Rock Island Arsenal Springfield 1903 and the dangers of low numbered Springfields.My father purchase

Rock Island Arsenal Springfield 1903 and the dangers of low numbered Springfields.My father purchased this neighbor from a friend of ours about ten years ago.  I don’t remember what he paid for it but it was certainly a good deal.  Originally it was manufactured in 1907 with the serial number 272,883, then refurbished and re-arsenalled during World War II.  When purchased it had a badly beaten up WWII era stock on it, which my dad replaced with an original WWI era stock.It was in purchasing this rifle that we learned the dangers of low serial number Springfields.  When the first batches of Springfield 1903 rifles were forged, the workers had no standardized method of determining if the steel for the receivers had reached the proper temperature.  Basically they just eyeballed it, calling it done when the steel had reached the right shade of orange.  Unfortunately they were sometimes wrong, forging receivers that were too brittle or too soft.  This caused some incidents of catastrophic malfunction (explosion) when fired.  Production was halted and new methods for forging receivers were instituted.  Many low numbered Springfields were destroyed, but many more were simply just put in storage.  Ours was one of those rifles.  When World War II came around the US needed guns right away.  The rifle was taken out of storage and refurbished for war.  Because it was a low numbered rifle, they did a metallurgical strength test on the side of the receiver, which left a big scar on it left hand side (pictured above).  Apparently it passed, and went to war until sold off by the CMP.  For those buying Springfields with the intent to fire them, here are the serial numbers considered unsafe.Springfield Armory < 800,000Rock Island Arsenal < 286,506 -- source link

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