User Panel
Posted: 8/13/2023 2:58:42 PM EDT
Was it an intentional design choice to choose en bloc clips over magazines when the Garand was adopted in the 30s by the US Army? I vaguely recall reading that Ordnance did not want soldiers to waste ammo and were concerned with a mag they would burn through ammo faster.
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I read somewhere on the internet that an original version had planned magazines but it was requested to be an internal magazine by the end.
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The BM59 is one such example of how it would have worked for a magazine.
Belt fed was just not possible due to the design. |
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The Garand is mag fed.
Not detachable, but mag fed nevertheless. |
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Could have? Sure.
The choice was basically down to perceptions at the time about shooting stances and, more significantly, the logistics of magazines. Old dudes that had learned to shoot on trapdoor Springfield's were calling the shots, so only so much could change so fast. All things considered, the enbloc.clips worked really well. I doubt they materially limited the average infantrymans effective rate of fire after the first 20 rounds. |
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All repeaters are feed from a magazine, just not all are removable.
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Quoted: Quoted: It was designed to be mag fed from the start. This. Army Ordnance Corps said nope. Cool I’d like to see a prototype. Did it use BAR mags or did it have its own proprietary Garand mag? |
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I recall reading that they originally were designed to accept BAR magazines, but went to clips to save ammo and reduce costs.
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Quoted: Cool I'd like to see a prototype. Did it use BAR mags or did it have its own proprietary Garand mag? View Quote Winchester Experimental Mag-Fed Garands |
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Quoted: I’m not trying to be a pendantic ass but doesn’t by definition a magazine have its own internal spring to feed? ETA: I guess I should have specified detachable magazine. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: The Garand is mag fed. Not detachable, but mag fed nevertheless. I’m not trying to be a pendantic ass but doesn’t by definition a magazine have its own internal spring to feed? ETA: I guess I should have specified detachable magazine. Over/under on pendantic asses in this thread pointing out the definition of a magazine? |
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Quoted: I recall reading that they originally were designed to accept BAR magazines, but went to clips to save ammo and reduce costs. View Quote Considering how badly we had let our military deteriorate after the Great War I almost understand Ordnances logic. After all it was the war to end all wars. I don’t know how clear WWII was in the minds of planners when Garand trials were going on in the early/mid 30s. None the less it seems a decision that probably cost many American infantrymen their lives. |
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Quoted: Was it a proprietary mag? View Quote Gun Jesus has done several videos on this, including Garand's original designs with T1919 and T1920, BM-59, and Winchester experimental designs. Dept of Ordnance specified the internal mag. Hatcher's Notebook can be downloaded as a .pdf and discusses why they wanted it. Also, remember that the Pederson cartridge allowed for 10 Rd internal rather than 8. |
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The military stipulated that the M1 be loaded via en bloc clip and be in 276 Pederson.
John Garand built it and then the military said we changed our mind it must be 30-06. In 1945 the M1 was adapted to be select fire using a modified BAR mag. They were planning on having 100k ready for the invasion of Japan but the war ended and the program cancelled. |
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Quoted: The military stipulated that the M1 be loaded via en bloc clip and be in 276 Pederson. John Garand built it and then the military said we changed our mind it must be 30-06. In 1945 the M1 was adapted to be select fire using a modified BAR mag. They were planning on having 100k ready for the invasion of Japan but the war ended and the program cancelled. View Quote Isn't that basically an M14? Edit: damn, beat, but by less than a second? Not sure I've seen that before... |
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An empty BAR mag weighs a pound and a half, empty. More when you cram 20 rounds into it.
Granted, you save some weight by removing the mag internals from the rifle, but that's still a substantial weight penality per 100 rounds of ammo compared to the en blocs. |
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A magazine fed M1 in 276 Pederson would have been very nice. Comically obsolete by today's standards. But bleeding edge tech in the early 1940s.
Oh well, it's not rifles and riflemen who win wars. Its artillery and things that make even bigger booms. When you have the balls to use it. Since no one has both those bigger weapons or the balls to use them anymore I suppose no one will ever win a war ever again. They will just go on and on and on like the Hundred Years War. |
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Quoted: I’m not trying to be a pendantic ass but doesn’t by definition a magazine have its own internal spring to feed? ETA: I guess I should have specified detachable magazine. View Quote A magazine is where the ammo is stored ready to be fed into the chamber. A clip inserts into the magazine or charges a magazine. A magazine can be just loose rounds that gravity feed into the chamber. |
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Quoted: Quoted: It was designed to be mag fed from the start. This. Army Ordnance Corps said nope. There’s a reason why the Springfield Armory was shut down and the Ordnance Corps had its wings severely clipped after the cluster that was the M14 acquisition. |
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Looking at wiki......it’s pretty close case wise to the 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano.
It would have been a nice set up in .276 Pedersen with 10 rounds. .450 casehead diameter versus the .30-06 .473 dia. It’d be tempting to mod a bolt but too much work. It’d be one thing to weld and remachine around the bolt face but if you had to alter/move the hole for the ejector then that’s a nonstarter. |
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What’s funny is how the M1 has weird design choices due to its evolution during trials
The op rod is so damn long and the gas dwell time is about short because it was gonna be a gas trap rifle (in fact it was adopted as a gas trap). Even still the op rod can rub on the Barrel The op rod is manufactured bent because of the thicker .30/06 barrel (the original .276 was straight) 8 rounds is unusual. It was supposed to be 10 .276 The disassembly is very weird and, for modern shooters very tricky to do without messing up your bedding / accuracy. Really the intervals are just plain funky and unusual. Like using the recoil Spring As the mag spring too. Also a weirdly short bolt and bolt throw. Like they were trying to keep the action length and recurved very short. Sub guns of the era had longer cycle distances! |
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Quoted: Considering how badly we had let our military deteriorate after the Great War I almost understand Ordnances logic. After all it was the war to end all wars. I don’t know how clear WWII was in the minds of planners when Garand trials were going on in the early/mid 30s. None the less it seems a decision that probably cost many American infantrymen their lives. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: I recall reading that they originally were designed to accept BAR magazines, but went to clips to save ammo and reduce costs. Considering how badly we had let our military deteriorate after the Great War I almost understand Ordnances logic. After all it was the war to end all wars. I don’t know how clear WWII was in the minds of planners when Garand trials were going on in the early/mid 30s. None the less it seems a decision that probably cost many American infantrymen their lives. Plus the Grand was going up against bolt actions with 5 round internal magazines when it was first fielded. Other countries were for sure experimenting with different designs, like the SKS, CETME, etc. But nothing was fielded yet as I recall. |
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Quoted: Bar mags suck. The Garands bolt speed is too fast for the bar magazine to feed properly View Quote Yep. They were heavy, too large for capacity, and too much friction. Apparently when they trialed the BAR mags, the bullet tips would indent the front of the mag from shaking around during recoil. It doesn't help that it's an 8# rifle shooting 30-06 at 950rpm haha. |
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Quoted: Isn't that basically an M14? Edit: damn, beat, but by less than a second? Not sure I've seen that before... View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: The military stipulated that the M1 be loaded via en bloc clip and be in 276 Pederson. John Garand built it and then the military said we changed our mind it must be 30-06. In 1945 the M1 was adapted to be select fire using a modified BAR mag. They were planning on having 100k ready for the invasion of Japan but the war ended and the program cancelled. Isn't that basically an M14? Edit: damn, beat, but by less than a second? Not sure I've seen that before... That was a good one! |
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The M1 Garand recoil spring pulls double duty as the magazine spring. When the weapon is in-battery (bolt closed), the bell-crank arm that applies force to the follower via the recoil spring is minimally-loaded. The follower gradually accumulates force as the bolt travels to the rear, where it is at a maximum, ready to lift the stack of cartridges in front of the bolt. I would surmise that this is a purposeful design element, since the low-mass op-rod is supplied with an incredibly brief burst of energy from the propellant gases at the gas port, which is like an inch from the muzzle. John Garand appears to have purposely designed it so that the cartridge stack is exerting the least amount of force (and friction) to the bolt as the bolt is moving to the rear of the receiver.
The op-spring is also really strange - the print says it is made from a modified 420 stainless steel, that is heat-treated and heat-set (a process that sets up a beneficial residual-stress system) after it is coiled. Both of those are really strange for a weapon spring, and I am personally unaware of any other weapon spring that is like that. Whoever designed that was *extremely* concerned about time-dependent stress relaxation (resulting in a loss of load) of the spring, which I personally think is unfounded, because the spring sees an extremely low stress value, even when it is compressed solid. I would not expect stress relaxation to be an issue at all with a spring that is stressed at only about 100,000psi when the bolt is locked open, regardless of material. The M14 uses a 17-7ph recoil spring, which is basically impervious to stress relaxation at room temperature. Strangely, it still used maximally-stressed Music Wire magazine springs, which absolutely do relax continuously over a period of weeks, months, years. I don't know why they didn't use 17-7ph for that spring. So yes, it could have used an external magazine, and there was a late-war prototype that did use BAR magazines (I forget its designation). |
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Quoted: What’s funny is how the M1 has weird design choices due to its evolution during trials The op rod is so damn long and the gas dwell time is about short because it was gonna be a gas trap rifle (in fact it was adopted as a gas trap). Even still the op rod can rub on the Barrel The op rod is manufactured bent because of the thicker .30/06 barrel (the original .276 was straight) 8 rounds is unusual. It was supposed to be 10 .276 The disassembly is very weird and, for modern shooters very tricky to do without messing up your bedding / accuracy. Really the intervals are just plain funky and unusual. Like using the recoil Spring As the mag spring too. Also a weirdly short bolt and bolt throw. Like they were trying to keep the action length and recurved very short. Sub guns of the era had longer cycle distances! View Quote The Garand has a lot of really weird design features. The receiever is incredibly short, and incredibly complicated. A lot of the parts look like a headache to machine. I don't think the bolt even travels to-and-fro in a perfectly straight line, I think it takes a slight rainbow-trajectory (someone correct me if I'm wrong). |
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For 8-10 round rifle, clips actually make a lot of sense. Less weight than steel mags. Also shipped in clips ready to go. More than 8-10 rounds then mags make sense - but the mentality was a rifleman didn’t need hi-capacity magazines, especially in a 30-06 battle rifle.
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Quoted: Could have? Sure. The choice was basically down to perceptions at the time about shooting stances and, more significantly, the logistics of magazines. Old dudes that had learned to shoot on trapdoor Springfield's were calling the shots, so only so much could change so fast. All things considered, the enbloc.clips worked really well. I doubt they materially limited the average infantrymans effective rate of fire after the first 20 rounds. View Quote Read once over at cmp forum that they army tested and found that the 8 rd clips were actually faster over the course of a prolonged battle. |
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Could have been, and should have been. But back then the people in charge were overly conservative and resistant to change.
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Quoted: Read once over at cmp forum that they army tested and found that the 8 rd clips were actually faster over the course of a prolonged battle. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: Could have? Sure. The choice was basically down to perceptions at the time about shooting stances and, more significantly, the logistics of magazines. Old dudes that had learned to shoot on trapdoor Springfield's were calling the shots, so only so much could change so fast. All things considered, the enbloc.clips worked really well. I doubt they materially limited the average infantrymans effective rate of fire after the first 20 rounds. Read once over at cmp forum that they army tested and found that the 8 rd clips were actually faster over the course of a prolonged battle. I think my late war the m1 Ammo came in on bandoleers already ready in en bloc clips but that wasnt always the case when we were still shooting up old stocks of 5 round stripper clips of M1903 Springfield ammo. IIRC the M1903s stayed in rifle squads for prehaps the entire war as they were needed for rifle launched grenades. |
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Quoted: Bar mags would seem to be a natural choice View Quote When Springfield experimented with the T-22 up to T25, it was thought that the BAR magazine would be used. The problem was the Army wanted selective fire and feeding with the BAR magazine was unreliable. They could strengthen the spring to push the cartridges up faster; but then it wouldn't be reliable for the BAR OR they could lengthen the receiver by 1/4" which would increase the travel distance and give more time for the BAR magazine to feed. Neither were ideal as the Army wanted to keep the receiver the same. Remington's solution to keep the BAR magaazine and the original receiver was to insert a spring w/in the op rod spring (dual spring) worked, but for reason unknown the Army didn't like that either (NIH?). |
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Quoted: The Garand has a lot of really weird design features. The receiever is incredibly short, and incredibly complicated. A lot of the parts look like a headache to machine. I don't think the bolt even travels to-and-fro in a perfectly straight line, I think it takes a slight rainbow-trajectory (someone correct me if I'm wrong). View Quote The bolt does slightly slightly tip down. While the receiver isn't exactly simple, its about as simple as you can make a long stroke, en bloc clip fed rifle |
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Quoted: The Garand has a lot of really weird design features. The receiever is incredibly short, and incredibly complicated. A lot of the parts look like a headache to machine. I don't think the bolt even travels to-and-fro in a perfectly straight line, I think it takes a slight rainbow-trajectory (someone correct me if I'm wrong). View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted: Quoted: What’s funny is how the M1 has weird design choices due to its evolution during trials The op rod is so damn long and the gas dwell time is about short because it was gonna be a gas trap rifle (in fact it was adopted as a gas trap). Even still the op rod can rub on the Barrel The op rod is manufactured bent because of the thicker .30/06 barrel (the original .276 was straight) 8 rounds is unusual. It was supposed to be 10 .276 The disassembly is very weird and, for modern shooters very tricky to do without messing up your bedding / accuracy. Really the intervals are just plain funky and unusual. Like using the recoil Spring As the mag spring too. Also a weirdly short bolt and bolt throw. Like they were trying to keep the action length and recurved very short. Sub guns of the era had longer cycle distances! The Garand has a lot of really weird design features. The receiever is incredibly short, and incredibly complicated. A lot of the parts look like a headache to machine. I don't think the bolt even travels to-and-fro in a perfectly straight line, I think it takes a slight rainbow-trajectory (someone correct me if I'm wrong). The past is another country, they do things differently there. The thing I always notice about early repeating firearms is that they are usually insanely complicated, unless they were personally designed by John Moses Browning. Then I remind myself that the people designing these things often didn’t have a lot of other guns to reference. Perfection is achieved when there is nothing more to take away. |
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