most of yu probably already know) but it really is a shame that the 1917 Enfield which played such a major role in our military history has been sort of a misunderstood stepchild.

BTW. I AM NOT an expert on the things; just made it a point to read up on the rifle for my own benefit. One thing I gleaned along the way is that post WWI some guys would replace the rear sight staff with it's counterpart from the BAR which had both elevation and windage adjustment. So if you find one...

[Lead melter]

Slug the barrel on that 1917 if you buy it. This rifle was designed for and originally made in .303 Brit (Pattern 1914). When the US version came out they used the same barrels but with .30-06 chambers. Rifles which may have been rebarreled prior to WWII may have mor standard .30 cal barrels.

Maybe that would explain why I've never been able to get mine to shoot inside 8" at a hundred yards. Well, that AND the terribly creepy trigger....much like a lot of M-N's. I'll give those .311s a go. Thanks for the info.

[Buckshot]

Slug the barrel on that 1917 if you buy it. This rifle was designed for and originally made in .303 Brit (Pattern 1914). When the US version came out they used the same barrels but with .30-06 chambers. Rifles which may have been rebarreled prior to WWII may have mor standard .30 cal barrels.

..........DonH, I'll have to disagree if what you're saying is that they used the same barrels dimensioned as those on the 303 version. When they altered the design and their tooling to produce the P14 as the 30-'06 P17 version, they used the Springfield armoury bore and groove tolerances. While it's true they retained the left hand 10" pitch and the same 5 lands and grooves of equal width that is the extent of it.

An 'On' P17 will have a .300" land and a .308" groove. They may stray to a .301" land and a .310" groove but they'd be the exceptions. My P-17 Remington has a 11-17 dated barrel of .300"x.308" dimensions.

Re: Accuracy of the P-17 vs the Springfield should be very similar if both rifles are correct. One major difference however is feel, and compareing feel and handleing the P-17 is a club compared to a Springfield.

.............Buckshot

[StrawHat]

Didn't Alvin York use a P17 for his shooting foray at the Germans?

[Bret4207]

Yup. Check post #9 in this thread.

FWIW- The USMC had an almost religious loyalty to the Springfield. Considering their experience in the "Banana Wars", Hati, China and WW1 I suppose the "Old Corps" felt a proven rifle was preferable to some new fangled repeater like the M1 Garand. The COrps went into WW2 with '03's and 03A3's and from what I read there wasn't a lot of whining about it. Of course after the M1 entered service the Marines loved it, most of them anyway. Anecdotal eveidence suggests there were a few die hard '03 men who clung to the bolt rifle long after they could have had an M1.

This of course has nothing to do with the '17, but does relate to the institutional mindset mentioned earlier. Personally, I hope to have a '17, an '03, an 03A3, a Garand and every other gun I can get me mitts on! I'll let you if I find one to be radically superior to the others.

[DonH]

..........DonH, I'll have to disagree if what you're saying is that they used the same barrels dimensioned as those on the 303 version. When they altered the design and their tooling to produce the P14 as the 30-'06 P17 version, they used the Springfield armoury bore and groove tolerances. While it's true they retained the left hand 10" pitch and the same 5 lands and grooves of equal width that is the extent of it.

An 'On' P17 will have a .300" land and a .308" groove. They may stray to a .301" land and a .310" groove but they'd be the exceptions. My P-17 Remington has a 11-17 dated barrel of .300"x.308" dimensions.

.............Buckshot

You may know more about this than I do but the friend to whom I referred is a scientist and high precision shooter and his rifle takes .311/.312 jacketed bullets for optimum accuracy. Another friend has bought the rifle and having expressed in shooting cast bullets will allow me to slug the bore. That will tell the tale but for now I see no reason for a .003" -.004" oversize bullet to shoot more accurately than a .308" unless indeed the bore dia. is indeed larger.

Respectfully

DH

[DonH]

Yup. Check post #9 in this thread.

FWIW- The USMC had an almost religious loyalty to the Springfield. Considering their experience in the "Banana Wars", Hati, China and WW1 I suppose the "Old Corps" felt a proven rifle was preferable to some new fangled repeater like the M1 Garand. The COrps went into WW2 with '03's and 03A3's and from what I read there wasn't a lot of whining about it. Of course after the M1 entered service the Marines loved it, most of them anyway. Anecdotal eveidence suggests there were a few die hard '03 men who clung to the bolt rifle long after they could have had an M1.

D

I don't wish to offend any old (or new) Marines out there; I get into enough trouble with own brother. Many things about the Marine Corp have been "gospel"* for so long that few questiion it. During my lifetime Marines have made do with equipment long after other services have moved on largely due to a "hind t**t" situtatiion. An example was the 03/ 03A3/M1 thing. Springfield Armory was under the auspices of the Army so the Army got M1s first. Marines were re-armed when the Navy saw fit. There were no doubt those who would have preferred to keep the bolt action however.

Most people are probably of the belief that the 1917 was a secondary weapon in WWI. Truth is that the number of 03s in service and what could be produced by Springfield relegated THAT rifle to secondary status during that war. There were likely no more than about a fourth of our troops in France armed with 03s. That the 1917 has been sort of stepchild is no doubt due to the fact that it was niether designed nor produced at S.A.

*Few people realize that Marines never fought as stand-alone Marine units in a major war prior to WWII. They were in many company-size or possibly regiment size actions around the world over their history but even in WWI they fought integrated with Army units. In that war there was one brigade of Marines (4th) in front-line service. That brigade was half of an AEF division, the other half of which was regular Army infantry. Division commander was Marine but CO of the Marine brigade was Army. The 5th and 6th Marine regiments and 9th and 23d USA Infantry regiments performed with equal valor at Belleau Wood, the Marne, Blanc Mont, etc. ( Read DEVIL DOGS, a history of WWI marines). Marine accomplishments were written up ( and not disputed by Marine commanders) back home to the exclusion of their Army brothers, creating bad blood for succeeding generations in both services.


Boy, I stepped in it now! " Lord forgive me and please help the starving pygmys in New Guinea"

[45 2.1]

Didn't Alvin York use a P17 for his shooting foray at the Germans?

According to Yorks diary that his son has, he didn't. I think I remember reading from the article about it that he "liberated" a Springfield from the cooks shanty that he used that day.

[yeahbub]

I've a question on another minor detail. Is it P17 or M17? I know the Pattern 14 is the P14, but I read in various commentary about the Model of '17, and elsewhere, the Pattern 17.

It all reminds me of the general confusion about "to", "too", and "two", which, like the poor, will always be with us.