Parker-Hale .303-.22 Conversion Kits for the Enfield, Lewis, and Vickers
Britain
•
9m 19s
In July of 1918, the British military formally adopted a Parker-Hale system of adapting .303-caliber arms to .22 rimfire for short range training. The system involved lining standard barrels with .22 caliber blanks that were machined with full size .303 chambers. Special cartridge inserts were used which had the external dimensions of .303 cartridges, but held .22LR cartridges inside. This allowed the weapon to use the same feeding system as it normally would, and to duplicate the handling and trigger mechanism of a standard .303 caliber gun wile only firing a small rimfire cartridge.
Parker-Hale built kits of this type for the Lee Enfield rifle, the Lewis LMG, and the Vickers HMG, and all were used by the British military. In the Lewis and Vickers, there was no accommodation made to actually cycle the guns; this sort of .22 practice drill was done by manually cycling the actions after each shot. Still, it was a good way to practice basic drill (loading, unloading, etc) as well as basic marksmanship without the noise of full power cartridges and without the need for a full-power-rated backstop.
The system for the Lee Enfield was replaced in 1920 (after only about 2 years of use) with the No2 MkIV* rifle, a dedicated .22 conversion of an SMLE. Parker-Hale kept the system in their commercial catalog into the 1930s, however.
Up Next in Britain
-
Vickers Mk IV .50 Caliber Water-Coole...
Development of the .50 caliber Vickers guns began during World War One, but stagnated after 1918, and was not really completed until the early 1930s. At that point, Vickers produced a series of the guns for use primarily as armored vehicle armament and for antiaircraft use. It was formally adopte...
-
British .303 Browning Mk II* Aircraft...
Britain began the process of replacing its Vickers aircraft machine guns with a new Colt/Browning design in 1935, with its adoption of the Colt MG40. This was essentially John Browning's air cooled M1919 machine gun made smaller and lighter, with an increased rate of fire, and reversible feed dir...
-
From the American Revolution: Short L...
The standard weapon of the British Army in the American War of Independence was the “Brown Bess”, and today we are looking at a 1769 Short Land Pattern example of the Brown Bess. This was a smoothbore .75 caliber, 10.2 pound flintlock with a whopping 42 inch barrel (the Long Land Pattern it super...
