Dang! We missed it – 8″ barrel

The barrel is still in the 1970s-80s temperate camouflage.

Nope, this isn’t, say, a tube for an Artillery Luger (we already got one) or a Smith M29, nor is it something to SBR your AR with. It’s not 8 inches long, it’s 8 inches in diameter. From land to land. Repeat after us: “that is one BFG.”

Somebody is now in a position to say: we’ll see your Barrett .50 and raise you 7 1/2″. A rare, apparently not demilled, 1978 barrel for the Vietnam-era M110 8″ howitzer was on eBay earlier this month, for sale in San Pedro, California. The gun probably once stalked the deserts of Fort Irwin or the National Training Center, before being surplused. The seller did say he was selling without the breech block.

Somebody bought it for $4,000, less than we’ve paid for some much smaller hardware. According to the seller, that was his reserve, and barely more than the scrap value of the barrel.

Of course, it’s the bare barrel, missing not only the vehicle that hauled it but also the elevating, traversing and recoil mechanisms. And it’s not exactly man-portable: removing this testament to Watervliet Arsenal’s metal-shaping skills from its resting place in the weeds in San Pedro must have involved riggers, heavy equipment, and a truck big enough to haul the 26’6″, 7 1/4 ton monster away.

Interesting to us, the nomenclature engraved on the barrel appears to be M201. We thought the barrel was the “M2A1.” Could Watervliet have made a typo?

But if you collect US military arms, that’s one hell of a collection centerpiece. Or you can just park it in the front garden and keep the damn kids off your lawn. (Laugh if you will: we once knew a retired general who kept an MG08 on sled mount at the top of the walk in front of his tidy split-level. He said it cut down, not only on kids chasing stray balls, but Jehovah’s Witnesses chasing stray souls as well. Wish we could remember his name; he’d been on Patton’s staff as a junior field grade).

The M110 was a self-propelled version of a WWII howitzer that used the same chassis and trails as the 175mm Long Tom. The WWII 8-inch’s projectile and barrel were based on a WWI-vintage British 8-inch howitzer design. The M110 entered service in 1963 alongside the M107 SP version of the Long Tom, and left active duty by 1990, leaving the USAR in 1994 as all USAR combat-arms units were disbanded or reconstituted in the National Guard (while support and service-support units flowed the other way). The guns and howitzers alike were deployed in Divisional, Corps and Army Artillery units. (The Army-subordinate units were later called “Echelons Above Corps” in one of those military jargon changes that gets some O-6 his retirement Legion of Merit). They were one of the principal delivery systems envisioned for W33 and W79 tactical nuclear warheads and GB nerve agent (aka Sarin), before the US’s unilateral chemical disarmament in 1970 and unilateral tactical nuclear disarmament in 1992. This video is an overview of the then-new SP guns and the development of their chassis.

This barrel is from an M110A2, the muzzle brake being used only on the A2 variant. The A2s were not new production, except for the barrels (like this one from 1978). The chassis and mechanism (elevation, traverse, recoil, etc) came from the M107s that were being decommissioned at that time.

What sent the 8-inch (aka 203mm) howitzer and before it, the 175mm gun, to the showers, was the march of technology. New 155mm projos could fly farther and hit harder, making the bigger guns obsolete (yes, they could have chosen to make the larger projos fly even farther and hit even harder, They didn’t, choosing to use the technology to simplify and streamline logistics while keeping combat power and reach at least the same as it had been). The MLRS took away some other big-gun use cases; and US abandonment of chemical and nuclear weapons pulled the rug out from under one of the major justifications for this weapon.

Occasionally you see an M110 chassis for sale (or a recovery vehicle built on the same chassis, which must be useful if you have a lot of tanks). But the barrels are exceedingly rare, and not just for the reason you’d think (that the USG insisted the SP guns be thoroughly demiled before sale). You see, many of the retired 8 inch/203mm barrels got a new lease on life as a new kind of weapon entirely: they were used to form the casings of the deep-penetrating GBU-28 “bunker buster” bomb.

Cold War Clandestine Meetings

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It has come to everyone’s attention that one reason that the FBI wasn’t watching the Tsarnayev brothers and the ATF hasn’t been following the guns it shipped to Mexico (or even the M4 stolen from a SA’s car last year while two married-to-other-people SAs were banging away), is that they’ve been flat out surveilling various media figures and political critics of the ~~Supreme Soviet~~ Administration.

How do you survive in a surveillance society, where your political opponents have seemingly bottomless resources for spying on you? Well, it turns out there’s substantial literature on that: declassified intelligence tradecraft of the Cold War. So here we have for you a good long essay on the experiences had by officers and the agents they handled, in the years just before 1960, always looking over their shoulder for the guys in trenchcoats.

After convincing himself that he is not being followed, the intelligence officer proceeds to the meeting place by a route planned in advance with a view to suitability for checking thoroughly against surveillance all along it. Only after he is absolutely confident that he is not being followed does he go to the agreed place and hold the meeting with the agent. In addition to the usual visual checks against surveillance, a countersurveillance setup and certain technical means are used for detecting it.

Countersurveillance is set up at two or three points on the intelligence officer’s route to the meeting place. At these points a second, sometimes more experienced, officer watches the other drive or walk past and determines whether or not he is being followed. Having detected surveillance, the supporting officer gives an agreed signal at a specified time warning the other that he is being followed; this signal also denotes that the arranged meeting should not be carried out. The points selected for countersurveillance must lie on a section of the route where it is impossible for counterintelligence to maintain surveillance from parallel streets.

Regardless of the use of technical means (with which it is not always possible to detect the presence of surveillance), an intelligence officer going to a meeting with an agent must have a well-developed ability to check reliably and without mistake for surveillance and spot it for certain if it is there.

These techniques worked well in the Cold War of the Eisenhower-Krushchev years. Now for the punch line: this is Soviet tradecraft, pilfered at the time and published in the CIA’s in-house magazine, Studies in Intelligence. This Top Secret document was originally published by the Military-Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Army in 1960 (and so it probably represents GRU rather than KGB tradecraft). It’s interesting to read this and see the Soviets’ fear of American and allied counterintelligence.

But while there are plenty of references to the Cold War situation in the Whole Thing (which you should Read™), most of the tradecraft needs only to be updated for the improved surveillance technology of the 21st Century. Tradecraft — and a healthy dose of paranoia — lets a human intelligence collector operate even in extremely oppressive denied areas. As the Soviets considered the territory of the Glavni Vrag (Main Enemy). Here’s another example:

Whatever cover measures the intelligence officer takes, however, their effectiveness depends considerably on whether the agent conducts himself correctly, his ability to conceal his work, and the extent to which his behavior is disciplined. If he is undisciplined and does not strictly observe contact arrangements, so that it becomes necessary to take irregular steps such as calling him on the telephone or intercepting him, all the cover precautions used by the intelligence officer may at times become futile. The same thing will happen if the agent does not take adequate steps to conceal the temporary removal of documents or does not have a convincing cover story to tell the members of his family to account for absences and for having extra money.

An agent is unreliable if he is timid or lacks self-confidence. Such an agent can attract suspicion to himself by his timid behavior, whereas a bold and enterprising agent, behaving naturally in accordance with a good cover story, will not stand out from other local residents. The agent, like the intelligence officer, can take helpful initiatives to enhance the security of operations under way in making checks for surveillance, inventing cover stories, etc. This is why agent training is a continuing concern.

New, more effective measures for cover, which could ensure that work is continued under worsening conditions, should be thought out and readied in advance. Some of the possibilities are holding personal meetings with agents at night, holding them in specially selected officers’ living quarters, using new forms of impersonal contact, smuggling agents into official establishments for meetings, and getting them in in the great throng of guests coming to large receptions. But one must not be limited to such examples; the whole body of intelligence officers must work actively and creatively on this problem. In present conditions, when counterintelligence in most of the capitalist countries is very active, great importance must be placed on measures for making personal meetings between intelligence officers and agents secure.

Now, in 1960 the FBI was hunting, along with the usual criminals, the KGB and GRU’s case officers and suborned agents. But in 2013, it seems, they’re hunting you. The tactics, techniques, technologies and procedures that Ivan used then to stay a step ahead of them may have a new relevance for you now.

M1 (etc) Carbine overhaul manual

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… we may as well share with you the overhaul manual on the M1/2/3 carbines. You know, these things:

This edition of FM 9-1276 was published in 1947 and it contains a lot of useful information, including the overhaul flow chart we’ve already shown you, and the very interesting inspection and rebuilt-weapon serviceability standards.

Most gun-culture types have a certain fetish for MilSpec and seem to think that military specs are always higher that civilians’ standards. Well, it depends on the civilian! But the military has looser requirements than you might think, and one characteristic of these requirements is that a weapon in the hands of troops is not required to meet standards of a weapon freshly rehabbed, or one being mothballed (figuratively) for that matter. For example, when the M16A1 was standard issue, one could be turned in for higher-echelon maintenance if the barrel was shot out. How shot out? The depot didn’t want to see it if it could still achieve seven (!) minutes of angle. Needless to say, crappy-shooting M16A1s were pure hell for a unit armorer to get rid of.

There are a few examples of this very, very low bar attending to the M1 (and M2 and M3) carbines. One of the most interesting is the high tolerance for pitting in the inspection standards. A barrel was only unfit if the pits were wider than a land or a groove, or longer than 3/8″. Pitting across most of a groove? Well, that was OK, then. Just so long as it’s not all the way across.

Anyway, here goes:

M1_Carbine_TM9-1276.pdf

OT: Happy Birthday, Richard Wagner

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Richard Wagner would be 200 today, if he, unlike his music, were immortal.

Wagner was one of the most interesting (and one of the last) of the great composers; his reputation took a hit in the mid-20th Century because Hitler was a fan*, but the music has endured.

As war, if only supernatural war among Gods, poisonous dwarves and Nibelungs, was a constant theme of Wagner’s work, it’s not surprising it’s had some military echoes, most famously in the helicopter assault from Apocalypse Now. That’s a fairly ridiculous war movie if you take it seriously, but greatly entertaining: a bit like the Ring Cycle that way.

As well as being stirring, the best of Wagner is also intelligent and thoughtful, and he used very sophisticated harmonies but kept the music sounding natural and, well, good. That’s rather hard to do, as anyone who’s suffered through a jazz performance of great technical virtuosity, but no melodic or thematic interest, can tell you.

It’s good music to fight by — the moral content of your fight is up to you.

* Hitler, actually, had rather good taste in music, as his record collection, long held in Russian captivity, reveals. The guy was a monster but he had decent musical taste. He even had Mendelssohn and Mahler works in his catalog, which must have caused the world’s most legendary antisemite some profound cognitive dissonance — his whole ethos was based on the fundamental belief that Jews were no good and Mendelssohn is one of the many obvious and glaring disproofs of that belief (even if he never wrote a note, and he wrote some excellent notes, Mendelssohn deserves the . While there was a splash about Hitler’s music library turning up in Russia in 2007, the New Yorker’s Alex Ross noted at the time that hundreds of his records — Adolf’s, not Alex’s — are held in the Library of Congress special collections, and have been since 1945; and the Russian find may have authenticity issues.

There is one Hitler/Wagner nexus that would really be a great find if it turned up: Hitler had collected many of Wagner’s original manuscripts (Wagner lived in the time of Mad Ludwig, not Mad Adolf). Ross recounts the sad history of these missing documents in the first of the two links just above. A more recent update on these missing scores is here at Arts Journal.

Terrorist might do 2 years for 4 bomb murders

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One John Anthony Downey is under arrest as British prosecutors seek to close a 1982 mass murder by IRA terrorists. In July, 1982, they charge, he set and detonated a massive car bomb that destroyed an element of one of the units that guards Buckingham Palace. The bomb, one of two coordinated bombs set by the IRA in London’s Hyde and Regent Parks that day, killed seven horses and three men, two of them just married; a fourth member of the Blues and Royals died of his wounds four days later. Many other men and at least one horse suffered serious wounds.

John Downey, from County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland, is accused of being responsible for the car bomb that targeted a troop of the Royal Household Cavalry, Blues and Royals, as they rode from their barracks to Buckingham Palace.

Mr Downey is charged with the murders of Squadron Quartermaster Corporal Roy Bright, 36, Lieutenant Anthony Daly, 23, Trooper Simon Tipper, 19, and Lance Corporal Jeffrey Young, 19, on July 20 1982.

Sue Hemming, the Crown Prosecution Service’s head of special crime and counter-terrorism, said: “The Metropolitan Police Service has been investigating the explosion near Hyde Park in London which occurred on July 20 1982.

“It is alleged that Downey is responsible for the improvised explosive device contained in a car parked in South Carriage Drive, London, which resulted in the deaths of four members of the Royal Household Cavalry, Blues and Royals, as they travelled on their daily route from their barracks to Buckingham Palace.”

via Man, 61, charged with murdering four soldiers in IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park bombing – Telegraph.

But thanks to an agreement the British Government and the terrorists reached in 1998, Downey need not be acquitted to get out of jail soon. If Downey is convicted, he can apply for a transfer to a prison in Northern Ireland (rather than one in England, where most of London’s murderers end up). Then he can apply for release after two years, regardless of his nominal sentence.

Meanwhile, of course, Downey’s victims are still dead, and their family members are still bereaved. Not that any of the IRA goons (or the Protestant terrorist goons, who were as bad and arguably worse) gives a damn about them.

The British were handling terrorism better when they were just having the SAS show up and blow these creeps away. Go easy on terrorism, and what do you get? Most everybody has seen the news from Woolwich. That’s what you get. It’s almost as if the nation had a suicide pact with its political elite.

Beretta: not quite leaving Maryland

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The largest single employer in Maryland’s depressed Eastern Shore, Beretta USA, isn’t leaving. But neither are they staying put, like Remington has decided to do in New York. The question only came up in the first place because of the respective states’ hostility to the companies, their products, and their customers.

Beretta can’t just up and move — there are licenses and permits, and difficult and complex heavy-industrial processes, that are hard to shift, and the company is handcuffed to its current location by the M9 production contract, which requires a delivery schedule that can only be met by flat-out production without interruptions (the only real way they could boost M9 production is go to a second shift or get the DOD to accept imported parts — a non-starter of an idea). Instead, they’re going to relocate planned expansion out of Maryland. Left unsaid, but strongly implied, is that Governor O’Malley has earned himself a political enemy that comprises an extended family that started off making arms for the princes of Italian city-states, back when those city-states were known for intrigues using daggers and poison. They survived that, so who are you going to bet on to come out of this on top? (What O’Malley’s ancestors were doing back then went unrecorded in mostly-illiterate Ireland, but his instincts today suggest that some ancestor introduced sheep into his bloodline).

O’Malley is one of those people for whom dislike of guns, their associated culture, and the people who don’t share his Mr Yuk reaction to them, is emotional, even visceral. When Beretta warned that O’Malley’s anti-gun bills would make it difficult to continue to operate in the state, he had two answers, delivered in tones of dripping contempt:

Beretta is bluffing
Even if they’re not, we’re better off without them.

As we reported at the time, the Beretta family replied directly: they don’t bluff. O’Malley’s aiming at higher office, and confident he doesn’t need the 400-odd workers at Accokeek. Those workers are going to see more and more new work bypass them and go straight to other states — Beretta’s not saying where, but Virginia, where they moved some warehousing under a previous legislative assault in Maryland, is a likely beneficiary.

O’Malley remains confident in his political base in the two most powerful constituencies in Maryland: the government workers in the Washington bedroom communities, and the welfare culture of post-industrial Baltimore. The demonized Beretta workers include quite a few of his voters from previous elections; what will they do now? From the outside, we can only say it’s going to be interesting in Maryland. O’Malley’s blue-state appeal depends in part on the expectation of every-growing tax revenues from industry. A Beretta USA board member, General Counsel Jeff Reh, testified that Beretta has paid $31 million in Maryland taxes, while investing $73 million in the state, in the last 15 years.

Beretta’s Matteo Recontini posted to the Beretta USA blog:

The question now facing the Beretta Holding companies in Maryland is this: What effect will the passage of this law–and the efforts of Maryland government officials to support its passage–have on our willingness to remain in this State?

In that respect we are mindful of two objectives: We will not let passage of this legislation prevent us from providing on-time delivery of our products to our U.S. Armed Forces and other important customers. We also will not go forward in a way that compounds the insult made to our Maryland employees by their Governor and by the legislators who supported his efforts.

That sounds a bit like the Judgment of Solomon. They’re going to split the baby.

On our first reading last week we didn’t notice a disclaimer, that this post was Recontini’s personal view, and did not necessarily represent the corporation. But the most controversial statements in Recontini’s post are tracked word-for-word by statements that Jeff Reh made to the Washington Times’s Emily Miller, a reporter who found herself assigned to the gun beat — and co-opted by the gun culture. With Reh and Recontini speaking in practical unison, it’s hard to take any disclaimer too seriously.

So, what does this mean to the gun world? First, Beretta pistol production will continue. Beretta lobbied a generally anti-gun potentate in the legislature enough that they don’t have to move production of the guns, just production and warehousing of standard-sized magazines. That’s already on its way to VA. Beretta’s modern sporting rifle, the ARX 100, is almost certain to go to one of the other states that are wooing blue states’ hated gun makers now, but its initial production is underway in Accokeek. Some processes, like chrome-lining barrels, involve heavy machinery and hazmat approvals, and probably aren’t going anywhere fast.

What does this mean to the shooter and collector? First, A lot of M9s have been produced in Accokeek, so if and when production moves — a lead-pipe certainty if O’Malley’s punitive laws stand — they probably won’t bear much of a premium, at least not for a long time. (There’s currently an invisible difference between values of used Italian and Maryland 92s, for example). But an early ARX 100, a weapon that is more reminiscent of the FN SCAR-L than the AR-15 (this is not a bad thing), might one day be as valuable as a Costa Mesa AR-180 — or a Hollywood AR-10.

3D-Printed Guns: Lulzbot Liberator fires 9 shots

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A Liberator 3D printed handgun with several modifications has successfully fired nine shots from a single barrel. The shots were fired with a tether from a platform for safety.

This is the Liberator we previously showed you, printed on a Lulzbot, an under-$2k machine. This unit’s modifications from the original 3D-printed Liberator include:

Longer barrel
Rifled barrel (helps with regulatory compliance, avoiding NFA, but it’s doubtful that it imparts any stabilization to the round, for reasons we’ll soon see)
Screw instead of printed trigger and hammer pins
Different resin

Like Cody Wilson’s Prototype #1, this Liberator contains enough metal to comply with the so-called Undetectable Firearms Act.

Andy Greenberg of Forbes still seems to be torn three ways by his newsman instincts to cover this story, his techie instincts to applaud this, and his liberal instincts to condemn this technology. But his newsman side is winning and he continues to cover 3D gun developments in Forbes.

Meanwhile, the gun is discussed in this thread in the DEFCAD forums.

Takeaways:

Yeah, you can do this on a low-cost printer.
The generic ABS actually has better mechanical properties than the proprietary stuff Cody Wilson’s Stratasys requires.
Nobody has tested a .380 barrel to failure yet, so nobody knows where the failure point is. However, these guys were getting close. The headspace was increasing — and they think the bore diameter and chamber diameter were, too — with each shot.
The lack of rigidity of the barrel, compared to a steel barrel, takes a lot of velocity away from the .380 cartridge. They only captured 2 of the 8 shots’ velocity: 498.2 and 465.1 FPS. That’s half or less of typical .380 FMJ muzzle velocities, which range from around 900 to 1100 (per Ballistics 101). That would be a even larger proportional decrease in muzzle energy (because velocity is squared in the energy formula).

The best use for this, then, is as a technology demonstrator, and a proof of concept (as Wilson has consistently argued). But then, you couldn’t do much with the Wright Flyer either, yet there’d be no SR-71, Airbus 380 or UH-60 Black Hawk without the Wrights’ proof of concept and the other flimsy powered kites of wood and muslin that followed it into the air in the early years of the last century.

The Liberator also has a couple of other possible uses: a defense arm in places where people are so disarmed that even a marginal weapon like this is the best you can do. And there’s always the purpose of the original Liberator, as illustrated on its comic-strip instruction sheet: to whack some henchman of a tyrant, and take his factory-made gun.

That last use is probably keeping some wannabe henchmen up late at night. But if they were thinking henchmen, they’d be a lot more worried about the fact that it is the first raindrop of a deluge; or to put it another way, the Wright Flyer of a new technological era.

Don’t bring a gun to a sword fight

Lifestyles of the Rich and Packing

Update:

Back to Eleanor, it seems de rigeur on the left (for example, at the dependably Democratic AARP blog) to say she didn’t actually carry the thing, but the AARP guy ultimately gives in and quotes testimony on both sides of the issue. A few years back, Narodniy Politicheskiy Radio mentioned the revolver in what was otherwise predictable propaganda about a Designated Role Model™. Dave Kopel has more on her revolver-toting, from 2002. He used those same facts in a 2012 New York Times symposium — pearls before swine, but you have to credit him for trying. This Kopel thread suggests (in the comments) that her gun was provided by the then-head of the Secret Service, and was more likely than not a Colt Official Police revolver. Some good commentary on other shooting Roosevelts at all those links, too. Finally, this instructor’s page has a grainy copy of her application for the 1957 license shown above, and it suggests that she has had a permit continuously since 1933.

Why Carbine parts don’t match

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If you pick up a typical M1 Carbine (or almost any US military surplus weapon, but let’s stick to carbines for reasons that will become obvious) at a gun show, you’ll find that it’s a mélange of parts from various makers and vintages. But occasionally, someone will have a gun that is, for example, all Inland parts. Obviously, the first one is a parts-gun junker, and the second one’s “as issued” back in W-W-Two, right?

Maybe not right. It could actually be the other way around: the first gun is just the way some GI carried it in WWII or Korea, and the second was carefully assembled from parts to catch a collector’s eye. Whaaat?

It has to do with how carbines were handled, maintained, and redistributed in the theaters or war and in the Zone of the Interior, as the US was still often called in the mid-20th Century. The flow chart on the left (which you’ll probably have to expand to read) spanned two pages of the M1/2/3 Carbine overhaul manual (FM 9-1276) and explains the steps in an overhaul.

Not every gun got overhauled, but every time Ordnance units got their hands on a gun, it was considered for it. To decide if they needed to do it, they had to inspect the gun, of course. Ordnance got guns when they were turned in by armorers as having “issues”, turned in as entire unit sets by traveling units, recovered from battlefields and field hospitals (to this day, if you enter a hospital with a weapon, some Gorgon of a nurse will take it away from you, muttering incantations to the Gods of Geneva), and various other means fair and foul. At lower echelons, any guns passing inspection or readily reparable would quickly go back out to line units as battlefield replacements.

Guns that needed depot attention would be greased up in Cosmoline and packed together in wooden crates, and shipped to that facility, where they’d enter the top left of the chart. They’d be taken out of the crates, which themselves would be sent to a specialty shop for repair and reconditioning, and dismantled. Individual parts would be inspected — some by eyeball, and some using gages — and repaired, if possible; serviceable parts whether from inspection or repair benches would be refinished and then go to a central parts bin. (U/S parts were discarded).

In addition to the parts from the incoming carbines, the parts bins also held parts acquired under replacement-parts contracts, some makers of which never made complete carbines, only individual parts. None of the parts in the bins were labeled to a particular serial number of carbine. It was by way of this parts bin that most USGI carbines became mixmasters.

A very few parts were not removed from a carbine in this process. If the front and rear sights were serviceable, they stayed on board (Carbine rear sights were staked firmly in place, four times; front sights are simply a bear to remove and replace). And if the gas system worked and wasn’t visibly corroded, it wasn’t always disassembled. It’s possible to test the carbine gas system, on a field-stripped weapon, by the simple expedient of plugging the chamber with a finger or thumb, and blowing into the muzzle.

At the other end of the depot’s small arms bay, technicians (probably different ones from the ones stripping carbines at the intake end of the production line) would assemble carbines from the refinished, repaired or recertified parts in the parts bins. It had to pass a complete inspection and a live-fire function test, or it was repaired until it did. After test firing, the weapon was cleaned, inspected again (and sent again to the repair bench if need be, in which case it would be reinjected at the test-fire station again), and greased and packed.

Then, cases of carbines (the same cases that carbines came in in, after they, too, were overhauled and repaired as necessary) were shipped to users worldwide, or stored in the depots until called for. The cases held 10 M1 or M2 carbines, and weighed 83 pounds, measured 39 3/8 x 10 3/4 x 10 3/4 inches, and displaced 4 cubic feet; 10 M1A1s in the same case weighed 91 pounds.

As you see, this means that the odds are astronomical against any carbine that has been through this process still possessing parts made by its original maker. Modern guns are made with precision, interchangeable parts with almost zero hand fitting, and this high-throughput WWII-vintage overhaul system took maximum advantage of that.

So if you have an Inland carbine with all Inland parts (or Winchester, etc.) then that gun either has never been through the overhaul process, or has been carefully reassembled by some collector, carefully hoarding parts over the years. And there’s no really obvious way to tell; even a couple of late-carbine parts might have been refitted to an early carbine at the unit level, and the Air Force, which kept toting carbines into the 1960s, was especially slapdash about rebuilds and repair parts (a tradition they kept up with M16s and GAUs).

Our advice: don’t get too wound up about Carbine originality — if you do, you’re probably going to get fished sooner or later. The officers, signalmen, medics, mortarmen, support troops and others who toted these in every theater of war, didn’t worry overmuch about these details. Neither should we.

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery

Dang! We missed it – 8″ barrel

Cold War Clandestine Meetings

M1 (etc) Carbine overhaul manual

OT: Happy Birthday, Richard Wagner

Terrorist might do 2 years for 4 bomb murders

Beretta: not quite leaving Maryland

3D-Printed Guns: Lulzbot Liberator fires 9 shots

Don’t bring a gun to a sword fight

Lifestyles of the Rich and Packing

Update:

Why Carbine parts don’t match