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Winchester M1 with "X" on firing pin
peepaw
Member Posts: 17 ✭✭
All the parts on this M1 are marked correctly, except the firing pin has an "X". I was told by a gunsmith this means "Experimental". Is that true? Is that a good thing value wise?
Comments
Is it a round firing pin, or the more common flat? I'm curious if it's the former, which was heavier, and was more likely to cause slam fires. Might be that yours is round, and marked with the X to better I.D. it?
Reading further on this, it looks like I'm not 100% accurate on the pins causing slam fires. The heavier round pins were taken out of service more because of the tendency to get jammed forward, after a lot of use, which could then lead to slam fires. All this probably has nothing to do with your firing pin, but it made me go down a bit of a rabbit hole, and had no idea that there were heavier round firing pins to start with.
To be honest, I don't have an answer on whether or not your "X" mark really stands for "experimental". My gut tells me no, and that it's probably just a random acceptance mark, but I hope someone here can figure it out anyway.
Don’t know if this is any help or not ,,,,, scroll down to ‘firing pin’.
https://m1family.com/part-markings-check-here-first-t46.html
I would expect the part to have the usual Winchester punch mark on the back flat. But, that's just a guess.
Neal
Mark would have told us.