Prior to that there were no reported receiver failures after 1929 (though it was assumed they likely took place) and a unknown quantity of low number guns that saw use during WW2 experienced no reported failures
Safety incident reports are only available to certified safety investigators and the legal department. You have to have a "need to know". I think Hatcher had a report made during the investigation on what to do with the one million low number receivers in Army inventory. I think the data base dates to then. Hatcher reports an investigation and the team that conducted metallurgical investigations recommended that all low number receivers be scrapped. This was rejected as it was cheaper to keep a defective rifle in use than replace it. If the weapon survived till the barrel was worn out, the receiver was scrapped at depot. If the defective rifle blew up in service, injuring some sailor, soldier, or Marine, well tough luck to the injured. Rehabilitative services were paid for an agency outside of the War Department, so it made economic sense to a cash strapped service to injury individuals rather than spend money replacing defective rifles.
I think it is probably that whatever database had been maintained, the purpose for it ended once the services decided to keep low number 03's in inventory. Collecting data and maintaining a database costs money. Why spend money when there is no purpose? There are known low number receiver blowups before Hatcher's database and there have been the occasional reports since Hatcher's Notebook has been published in 1948
If you have not figured out, the organization you work for considers you a disposable item, and safety has always been a cost/benefit analysis. And in this case, in this period, service members were considered cheaper than a forty dollar rifle.
The primary problem was not the heat treatment, it was a lack of temperature gauges. Army Arsenals were underfunded and out of date from the Civil War to WW1. The lack of temperature gages meant that anywhere heat was applied to metal, human eyeballs were deciding the temperature. Go watch Forged in Fire where knife smiths have to make a knife blade under very short time periods. Every show that I can remember, someone's blade has cold shunts, delaminations, and/or is burnt due to over heating. It is very common to see a knife blade, or sword blade, go flying off in fragments because the heat treatment burnt the steel. Human eyeballs were recognized at the time, that is 1914 period, as poor judges of steel temperatures.And that has not changed.
Also, due to the rush to increase production, unskilled or untalented workers were installed on the production. For a contemporary similar situation, research the problems with Boeing 737 Amax Production:
He Spoke Up On 737 Max. Now He'll Speak Out.
10 Dec 2019 New York Times
Mr. Pierson is going public for the first time. In an interview, he expressed concern that many of the planes produced in 2018 were unsafe and that Boeing was more focused on meeting production deadlines than on safety.
Mr. Pierson said, a shortage of workers, including mechanics, electricians and technicians, caused the overtime rate at the factory to more than double. Workers were completing jobs out of sequence, leading to additional mistakes. And senior executives at Boeing exacerbated the problems, he added, by berating employees about delays and urging them to work faster.
"What I witnessed firsthand, the chaos and the instability in the factory, is really unsettling to me as someone who's been around aircraft their entire life," he said.
I am certain in the run up to WW1 Springfield Armory was technologically behind the times in equipment, training, people, and process controls. And then WW1 hit. World War 1 was hugely disruptive to all factories as skilled workers were leaving to volunteer to fight, and then, the draft kicked in. Factories had to ramp up production levels and the machines, people, and processes were not there and the number one priority was to get things out the door. And there was a perverse incentive in the forge shops, workers were paid piece rate. If they cranked up the temperatures, they could stamp out parts faster.
Something else, Springfield Armory did not have a metallurgy group nor incoming material inspection. When ever I read a materials analysis of the steels used in the single or double heat treated receivers, the material quality is poor. This is to be expected when a buyer does not know better. The smart steel maker delivers the worst steel to the stupidest buyer. To fix this, Springfield Armory created a Metallurgical Department of ten full time workers. That is very expensive, just add 10 people to your family, and these had to have been professionals. There was a huge revamping of Springfield Armory, in fact, in the middle of the largest shooting war in human history (to then) Springfield Armory was shut down. That is huge, huge, huge, but Hatcher does not address or comment on that. But it really shows how messed up Springfield Armory was, and how much work it took to put it back together.
I am of the opinion that the same stock of steel purchased for low number receivers was used all the way through to 1927, when the switch over to nickle steel happened. We do know, from Hatcher's Notebook, that the double heat treat was maintained until then, because the Army had used up its WW1 stockpile. The double heat treatment is more or less a mis direction of a much bigger mess. The double heat treatment did not turn plain carbon steels into mythic super steels. It was a "better" heat treatment, but in so far as improving the base properties of Class C steels, well no matter how much you polish a turd, it stays a turd.
There is a cult of the single heat treat receivers, but what I want to know from those who claim they are safe, just how many rounds have you put through yours? Based on all the web interactions I have had, the ones demanding that I prove low number receivers are unsafe, are simply trolls, stirring the pot, with no skin in the game.
There are known blow ups of double heat treat receivers, over pressure loads will dissemble them just as they will any other.
