>It's also impossible to say who made this carbine originally, at least
>completely. (...) this particular carbine's barrel is marked as having
>been made by Inland(.)
>
>However, that doesn't necessarily mean the receiver is also an Inland,
>nor any of the other parts. They probably are, Inland made by
>far the largest number of carbines, but unless they're marked
>someplace that's currently hidden inside the stock, there's no way of
>knowing.

OK, I've tried to get a photo of this and haven't been able to, because it's just barely visible to the naked eye, much less a nonprofessionally employed camera, but...

See where the serial number is, there on the back of the receiver abaft the rear sight? Well, I recently learned that this is not the original type of rear sight that was on the M1 carbine. It's authentic GI equipment, but it was introduced as an engineering change during production, and was later retrofitted to a lot of the carbines that were built before it.

The original sight was a much simpler affair, with a two-position flip aperture that toggled between two ranges, as opposed to the finely machined, two-axis-adjustable affair with a screw knob and a spring detent and all the other fiddly bits, as we have here. (This is a bit unusual, as in my experience combat small arms sights virtually always get revised in the other direction.)

Anyway, the upshot of that is that the base of the new adjustable sight is considerably larger than the original two-position flip sight was, and it's covering up the manufacturer's name, which is stamped on the receiver just forward of the serial number. This is in keeping with the standard U.S. ordnance procedure at the time, viz. the receiver markings on the Garand M1 rifle:

On the carbine, the designation and caliber are marked ahead of the bolt, on the part of the receiver the barrel shank goes into, probably because there isn't room for all of it on the back of the carbine's eensy receiver, but by tilting it just so in the right light and squinting, I can see the first two letters of a line of stamping above the serial number at the back, the rest of which is hidden under the rear sight: IN

Since GM's Inland Division was the only prime contractor for these rifles whose name started with those letters, that pretty clearly shows that they made the receiver as well as the original barrel that was on this one (assuming that the 1943 barrel that was on it when I got it was the original, which is impossible to know for certain now, but I would consider it a pretty safe bet).

As it happened, most (though not all) contractors marked virtually every part of one of these things somewhere with a code that would identify, to someone with the appropriate list, the original source of each part. We saw the SI mark on the front barrel band in the original post. I haven't undertaken a thorough investigation of all my carbine's small parts, but I did notice when I had it apart a bit ago that the stock is stamped "SA" on the inside, up front. That indicates the stock that's on it now was made by Springfield Armory (the government arsenal, not the consumer firearms company), and that's interesting, because it means it's not the original one. Springfield didn't make M1 carbines during the war, only some replacement parts for them later on. Although broken and repaired at some later date, the stock that's on this carbine now is somewhat newer than the metal parts. (That also explains why it has the cutout for the full-auto M2's selector switch—that was the only carbine stock pattern produced after the M2 came about, to simplify logistics.)

I just thought some folks might find that interesting. I'm always impressed by the amount of detective work that historic firearms communities can usually be found to have put in on this kind of thing.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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