1917 enfield eddystone

[palerider1]

can anyonetell me what the difference is between the eddystone enfield and the winchester and mil-tec enfields. i have the opportunity to buy a eddystone which has been filled with cosmoline for years and years. one of my gunstore owners friends sold it to him. the stock, reciever,and everything is full of cosmoline....the gun is in excellent shape along with a perfect stock. i can probably get it for 500. its chambered in 30-06, manf. date is 11-18

thanks,
palerider1

 

[swingset]

can anyonetell me what the difference is between the eddystone enfield and the winchester and mil-tec enfields. i have the opportunity to buy a eddystone which has been filled with cosmoline for years and years. one of my gunstore owners friends sold it to him. the stock, reciever,and everything is full of cosmoline....the gun is in excellent shape along with a perfect stock. i can probably get it for 500. its chambered in 30-06, manf. date is 11-18

thanks,
palerider1

The only difference between Eddystone and Winchester is manufacturer - Eddystone was a Remington division, IIRC. Winchesters aren't as common, so they tend to command more $$ but not much. I have no clue what a mil-tec Enfield is? Anyway, $500 for an excellent condition P17 is a good price, especially if it's pre-WWII (blued and not parked).

 

[DSS]

mil-tec is a company offering refurbished ones. A little on the pricey side too.
Eddystones are fine rifles for the M1917.

I have a winchester too. The winchester had a nicer looking parkerized finish and browned bolt from the factory while the eddystone was all parkerized. I am sure it was arsenal refinished somewhere along the line. Originaly they were blued and browned mostly. redos were always parkerized.

There really isn't any difference between them. Parts interchange easily and they are fine rifles if you are lucky enough to get one with a good bore. I lucked across a new in wrap JA 2 groove barrel to redo the one in the picture with.

 

[HankB]

The Enfield action design is highly regarded for its size and strength - though in "blow up" tests P.O. Ackley's test Enfield let go before any of a number of other military actions. The only real design weakness is the way the ejector spring is implemented - it's prone to breakage. (Also the front of the extractor is usually flat, so you can't put a round in the chamber and have it snap over the rim when you try to close the bolt. OK, you're not supposed to try this with CRF actions, but . . . )

Some Eddystone Enfields apparently had a poor heat treat, and ended up with brittle receivers. Unfortunately, unlike the run of poorly heat treated Springfields, there doesn't seem to be any reliable record by serial number as to which Eddystones are affected.

Some people claim no Eddystone should ever be fired. Others assert that Eddystones are as good as any, and better than most. For myself, I figure the truth lies somewhere in between . . . but I don't have enough info to draw a line, other than to say the majority seem to work fine.

FWIW, the A-Square company used to use 1917 Enfields as the basis for their heavy rifles, chambering them for cartridges up to .500 A-Square - a necked-up .460 Weatherby. At an SCI convention around 10 years ago, the owner of the company told me he wouldn't use Eddystones.

In terms of differences between the actions, I remember reading something about a gap in the receiver on one variation if the "ears" around the rear sight get milled off for sporterizing, making other versions more desirable from that standpoint . . . but if you're keeping the rifle original, that's moot.

 

[rbernie]

Also the front of the extractor is usually flat, so you can't put a round in the chamber and have it snap over the rim when you try to close the bolt. OK, you're not supposed to try this with CRF actions, but . . .

FWIW, this is easily 'corrected' by stoning a bevel on the front of the extractor. This allows you to drop a single round in the chamber and load it under duress. I've done this to all of my Mausers and Enfields, and while it does the extractor no good to flex it over the rim of a cartridge, it does give you the ability to single-load when you don't have the time to load the magazine properly.

Some Eddystone Enfields apparently had a poor heat treat, and ended up with brittle receivers.

As far as I know, the Eddystone receiver brittleness isn't along the same lines of the 1903 (where the receiver was so badly heat-treated that it was truely brittle). In the case of the Eddystones, the receiver heat-treat was supposedly just off enough in some cases that if the barrel was over-torqued when assembled on a receiver that was slightly overheated *and* the barrel was then removed, the stress from removing the old barrel could cause micro-cracking of the receiver ring. Addressing this requires that you either not rebarrel the rifle (in which case by all accounts everything will work just fine) or that you MPI the receiver after removing the old barrel and be prepared to chuck the receiver if the MPI shows structural defects in the receiver. And, of course, not all Eddystones suffer from a slightly hard receiver - AFAIK, there's no way to tell which you have until you work on it and see.

At an SCI convention around 10 years ago, the owner of the company told me he wouldn't use Eddystones.

Given the number of them that would need to be chucked away for failing MPI tests, I can't say that I blame him.

The best bang-for-the-buck rework of an Eddystone Enfield action (presuming that it's already been butchered) is to plop in a P1914 bolt and have the chamber reamed to 300 WinMag. The only issue with this is that the barrel is a wee bit short to really use all of the powder capacity of the 300 WinMag. But this is all an aside to the initial question.

The Eddystones are generally cheaper than the Winchesters and Remingtons by a fair bit.

 

[Joey2]

A little off subject, but why no windage adjustment on the M-1917's?

 

[HankB]

the receiver heat-treat was supposedly just off enough in some cases that if the barrel was over-torqued when assembled on a receiver that was slightly overheated *and* the barrel was then removed, the stress from removing the old barrel could cause micro-cracking of the receiver ring.

Actually, the A-Square guy addressed this. (I'm going by memory here, so if there are any real Enfield experts reading this who see an error in my recollected facts, feel free to jump right in with a correction.)

He claimed that the barrels and threads were nominally 10 threads per inch. But under wartime production, if a barrel came out a 9.95 TPI, and the receiver was 10.05 TPI, they were not prone to reject either - they just forced the two together, using up to 325 ft. lbs of torque.

Usually, this didn't cause micro cracks . . . those occured when the barrels were removed. After being "crushed" together, it was very difficult to remove the barrels - no matter how the receiver was supported, the torque of removal would often cause fractures. (Removal usually meant a wrench with a LONG extension - supposedly, up to 20 feet - which sounded like a LOT to me when I heard it.) This was addressed by cutting off the barrel a few inches ahead of the receiver, and then drilling out the remaining bore and chamber until it nearly reached the threads. This left much less metal "backing up" the barrel portion of the thread, so the torque required to remove the barrel was reduced accordingly.

Nonetheless, for this and other reasons, the A-Square guy said due to issue of metal fatigue, these rifles ought to be rebarreled no more than three times, that is, once you've worn out three barrels (presumably with "normal" cartridges) that receiver has reached the end of its useful life.