Making Over a SMLE Sporter, Part 2

At some point, probably in the 1950's or '60's when  surplus SMLE's were widely available and cheap (I can remember in the 60's seeing barrels of them in Warshall's Sporting Goods in downtown Seattle for about $35 apiece), someone purchased this SMLE made by BSA in 1916 and converted it into a sporter.  Although most owners of SMLE's simply cut the service stock down, this person took two unusual steps: first, he discarded the two piece military stock and handguard and fit the barreled action, magazine, and trigger guard into a Fajen two piece sporter stock.  That had the obligatory white spacers at butt and grip together with a Monte Carlo comb.  Second, he removed the bridge for charging the rifle, giving a cleaner top line to the rifle, but leaving a large crescent cutout on the left side of the receiver.




I bought the rifle sight unseen from the auction GunBroker.com in May 2009 for $115 (probably a bit under the '60's price of $35, correcting for inflation).  I thought that it was an excellent candidate for an inexpensive make-over into a British-styled light rifle. Here is an example of what I was thinking of, this one with a flush magazine.

My aging eyesight dictated that I'd have to mount a peep sight instead of the open express sights on the example above. 

I cut off the Monte Carlo comb and used a rasp to reduce the cheek piece, reshaping it into the traditional pancake style with a sharply defined line.  Looking at several illustrations from old catalogs, I noticed that the English typically ended the forward edge of the cheek piece slightly to the rear of an imaginary line extended up from the rear of the grip, so I followed suit. 

I also moved the nose of the comb back and reshaped the grip, slimming it and smoothing out its arc.  Not having any buffalo horn at hand, I capped the grip with ebony.

The pitch of the butt was, well, unusual, so I changed the angle of the butt to the comb line to 90 degrees.  I had on hand an old Winchester red pad, so I sanded off the brand name and mounted it.  It looked quite like a traditional Silvers pad.  I gave the butt some cast off, rasping away at the cheek piece until the sights were on target when I mounted the rifle quickly.

Altering the fore end was comparatively straightforward.  I attached an ebony tip with dowels and epoxy and then shaped it into the shallow curve typical of English sporting rifles.  I slimmed the sides of the fore end considerably.  I cut off the two hollow studs in front of the magazine, originally intended to secure the detachable canvas breech cover, filed the metal smooth, and cold blued it.



I then took the gun to Fred Cornell (570 888-9236) of Sayre, PA, who was able to machine a fill-in for the charging bridge cavity and then soldered it in place and cold blued it.  He removed the rear sight, filing down the screw that secured it to the barrel until it was flush.

Fred soldered on a Williams ramp front sight and drilled, tapped, and mounted a Williams FP aperture sight.  The one negative of this sight is that unlike a Lyman, the sight bar can't be easily withdrawn.  If I were to do this over again, I'd search out an older Lyman with its quick release.

I wanted to mount the old-fashioned rings for a sling, but I couldn't find a source for them.  Instead, I ordered swivels and a sling from NECG, and Fred soldered on the front swivel in a typical English position.  Similarly, I placed the rear swivel closer to the grip than we're accustomed to.

Refinishing the rifle was straightforward.  The Fajen stock was black walnut with a somewhat greenish cast, so to kill the green I added red mahogany aniline dye to extra dark walnut dye in 50-50 proportions.  I then rubbed in two coats of alkanet oil, rubbing each down with 0000 steel wool after it had dried.  Two coats of satin polyurethane varnish followed as a sealer, again rubbing each coat down with steel wool.  I then top coated with Tru-Oil with a slight amount of alkanet oil added to it.

For checkering, I used a simple V pattern of 18 lines per inch on the grip and the fore end. The checkering on the fore end wraps around.

At some point, I'd like to have the magazine shortened so it only holds five rounds.  It would still protrude, but not look quite so military.  As of now, the rifle with sling weighs seven and a half pounds, handles like a dream, and is a delight to hunt with.

 

 





 

Making Over a SMLE Mark III* Sporter in .303 British

SMLE stands for Short Magazine, Lee Enfield; less formally, troops called it the "Smellie."  The Mark I was adopted in 1902 as the British service rifle following their decidedly unpleasant experiences fighting the Boers, many of whom were using charger-fed 7x57 Mausers, in what we now call South Africa.

It is "Short" because its barrel was shorter and therefore less cumbersome than its predecessors, the Lee-Metford of 1888 and the Lee-Enfield of 1895.  The "Magazine" denotes that it could be loaded with two five-round chargers, so it held five more rounds than the Mauser and was much faster to reload than the older Lee-Metfords and Lee-Enfields (their magazines held eight and ten rounds, respectively, but like the US's Krag, the rounds had to be loaded one at a time).

"Lee" commemorates Richard Paris Lee, the Scottish-born American who invented this box magazine system, while "Enfield"  refers not to the armory located at Enfield Lock but to the system of rifling with deeper grooves than those used in the Medford system.

With me so far?  We've almost finished!  The * following the Mark III indicates an official modification of the model pattern, but not one so sweeping as to require a different mark, as in, say, the Mark IV used by the British in WW II (the Australians stayed with the Mark III).  The SMLE Mark II's were updated Mark I's; the Mark III was adopted in 1907.  The Mark III*, adopted on January 2, 1916, did away with the long-range volley sight and the cut-off for the magazine. In May 1926, Great Britain began a different system of nomenclature:  the Mark III* became the Rifle No. 1, Mark III*.  If you can keep this straight, you're a better person than I am.

All of these models plus the later Mark IV and Mark V fired the .303 British, a rimmed cartridge introduced with the Lee-Metford in 1888.  It was at first loaded with black powder for about 1850 fps, then with smokeless cordite for about 1950 fps, both with a 215 grain round-nosed bullet.  In November 1910, the S. A. Ball Cartridge Mark VII became the standard, a smokeless round with a 174 grain spritzer developing about 2450 fps.

In the next post, I'll discuss how I made over a sporterized Mark III* SMLE.

"The Great Day That Dawns": The Source for a Kitlinguharmiut Song and My Redaction

Judging from the number of quotations on the web, this song from the Kitlinguharmiut or "Copper" Eskimo people (they made copper tools) has had a remarkably widespread and pervasive influence.  The US Department of Health has even used part of its concluding lines as the title for a handbook on suicide prevention:  To Live To See The Great Day That Dawns . . . Preventing Suicide by American Indian and Alaska Native Youth and Young Adults.  I read this song for the first time about ten years or so ago, when I was researching the hunting cultures of Northern Indians and of the Inuit, and it made a great impression on me.

I copied the English translation of the song and subsequently rewrote it.  I wasn't concerned about altering the integrity of the original:  after all, that was already at two removes.  This song first had been translated into Danish and that version then had been translated into English.  If you want to be strict about it, every translation is a betrayal, an idea expressed more succinctly in Italian:  traduttore, traditore.

Recently, as part of an extended conversation, I wrote down my redacted version and sent it to a group of friends that included Steve Bodio, who wanted to post it on his blog Querencia.  He asked me where it was from, and I told him that I'd reworked it but had lost my note on its source.  After Steve posted it, "Anonymous" then commented that a longer version could be found in Nick Jans's excellent The Last Light Breaking.  That is correct, on both counts:  that book gives the source, and that book is indeed excellent.  Thanks to Jans's citation of The Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24 by Knud Rasmussen, I was able to run down the original English translation.  It can be found in Rasmussen's  Intellectual Culture of the Hudson Bay Eskimos (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24.  Trans. W. E. Calvert. [Copenhagen:  Gyldendalkse Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1932]), IX, 53.  I believe that this is the first time it has been quoted on the web with a full citation. 

It goes as follows:

     And I think over again
     My small adventures
     When from a shore wind I drifted out
     In my kayak
     And thought I was in danger.
     My fears,
     Those small ones
     That I thought so big,
     For all the vital things
     I had to get and to reach.
     __ __ __

     And yet, there is only
     One great thing,
     The only thing:
     To live to see in huts and on journeys
     The great day that dawns,
     And the light that fills the world.
     __ __ __

I felt by shortening the song and dividing it into three quatrains it could be more expressive and, perhaps, even more emphatic.  I was pleased enough with my version that I decided to inscribe on a canoe paddle I'd made.  That might have been a good idea, but my execution wasn't.   Although my handwriting was legible, the design didn't look right on the blade of the paddle, so I erased it.  Apparently, I then tossed the notes I had made on the source of this song, keeping only the version I had reworked on my computer.

Now that the source is clear, here is my reworked version:

     Kitlinguharmiut Song

     As I recall once more
     The time I drifted out
     On an off-shore wind
     And believed I was in danger,

     I recall again my fears,
     Those small ones I thought so big,

     For all the things I hadn't yet

     Accomplished in my life.

 

     Yet there is only one big thing

     That truly matters:  to live

     To see the great day that dawns

     And the light that fills the world.

     

Caroline Gordon's novel, Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934)

 I had never heard of this novel until I read about it in Stephen J. Bodio's illuminating Sportsman's Library, but his praise convinced me to run down a used copy and read it.  I bogged down half way through the first time:  I kept feeling I was missing something.  A year later, I picked it up again and persevered, becoming more and more interested in this novel's power of suggestion, a power the more unusual because it derives less from what is said than from what is left unsaid.

The novel is narrated by Aleck Maury, a surviving representative of a socially privileged, literate but largely unintellectual Southern culture.   Maury apparently was born some time during or shortly after the Civil War at Oakleigh plantation in Louisa County, Virginia.  Just as reading most of Jane Austen you'd never know the Napoleonic Wars were in progress, so in Aleck Maury, Sportsman you'd hardly realize the Civil War had been fought.

Aleck Maury's mother had died while rocking baby Mary to sleep, so Aleck, the second youngest of five, was brought up by his eldest sister.  Aleck Maury's father did little but blame the parlous times for the ever-declining yields of his plantation, its soil depleted by successive crops of tobacco.  Impoverished from gambling, his father passed the time by writing blank verse, reading Classical literature, and declaiming poetry to his children.

When Aleck was eight, his father began to teach him first Latin and then Greek.  He made no effort to accommodate his instruction to a child's understanding.  One of the novel's memorable  moments is Maury recalling his father fixing his eye on him when he mistranslated a line of the Aeneid, saying sternly, "That, sir, is a dative."  Maury became good at Latin and Greek, and after graduating from the University of Virginia and working hand-to-mouth as far as Seattle and San Francisco, he eventually returns, not to Virginia, but to Tennessee to become a school teacher.  Almost by default, Maury adopts the vocation of teaching Classics. He persists in this endeavor until late middle age, and one of the many unvoiced but remarkable aspects of this novel is that its narrator seems to have learned almost nothing from the material he taught to others.

Maury's vocation may be teaching Classics, but that is not remotely his avocation.  From his first experience as an eight-year-old on a possum hunt with Rafe, hunting and fishing afforded him the most intense experiences of his life.  By hunting I mean bird shooting, not, as the English would have it, riding to hounds (which Maury tried and didn't like especially), and by fishing I mean angling for crappies, bream, and bass with fly or bait.  Bird shooting and fishing offer him an escape from himself, and Gordon is careful to leave it to the reader to judge whether that alternative is a viable, let alone a sufficient, one.  Ironically, the closest Maury comes to uniting his vocation with his avocation is writing down on the flyleaf of his first copy of the Aeneid his fishing mentor's recipe for making dough balls to catch suckers. 

We learn more about Maury's affection for his muzzleloading Greener shotgun than we do about his favorite writers.  The only time anything from Classical literature becomes important to his life is when Maury muses he'd like to hear his student Molly Fayerlee read aloud some lines from Horace. Typically, Gordon doesn't give the source, but it's Ode I.9:

Quid fit futurum cras, fuge quaerere; et

Quem fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro

Adpone; nec dulces amores

Sperne puer, neque tu choreas . . .

In George F. Whicher's translation, one I like to think Maury would have appreciated:

 

Pry not into the morrow's store;

   Thy profit doth advance

By every day that fate allots,

   So, lad, improve thy chance,---

Ere stiff old age replace thy youth,--

   To love and tread the dance.

Apparently Molly did read those lines aloud, and apparently that led to his marrying her (or, possibly, her marrying him) in 1890:  Caroline Gordon routinely omits seemingly relevant details like these.

Some years afterwards, following moves first to Mississippi and then to Missouri, misfortunes befall Maury and his family.  Their son dies from an accident while swimming, Molly and he grow a bit apart, and then Molly dies while undergoing surgery (perhaps for cancer; again, we do not know).  Maury grieves after his own fashion, putting aside hunting and fishing.  Soon after that, he is asked to resign from the college where he teaches.  Suddenly he is free, and it's ironic that at first he has absolutely no idea what he wants to do.  Depressed, he begins to realize that he's getting old.

He spends the next few years attempting to establish a fish farm but is not especially successful.  For the very first time in his life, drifting about on the still waters of Lake Lydia, he does contemplate his own death, but, unsurprisingly, his memento mori doesn't reach any resolution.  He remains depressed and at loose ends.  On a whim he decides to go to Florida and fish--again, not a successful experience. 

In the last chapter, his daughter Sally and his son-in-law Steve suggest he come to live with them. The three of them begin looking for a suitable house near Caney Fork, Tennessee.  The first part of this chapter serves primarily to demonstrate not merely how old-fashioned but how old Maury has become:  their youthful energy highlights his decrepitude.  He's fat, his legs hurt, and he quickly becomes winded. Sally's contemporary slang seems to him altogether inappropriate (much, perhaps, as Maury's mode of addressing blacks, young and old, seems inappropriate to our own sensibilities).  Stiff old age has indeed replaced his youth. 

Then, everything changes for the better.  Hearing about the fishing to be had in Caney Fork and then seeing the river itself revive Maury's spirits remarkably.  While Sally and her husband are debating about where to live, Maury quietly sneaks on a bus and takes off to go fishing in Caney Fork.  He may perhaps have finally realized the wisdom of the Englishman who years before taught him to cast a fly.  Back then, Colonel Wyndham had pursed his lips reflectively and told Maury:  "You're young and you don't realize it yet, but there isn't time enough . . .  There isn't time enough." 

Habitually unreflective, Maury doesn't grasp the significance of Wyndham's insight, and he doesn't even recall it when, a number of years later, he once again sees Wyndham, now aged ninety, gamely stumbling down to a river to fish.  Even at the very end of the novel, when he realizes in surprise that he'd just turned seventy a few days before, it is impossible to say whether Maury decides to seize the day and to make the most of his remaining time, or whether he simply decides he wants once more to go fishing.  A lesser novelist would have been underlining the theme of carpe diem every time the narrative would allow it.  Caroline Gordon, thankfully, is content to just make a slight gesture toward it. 

This is a self-portrait by a sportsman who has resolutely remained focused on the surface of life, but Caroline Gordon has made brilliant use of what in graphic art is termed negative space:  What is not said by Aleck Maury, Sportsman, is just as important as what he does say.

Pasta alla Norma (Pasta with eggplant, tomato, and ricotta salata sauce)

I first noticed this eggplant recipe in Italian Cooking in the CIA atHome series (see my earlier review).  It was delicious, so I did some research, experimented, and came up with my own version.  Tradition has it that the name derives from the custom in Catania, Sicily, of using Bellini's opera title to describe whatever was especially good.

Serves 4
Ingredients: 
     2 small eggplants
     Oil for frying
     1/4 cup olive oil
     2-3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
     1 chili pepper, cut in half and seeded, or 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes (to taste)
     1 3/4 pounds ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped; or a 26 oz. box of Pomi
          chopped tomatoes
     1/2 cup grated ricotta salata*
     Fresh basil, torn into small pieces, to sprinkle on top, if available

     1 pound bucatini (hollow spaghetti), or 1 pound penne

After cutting off the ends of the eggplant, slice them across into 1/2" slices.  Place in a colander either in the sink or with a bowl under it and salt the slices to draw out any bitter juices.  If possible, press down with a bowl weighted with some cans of food.  Let drain for at least an hour.  Then rinse thoroughly and dry each slice.

Traditionally, the eggplant slices are then fried in oil until they are lightly brown on each side.  If in doubt, undercook slightly, as you don't want them to fall apart when you slice them.  Alternatively, you can oil a baking sheet and bake them at 350 degrees, turning once.

When they have cooled, slice the rounds into strips 1/2" wide.  Cut the longer ones in two.  Set aside some of the best looking ones for topping.

Heat the water for pasta.  Salting it will improve the pasta's flavor.

Meanwhile, make the tomato sauce.  Add some olive oil to a sauté pan over low heat and add the garlic and the hot pepper.  When the garlic is just starting to color, add the tomatoes.  Cook over medium heat, 20-25 minutes.  If you used a chili pepper, remove the halves.

Boil the pasta until it's al dente.  Drain, keeping back 1 cup of pasta water.

In a bowl, mix the pasta and tomato sauce and most of the eggplant slices.  If the sauce seems too dry, add some of the reserved pasta water.  Taste for seasoning.  If the eggplant tastes bitter, add a pinch of sugar, mix, and taste again.  Add the reserved eggplant on top.  Drizzle with olive oil.  Sprinkle with the torn-up basil and then the grated ricotta salata.  Enjoy!

     *Ricotta salata (salty ricotta) is made by salting and pressing fresh ricotta and then aging it for three months.  It's somewhat like feta, but not as salty.

Update on Joss Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing

To update my post of August 2, 2013, I saw in last Sunday's NY Times that Much Ado has been released on DVD.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

If you are young enough to have a seventy-year-old (or older) parent, or old enough to be getting close to that age yourself, you should run, not walk, to buy a copy of Katy Butler's Knocking on Heaven's Door:  The Path to a Better Way of Death (Scribner, 2013).

By turns a memoir about her parents Jeff and Valerie as first one and then the other declines and dies, an unsparing account of her own frustrations about never being able to cope with her mother, let alone live up to her expectations, and a clear-eyed analysis of the too-often-unspoken mores of the medical profession that value (and reward) the prolongation of life over any other concern, Knocking on Heaven's Door will leave you shaken.

More than that, however, you may well begin thinking about your own future.  What do you want out of life?  How do you want it to end?  For most of us, the choices may not be as simple as the bang or the whimper we used to believe were the two witty alternatives.  Jeff Butler had a pacemaker installed while he was in relatively good health.  But when his health began to fail, that pacemaker kept his heart beating long after almost everything else of him had ceased to function.  No doctor wanted to turn it off--and that was only one of the problems Valerie Butler faced.  Caring for her husband at home probably shortened her own life.  After his death, she began to fail.  The good news is that the negative experiences of caring for her husband had taught her enough that, with her daughter's help, she was able to make better choices for herself about the best way to die.

May we all have the courage Valerie Butler had, and may we all read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the path to a better way of death that Katy Butler has described in Knocking on Heaven's Door.  Lots of books have the potential to change your life; this one could change your death.

Highly recommended.