[ihc] Garands and non IH Garands in particular

[John Hofstetter <hofs@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This month's "American Rifleman", the shooting magazine of the 
National Rifle Association, has an article about the Garands of the 
WW II era.  It says that building, rebuilding, repairing and renewing 
Garands was common practice by the Army during the war years.  In 
1945, the Springfield Armory was converted from a Garand 
manufacturing facility to a Garand overhaul facility.

On a Garand there is no such thing as matching serial numbers as only 
the receiver had a serial number. In the case of my IH all the parts 
were stamped with IHC but I don't know if that is true for the war 
time Garands, or not.

It occurred to me while reading the article that we who have acquired 
IH Garands may, in general,  have the highest percentage of original 
parts, because rebuilding the Garands (the practice lasted until the 
early 60's) seemed to be concentrated on the Garands left over from 
WW II.

By the way, the rebuilder was required to stamp the stock with a 
marque indicating who had rebuilt it. There seemed to be no "typical" 
location for the rebuilder's  stamp on the stock. Some were on the 
grip, some toward the rear of the stock, and so on. The article does 
have a listing of many of the rebuild brands if anyone is interested.

There is a picture at the front of the article of a GI sitting by a 
massive pile of M-1's cleaning up stocks with a bucket of some sort 
of a solution.  I laughed because it reminded me of the guys doing 
KP, and sitting by massive pots for their peeled potatoes. Not sure 
which would have been the worst duty.

John
--
John Hofstetter
www.goldrush.com/~hofs