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This is Jane:
She is a 1943 Smith-Corona "Springfield" style 1903-A3 bolt action rifle in .30-06. This rifle may be the nearest and dearest to my heart, which is certainly why I picked it up at a recent local gun auction even though I have NO business spending any more money on rifles. She was very likely personally carried into the most brutal conflict of our entire planet's history, the Second World War. I say that it is very likely because I have learned that she actually had a barrel replacement in 1944, suggesting a very high degree of service to her country in the hands of a soldier or Marine. Someone likely lived or died with their hands on her.
She has obviously had extensive restoration and rearsenalling, but regardless, her receiver and barrel saw combat and her stock was probably installed after the war was over, most likely anyway.
I named her Jane because she's obviously American, a USGI (U.S. Government Issue). Since she fought to save every woman (and man) from tyranny, I decided to name her what we indiscriminately call every every woman in this country that we don't have a proper name for: Jane.
This is Tania and Eleanor:
Eleanor:
Eleanor is a 1942 Savage (American built, English-serviced) Lee-Enfield bolt action rifle in .303 British that very likely saw service in World War 2 as well. She was built in the United States and sold to the United Kingdom (I believe), for use in the war. From what I understand (which is little), England was having a hard time keeping up war production before the U.S. entered the war, so we helped out by building more weapons and selling them to England (probably subsidized). She is the culmination in a long line of tried and tested English rifles that were used across the world in Royal military forces. At least two friends of mine whose fathers served in the Royal Indian Militia used Ishapore 2A Lee-Enfield rifles, one chambered in .303 British, the other in the later-used 7.62x51 NATO cartridge.
She has also had extensive restoration to her stock but she is all 100% original matching parts from muzzle to buttstock.
Tania:
Tania is of an unknown year of manufacture. She is a Czechoslovakian copy of the legendary German Mauser action (also copied in the Springfield 1903), known as a vz.24 8mm Mauser. She is most likely a late-1930's or early-1940's model, but her origins were erased when West Germany recovered these rifles after the war and ground the Czech crest off of the receiver, taking the arsenal stamp and date stamp with it. I'm not actually sure which side of the war these rifles served on. The vz.24 was a famous Mauser copy for two reasons: it is the largest, strongest "large ring" Mauser action ever built, and it was known as the "BRNO" (Bruno) for the city where they were manufactured in Czechoslovakia, when they were imported in great numbers by the Shah government of Iran prior to 1979. This rifle may have been to Iran, but I have no way of knowing.
I have been told that the batch of restored rifles that this gem comes from is one of the finest restored Czech Mausers ever produced. These weapons saw extremely arduous combat conditions in the bloodiest of battles.
Finally we come to Olive. Olive is named after the mother of Samuel Colt:
Olive was my, "what the hell are you thinking, if your mother finds out, you are cat food -- then again this is the most combat-tested and sophisticated family of firearms ever built and no firearms collection is complete without one", purchase.
I named her after Samuel Colt's mother since, after all, Colt is one of the largest original manufacturers of the M16/M4 family of rifles. I could regurgitate every major technical detail about the M16/AR15 style rifle, but I will be brief.
The M16 was first designed in 1957 and produced in 1960. It saw limited service in the beginning of the Vietnam war beside the weapons it would eventually replace, the M14 and M1 carbines. Due to early design flaws, the M16A1 design performed poorly in the hot, humid, dirty jungles where it often jammed and required a great deal of upkeep. It is actually due to this weapon's gorgeous-and-neurotic-girlfriend-like level of required maintenance that is largely responsible for the all-consuming culture of cleanliness-obsession in the Marine Corps and other branches of the military -- though, obviously, the complete nature of obsession with detail in the Corps goes above and beyond the scope of this weapon's heritage. For anyone who has used this rifle as part of the armed services, however, it is obvious that such an obsession when it comes to maintenance and cleanliness is paramount to its continued combat effectiveness in places like Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and other dusty climates. In fact, anywhere besides Antarctica, this weapon has to be cleaned and cleared of debris OFTEN. This is owed to the simple, yet dirty, design of its gas impingement system.
But I seriously digress. The rifle pictured is, in fact, a civilian version of the more modern, shortened, otherwise-tactically-upgraded M4 Carbine rifle with a 16" barrel, a 30 round magazine firing the 5.56mm NATO (or similar but not identical .223 Remington) bullet. The military version has a maximum effective range against a point target of 550 meters and against an area target of 800 meters.
My specific rifle is made by a company named Daniel Defense, that is quite new but VERY accomplished in the AR-15 market. It was built to military spec with a 1-in-7" twist heavy match chrome-poly lined barrel, meaning it most effectively fires military-spec heavy bullets with superior terminal ballistics and it resists wear and rusting for several thousand rounds.
The ribbing you see on the edges near the barrel are called "Picatinny" or Military Standard 1913 rails, designed to hold accessories such as the tactical grip pictured, which actually came with the rifle. The flat-top A3 receiver and collapsible M4 buttstock also came with it.
While it does not have the standard A3 carry handle iron sights, it has an excellent set of Daniel Defense "BOI", Back-Up-Iron sights:
That concludes this edition of "meet the new members of my family"
Pretty sure I've chased off everyone but Navigator, Blacknblue, and maybe some intrepid lurker.
I realize that the female is more deadly than the male but surely weapons also come in the male gender? 
