My latest gun purchase was a Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mk. I that was built by Maltby in Britain in 1944. The odd thing about this rifle is that it’s marked “No. 4 Mk. I*”, like its cousins made by Savage in the US:
Here you can clearly see that mechanically, the rifle is a Mk. I (no asterisk):
Using google, I found a few posts on other forums that confirmed that Maltby stamped some of their rifles like this. However, no one seems to know how many were marked with the “*”, or why.
Does anyone here have some more information or a guess?
There are all sorts of small stampings on the rifle. I can identify most of them, but there’s another one that makes me curious. What does the letter “H” in the Broad Arrow mean?
It looks like there's some other small marking partially covered by the arrow, but I guess that's just a badly-executed "M" for Maltby.
Here you can clearly see that mechanically, the rifle is a Mk. I (no asterisk):
Using google, I found a few posts on other forums that confirmed that Maltby stamped some of their rifles like this. However, no one seems to know how many were marked with the “*”, or why.
Does anyone here have some more information or a guess?
There are all sorts of small stampings on the rifle. I can identify most of them, but there’s another one that makes me curious. What does the letter “H” in the Broad Arrow mean?
It looks like there's some other small marking partially covered by the arrow, but I guess that's just a badly-executed "M" for Maltby.