Which CMP Garand to buy?

[Heat]

Which is the best way to go with the CMP Garands--Which will require the most investment afterwords..?

[astroman2057]

CMP is the best way to go without a doubt. I would say go with the most you can afford. I bought a Field Grade with the expections of a new stock to purchase after arrival but was totally content with the rifle as is. The front sight had been filed down and was not working for me and was replaced, as was the bent trigger pin that happened after 150 rounds. CMP will easily beat anything at a gunshow. Only thing better is that widow woman selling stuff at a yard sale before going to the rest home on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

[poof]

HAHAHA.. Thats like asking..............................FAL Or M1A



MI GARAND

ITEM #
DESCRIPTION
PRICE
Comments

RM1SAR M1 Garand, Springfield Armory, Rack Grade $445.00 Please allow 30-45 days for delivery.
RM1SAF
M1 Garand, Springfield Armory, Field Grade
$495.00
Please allow 60-90 days for delivery.

RM1HRAF M1 Garand, Harrington & Richardson, Field Grade $495.00 Please allow 60-90 days for delivery.
RM1SAS
M1 Garand, Springfield Armory, Service Grade
$595.00
Please allow 60-90 days for delivery.

RM1HRAS M1 Garand, Harrington & Richardson, Service Grade $595.00 Please allow 60-90 days for delivery.
RM1SACR M1 Garand, Springfield Armory, Correct Grade. Only available in serial # ranges between 5.4 and 5.8 million. $950.00 Please allow 30-45 days for delivery.
RM1HRACR M1 Garand, Harrington & Richardson, Correct Grade $975.00 Please allow 60-90 days for delivery.

How about starting with... THIS IS What I'M looking for..any one have one for sale?
Might pay a bit more.. but you get what you asked for.

OR take a trip to the north/ south store..
because the difference $600 & $1000 can and is BIG.
J.P.







Its luck of the draw

[Heat]

I'll probably go with service grade...gotta sell my AK and ammo, mags then I can get the rifle and a case( or two!) of the greek ammo...I guess I have watched WAY to many reruns of 'COMBAT' not to own a Garand

[fry]

hra, service grade or better.

[IanMor]

Heat, what kind of AK do you have that you might be selling?????

[Snake Bitten]

I received a HRA SG Jan '08 and overall very happy with the M1 from CMP. SB

[Heat]

Originally posted by IanMor
Heat, what kind of AK do you have that you might be selling?????
Romanian WASR-10--plain jane, about 300rds thru it..looks good, nice wood, no flashhider--has sling and 1 40 rd mag

[ABNROCK]

CMP is the way to roll. It's even better if you can make it to either their north and souf store and pick your poison.

I walked away with rack grade M1 and M1 carbines that could have been service grade or better.


V/R

Rocker

[steveo539]

Everyone MUST own a Garand. You won't regret it, they are fun to shoot.

[hagar]

If it ever comes down that I could only own 1 rifle, my HRA M1 Garand is what I will pick. And if SHTF ever happens, that is probably what I will take making sure my street is not an open invitation for looters and other miscreants. I can shoot the Garand better than most all my highpower buddies, they can beat me with AR15's, but when we shoot Garands, I kick butt!:biggrin:

[Heat]

I was told today that proper powder when reloading for this rifle is imperrative...medium burning...if I choose something fast burning it could bend the operating rod
any powder recommendations??

[Steggo]

Originally posted by Heat
I was told today that proper powder when reloading for this rifle is imperrative...medium burning...if I choose something fast burning it could bend the operating rod
any powder recommendations??

IMR4895
H4895
IMR4064
Varget

[Swampy]

I was told today that proper powder when reloading for this rifle is imperrative...medium burning...if I choose something fast burning it could bend the operating rod

Correction: SLOW burning powders can damage the gas system on the M1 rifle, NOT fast burning powders.

Slow burn powders have a higher residual pressure at the end of the barrel, where the bullet passes the gas port. The only thing fast burning powders can accomplish (As long as breech pressure is within loading manual spec.) is to initiate ftf's due to not enough gas port pressure to cycle the action. Not harmful at all..... just annoying.

Medium rate powders are what you want. Those already listed are fine.

Best regards,
Swampy

Garands forever
2007 NRA Missouri State 600 yard Service Rifle Champion.... with an M1

[P.I. Staker]

My CMP HRA field grade, hand picked at the south store. Best 495 bux I ever spent

http://enfielditis.net/garand/MYHRA.jpg


Unless it was the 426 dollars I spent for my CMP US GI Springfield field grade. Got it about a year and a half ago. Six digit serial number, made in April 1942.

http://enfielditis.net/garand/bigggaradpic.jpg

[owlcreekok]

I bought a stripped receiver a year or so ago. Got it just in time to see the prices go up after mine was paid for, then they ran out. Found a kit less barrel, actually a buddy found it.


A barrel from the Brownell's catalog is looming on the mid-late summer horizon.


All the metal has now been blasted and re-parked and sits all oiled up and at the ready against the day a barrel arrives.

Buy a racker, a field, a correct. Going the route I am costs more than a good field grade. Although it is gonna be nice if I end up with a shooter that looks like is just got issued for the first time. :love:

Now, I shall go back to stirring in the box of Garand goodies I have collected. I rattle a box of en bloc clips from The Old North State every so often. Kinda makes me feel all warm inside.

:shades:

[shlomo]

Originally posted by owlcreekok
A barrel from the Brownell's catalog is looming on the mid-late summer horizon.

Outa curiosity, Owl, which barrel are you lookin' at?

[owlcreekok]

Originally posted by shlomo


Outa curiosity, Owl, which barrel are you lookin' at?

The Wilson Arms std one.

[shlomo]

I figgered as much, knowin' you were building up a JCG gun. If you want, I'll try to get some user feedback from two Highpower guys I know that have one. I have installed and shot the Criterion on my JCG legal one, and so far it is more than satisfactory inasmuch as it pretty easily holds the ten ring.

[1911NM]

Assume that any CMP service or rack grade rifle you buy will have a barrel that needs to be replaced (cleaning damage). Assume the wood will be ugly. Assume you may have one or two bad parts to replace such as a windage knob or op rod. Have a knowledgable 'smith do a tech inspection when you receive the rifle. figure a total cost of about 1K including barrelling, refinishing, new wood. Still a great deal. M1s are great fun and .30 cal. ammo is cheaper than .223 nowadays.

[Heat]

Originally posted by 1911NM
Assume that any CMP service or rack grade rifle you buy will have a barrel that needs to be replaced (cleaning damage). Assume the wood will be ugly. Assume you may have one or two bad parts to replace such as a windage knob or op rod. Have a knowledgable 'smith do a tech inspection when you receive the rifle. figure a total cost of about 1K including barrelling, refinishing, new wood. Still a great deal. M1s are great fun and .30 cal. ammo is cheaper than .223 nowadays.
So I was at DGRguns.com and was very impressed with the product he sells..nice write up in Precision Shooting as well..for a neophyte in M1's like myself, tell me, are those cool looking flashhiders I see around for Garands legal for competition? As well, I was at Fulton Armory and noticed they have a forward (scout) scope mount..are these legal to have installed for competition and are they a good piece of gear as well? Seems like the scout concept has always intrigueing to me..

[1911NM]

Flash suppressors and scope mounts are not legal in NRA or CMP santioned competitions.

[owlcreekok]

Originally posted by shlomo
I figgered as much, knowin' you were building up a JCG gun. If you want, I'll try to get some user feedback from two Highpower guys I know that have one. I have installed and shot the Criterion on my JCG legal one, and so far it is more than satisfactory inasmuch as it pretty easily holds the ten ring.

That would be great. I gonna leave off jackin' this guy's thread,,,,go open another, I got questions. :angel:

[Steggo]

Originally posted by 1911NM
Assume that any CMP service or rack grade rifle you buy will have a barrel that needs to be replaced (cleaning damage). Assume the wood will be ugly. Assume you may have one or two bad parts to replace such as a windage knob or op rod. Have a knowledgable 'smith do a tech inspection when you receive the rifle. figure a total cost of about 1K including barrelling, refinishing, new wood. Still a great deal. M1s are great fun and .30 cal. ammo is cheaper than .223 nowadays.

Huh?

Every one of my CMP SG's was capable of shooting a gold medal score in the JCG match right out of the box. You don't need "pretty wood" to produce a competitive score. You do have to be a sufficiently skilled marksman. No aftermarket barrel, stock or other gimmick is going to compensate for that.

My field grade CMP rifles can also produce gold medal scores. One had a bad op-rod. The CMP replaced it for the cost of me shipping them the bad one. Their customer service is exceptional. They won't stick you with a dog.

I honestly don't own a rack grade CMP rifle. I've seen a lot of them used to clean the SR2 target used in the JCG Match slow prone stage. Usually by experienced HP shooters who regard the JCG Match as a fun way to spend the afternoon after the serious shooting is done. Even the rack grades tend to have bright, shiny bores and by the gauge, are suitable for issue to U.S. soldiers.

If you have $1K for the JCG project, buy a CMP SG with $600 and spend the rest on CMP M2 ammo. Burn up all that ammo practicing your offhand shooting and you will be a contender. The JCG match is won or lost in the offhand string. Lots of gold medals turn into s*** over the course of those 10 shots. Mine included. Certainly not the rifle's fault.

I'm not saying the CMP Criterion barrels are not good tubes. I'd use one if I ever needed to rebarrel a Garand. Based on actual range performance, I haven't found a CMP rifle that needs it to be competitive. Replacing a servicible GI barrel right off the bat is just a poor use of resources.

I Wish I could get my hands on all those GI barrels being taken off for no good reason. I could sell them to buy more practice ammo.

[1911NM]

Really?
How many gold medals have you collected with them?

[Steggo]

Enough to know what matters and what doesn't.

[shlomo]

I just shot a well-attended Garand match this past weekend, with right at 100 shooters, including a couple dozen Master class and Highmaster highpower competitors. To the best of my knowledge, not one person cleaned the 20-shot prone slowfire. That includes the match-prepped guns in "Modified" class. Not to say it doesn't ever happen, but it's rare, in my experience.

I've been to the South Store in Anniston a half-dozen times over the last 18 months, picking out rifles, and while the barrels on most of the rifles are certainly serviceable, a really good one is rare. The average throat erosion on the last crop of rifles was about 3. Since each graduation on the gauge is a tenth of an inch, that's a third of an inch of erosion. The muzzles are typically dinged or wallowed out some from cleaning rod wear, some shockingly so.

Does that mean that none of these rifles will shoot? Not at all. But it will be a rare one that can clean the 10-x target with any kind of regularity. I see posts all the time from guys who have a CMP luck-o'-the-draw rifle that's a hammer. Maybe so. But based on my experience over the last ten years shooting and seeing them shot in actual matches, including the Nationals, issue guns that can shoot knots are about one in a hundred. Maybe less.

At the following url, you can see the results from last year's "as-issued" class (the results of this year's match have not been posted as I write this).

http://rbgc.org/GarandMatch/Forms/2007/Match%20Results/2007jcg.pdf

As you can see, only one guy cleaned the prone SF. He is a very fine shot, and a Distinguished Highmaster HP shooter. The guy who won the match is also a Highmaster, and he shot a 199. Note that the scores drop precipitously after that. Of the top 20 shooters, at least 15 are serious highpower competitors who I know personally. Almost all of these folks have somewhere between six and 20 M1 rifles. You can bet that the ones they bring to the match are the best shooters they own. And yet they are shooting scores of 188 to 195, on the average, with the ones shooting 195s being well-pleased by that.

Another phenomenon you can see in the scores is the problem of group-shifting due to barrel heat-up. Note that the guy with the 200 on the SF prone went on to shoot a rousing 85 on the prone rapid-fire immediately afterward, and an 88 on his sitting. Trust me when I tell you that this guy knows how to shoot rapids.
There are several other folks who shot respectable SF scores in the mid 190s who also augered in on the rapid fires, due to being out of center. The culprit is group shift, and it is bedding-related, in my opinion of the moment. Bedding issues are more common than not in rack and service grade M1 rifles.

If this seems to paint a gloomy picture, cheer up. All of the stuff from the CMP is solid, functionally correct, and safe. But bear in mind that 99% of these 60+ year-old rifles were issued and well used. Quite a lot of them were dragged thru combat zones for a number of years. Most have been rebuilt once or more. Most need some work to shoot really well, some do not. If you have received one of the latter, congratulate yourself. If not, you still have one helluva cool rifle. And problems are made to be solved.

[Mandaree36]

I think the question is....what does shooting "really well" mean...

Most people buying a garand only want or need decent accuracy to have a good time and compete in little matches.

I have several garands and they hold their own, if I wanted some overjuiced, overbarrelled monolith than I would buy one.

Point is alot of the "pro" shooters here are sending out a message that these rifles need new barrels, when they do not. NOT unless your intending on being a serious match shooter.

Comparing apples and oranges so far as performance requirements. Perhaps a little distinction might be appropriate.

As to the original question no you do not have to make a big investment in parts when you buy a rack or service grade UNLESS you want stellar accuracy, pretty wood, etc.

If you want a good shooter then there are no issues other than a few basic backup parts you should have anyways, such as extractors, etc.

The little things it is nice to have on hand for this or that little repair that may come up, off the shelf you should be shooting trouble free, if not contact CMP and they will make it right.

[shlomo]

Originally posted by Mandaree36
I think the question is....what does shooting "really well" mean...

This is an excellent point.

For a skilled, experienced shooter, I would think that it means that the rifle is shooting on or inside "call". Or, in other words, there is some consistent relationship of the point of impact to the alignment of the sights at break.

It takes only a three-minute holding ability on the SR target to stay within the 10-ring at 200. Most experienced shooters with good vision can hold to one and a half minutes, and a really good shooter can hold to less than a minute.

It can be quite frustrating for a one-minute holder to shoot a five or six-minute rifle. A guy like that knows absolutely when he has broken a shot "right down the middle", and if he's shooting nines and eights to all four points of the compass, he ain't gonna be a happy camper.

My point in the previous post is that there are a lot of M1 owners who have, shall we say, an "optimistic" notion of their rifle's accuracy potential. You would think, after reading some of their posts, that sub-three minute Garands are as common as dirt, but the match results from across the country don't bear this out.

I did a little checking after making the SWAG that only one M1 in a hundred can clean the Slow Fire prone at 200. At the Nationals, where one can assume that a high number of good shooters will be on hand with the best rifles they can manage, the number of competitors that cleaned the SF prone was 13. This was out of 1320-odd shooters, and agrees very neatly with my guesstimation. At he Eastern Games, with 89 shooters (IIRC), there was one clean string. At the Western Games, with a similar attendance, there were none. And these, by the way, were ten-shot strings, not twenty.

Now, none of this is to say that you can't have fun shooting a rack or service grade M1--you certainly can. But if your goal is to keep 30 or 50 record shots in the middle over the course of a match, then that 60 year-old barrel with the dinged crown, wallowed out muzzle, and 3/8'' of throat erosion is not going to be a help in that endeavor.

I'm not sure what an "overjuiced, overbarreled monolith" is. But I can tell you that my experience indicates that 90% of getting a Garand to shoot straight is contained in two things: 1) a properly headspaced and chambered barrel with a decent throat and a clean, squarely cut crown; and 2) bedding with some down pressure on the front end of the barrel at the lower band. The unfortuate truth is that sixty year-old GI guns from whatever source usually have neither.

The good news is that both the barrel and the stock can be replaced for right at $300 total. If you refinish at the same time, you will wind up with the equivalent of a brand-new GI M1 Garand that looks purty, and will really shoot, for a bit less than a grand. Less, if you have the ability to do the work yourself. You will enjoy it, and your descendants will thank you.

[Mandaree36]

That was a great post, and I hope it aids our intrepid Garand buyer.

Point made that for plinking, useable accuracy in that regard - a rack or service will get you by.

Point made that if you desire the legendary if you will, accurate Garand, then some tlc is in order and inexpensive at that.

It well and truly looks like a win, win.

At the risk of highjacking a very small bit of this thread, I have a question. Can an out of stater stop by the North or South stores and do some garand, carbine shopping?

I have no personal and up close experience with the CMP, other than my two mail order Garands.

[shlomo]

Originally posted by Mandaree36
At the risk of highjacking a very small bit of this thread, I have a question. Can an out of stater stop by the North or South stores and do some garand, carbine shopping?

I have no personal and up close experience with the CMP, other than my two mail order Garands.

I'm not really sure about this, since I'm in a neighboring state. I have always been able to just walk in, purchase, and walk out with the item. I would think that if they can sell and ship directly to your door, then you ought to be able to make a direct purchase in person as well, regardless of home state.

Perhaps somebody else can chime in and clear this up.

[captk]

I would get a service grade rifle. I have 4 Garands, 3 Springfields and 1 H&R. The H&R is a much higher serial number and is the nicest of the receivers. I noticed on the CMP site they listed the H&R rifles available as high serial numbers. I would think you have a better chance of getting a less used rifle then the earlier Springfields. Of course if having one made during WW2 matters to you then this is not a good option. Any of the service grade rifles should be fine. I would also get as much ammo from CMP as you can afford while it is still around.
Ken

[Heat]

Originally posted by captk
I would get a service grade rifle. I have 4 Garands, 3 Springfields and 1 H&R. The H&R is a much higher serial number and is the nicest of the receivers. I noticed on the CMP site they listed the H&R rifles available as high serial numbers. I would think you have a better chance of getting a less used rifle then the earlier Springfields. Of course if having one made during WW2 matters to you then this is not a good option. Any of the service grade rifles should be fine. I would also get as much ammo from CMP as you can afford while it is still around.
Ken
We are of the same mind. I understand that CMP will be limiting the amount of Greek '06 to 10 cases total to extend their supplies..apparently there has been a rush on this particular ammo..Im thinking of selling off .308 to replace with '06----

[Heat]

Just put in the paperwork and money order today for my first Garand from CMP...bought a Service grade Springfield..they say 60/90 days wait..anyone see them show up earlier? Next purchase...as much ammo as I can afford!

[Tailback]

When the CMP was selling Danish return VAR barreled rifles I ordered one. Along with my order I put a sticky note on the packet that said "Hoping for a good Garand match shooter, wood condition not important". What I got was a VAR rebarreled rifle that gauged '1' at the chamber and '0' at the muzzle. Basically it guaged better than most brand new USGI barrels and it shoots like a dream.

The wood looked like it was run over (reapeatedly) by a tank. I didn't care because knowing that a lot of the accuracy with a Garand comes from the trigger group lockup with the stock, and the fact that I wanted to build a really beautiful rifle, I knew I was going to get new wood for the rifle.

DGR guns supplied the beautiful stock to combine with the accuracy of the rifle. He also tuned the trigger group to NM specs and re-parkarized all of the metal.

This Garand is as accurate as my skill and reloading ability will take me. If I were a betting man I'd put this rifle up against any service grade garand out there. If I ever get to Perry, I know this baby will get me a medal. Just to let you know, I'm a distinguished rifle badge holder so I'm not just making this stuff up.

[Heat]

Im REALLY looking forward to getting mine, hope Im lucky and they send me a gem..I have been in contact with DGR and will most likely send it there to be redone and accurized a bit..