I do not have a high opinion of WW1 or earlier metallurgy. People confuse the nice shiny finish and precise machining with quality. Unfortunately the quality stops at the surface as the metals of that era are of poor quality. This is due to the primitive and inconsistent process controls of the era. Every analysis of steels from that time, that I have read, will have a statement saying: “slag, impurities, poor quality”.
The process controls of Springfield Armory were so poor that they were producing burnt receivers from 1903 to 1918. When you read in Hatcher's Notebook, the forging ovens did not have gages to tell the temperature of the steel. Hatcher puts the blame on the workers, but the workers are not the ones buying the forging ovens. Management relied on human eyeballs to judge forging temperatures. There is no reason that human eyeballs were any better in one year than any other year.
Also, the steels used in these rifles are plain carbon steels, not the alloy steels we use today. The parts on these rifles are at least half to a third as strong as modern parts made from 4140 steel.
The basic problem, one that goes around and around, is that there is not a non destructive way to tell if a single heat treat receiver is good or bad.
These old receivers also fragment when they fail, good receiver or bad. The M1903 does not handle gas well, blowups show the blown out wood chunks, and that will occur single/double/nickel steel. The consequences of being wrong, the potential of serious injury so high, that I do not think it is worth shooting one of these things .
As for there not being a record of a receiver failure from that year. That only proves there is no record, not that a failure did not happen.
Everyone’s statistics are based on Hatcher’s Notebook which is not an all inclusive list of all 03 failures. Hatcher’s list starts 1917 and ends 1929. There are known failures after. Likely there were failures before, but they just were not reported or in the documentation which Hatcher had access.
Daffy Doc, in his paper at
http://m1903.com/03rcvrfail/ makes the same error.
No receiver failures were reported in the training period before the battles, and during the four major battles that occurred in the seven month period in 1942-43. While it's not possible to estimate the exact number of rifles involved, up to 7,000 would have been in use by the three rifle regiments of the 1st Marine Division, Based on the failure rates of 1917-1918 between one and two rifle receivers would have been expected to fail.
Daffy Doc could not find any failure reports and made the conclusion that absence proves no receivers failures. I disagree with this. The absence of records indicate the absence of records. That does not mean that there were never were records; there could have been. There are buildings full of records that the US Army and Marine Corp have right now which Daffy Doc will never see. These records will be disposed of by the lowest cost method which will guarantee the least embarrassment later. All organizations have to undergo reoccurring data dumps, or there will not be space for the workers. The lack of records might also be due to there was a shooting war going on. Even the military prioritizes efforts as the culture changes from peacetime bureaucracy to a life and death struggle. How high a priority would there be to create rifle failure reports in a war time expansion? If a rifle broke, someone threw it in a scrap bin and got busy filling out paper work for the real important things. Like the Guadalcanal invasion.
