And The Restoration Goes On and The Lithuania Accident (My P.O.V.)

Greetings and Salutations!
It’s been one of ‘those weeks’
The kind when you look at the clock and the calendar, and realize it’s only Wednesday and OMFG… it was 12 noon 30 minutes ago or more… how da fuq does the bloody clock say it’s only 12:02!?!

12:02 was hours ago I swear!!!!

Time Warps -do- exist apparently.

So… moving on… I’ve got a bunch more work done on the Enfield. It’s mostly cleaning and refinishing of the wood. I’m stuck ‘mechanically speaking’ in that I need pieces-parts and fiddly bits in order to do the fitment before I can get things moving again.

I did however, as stated get a lot of work done on the stock parts. They’re looking pretty damned good IMO… this’s pre-sand/post soak:

Then we have the post-sanding pics:

As you can see, all the crap, and paint is gone-gone.

And as I said, the butt seems to have a much lighter grain of wood to it. Not sure what exactly the wood -is- per se, but as you can see, it’s really pale compared to the other parts.

Speaking of which, here’s the main lower before pic (I forgot to get the other side in my haste, so sorry!):

….and the ‘after’, both sides:

I started with 180 grit sandpaper, and worked my way up to 1200. Let me tell you, my paws and fingers were worn the Hell out by the time I got done. It took off the paint, and a lot of the scarring on the wood. As this is NOT a ‘battle rifle’ so to speak (i.e. used in combat), but as a defensive weapon for the Hindu DotMil, I have no problem restoring the stocks to “as-new-as I can get them to” mode. The sanding almost crippled me I swear…

It was, as you can see, well worth the effort.

The other two upper parts came out pretty damned good as well. In fact you can see the repair channels on them, as well as the brass pin that they used to repair some cracking at one time or another.

and here’s the close up of the repair near the ‘ears’ of the upper:

From what I can tell, a brass pin as well as a metal ‘staple’ of some form. None of which were visible before I stripped and sanded them.

The smaller part of the upper came out like this, before and after:

Pretty neat how it cleaned up right?

So after taking care of the soaking, cleaning, scrubbing and then extensive sanding of the wood, I then went on to just doing MULTIPLE COATS of Birchwood Casey’s “Tru-Oil”.

This essentially is like an oil with a sealer on in. The more coats, the deeper and cleaner the finish. The results speak for themselves:

That’s one Hell of a difference from the start of this project agreed? That’s about 7 coats of the Tru-Oil on each piece. I have a few more to add, then one last sanding at 2500 grit, one final coat, and the wood will be done except for the fitting.

The only other part I did was the buttplate.
It got the brasso.

That was the ‘before’.
Here’s the ‘after’:

A couple of dings and whatnot, but again, in pristine shape for it’s age. Who knew all that time in Basic “doing my brass” would actually be used this late in life Aye?

Now I’m just stuck on waiting for parts to be delivered. Once I have the parts, I can then go full throttle on doing the fitment.

The reason being is I need the nosecap, the bedding, the bolt face and new bolt head for that matter. The Ejector… a lot of smol parts that I don’t want to get ahead of myself and have to re-do after the fact.

“Measure Twice, Cut Once.”

You know the drill.

Now, as far as news? As stated, this’s MY take on what happened in Lithuania. Mind you this’s based off of my own experiences in similar areas, but mind you my experiences were 25+ years ago, long before all the Gee-Whiz-Bang “Kid Koolio Kits” that the DotMil just seem to be in love with, i.e. Blue-Force trackers and GPS and all that jazz.

LOTS of people out there on the intarwhebz talking about mad conspiracy stuff… that the 4 dudes were actually killed in the Krain, that the Byelorussians kidnapped them… like I said, all sorts of weird shit…

In this case?
That Occam’s Razor holds up best.
Meaning that when faced with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest explanation is usually the best.

Which means that mine might just be the simplest one.

While stationed in Hohenfels Germany w/the OPFOR in the early 90s, one of our M998 TOW vehicles (a HMMWV) had a very similar issue. I.E. almost wasting a crew by drowning during a training exercise. It was (like this) an accident.

We (the TOW Platoon) were ‘sneaking in the back’ on a underused goat/boar trail to get to the rear of the BLUFOR to fuck them up.  This was a common tactic we used, as being the OPFOR, the “Bowl(s)” meaning the maneuver area was our home turf, and we knew ALL the back ways and byways to bypass enemy stronk-points. In this case however, one of our trucks got too close to a bog that we had mis-identified as solid ground. It WAS winter, and the snow cover didn’t help. The way a bog is and looked at the time, between the grass and snow, well, the grass had grown OVER the swampy wet part, and looked deceivingly like solid ground. 

Our guy drove too close, the edge of the “solid ground” collapsed and the truck went in QUICKLY into the water on it’s side.  Thankfully the water there was ONLY 4-5 feet deep, and the crew bailed but got SOAKED in the process. 

It actually took a pair of M88s to recover the truck as it kept settling into the soft-assed mud. Now mind you this was like in February, so it WAS a big deal as getting bone-assed soaked was a danger…

We ended up calling an ENDEX (End Exercise) and had the recover vehicles come out to retrieve our now-half drowned M998.

These issues also used to happen in Baghdad a lot too, where the Bradleys got too close to the edge of a canal and WHOOP! into the water! 

It got so bad that some units started making sure that the tracks had those emergency SCUBA tanks called “Spare Air” for every member of the crew, as well as dismounts after they had a bunch of guys drown in I want to say 05?

I scored 4x of them tanks when they turned in their tracks in Kuwait.  Neat lil toy.  6-8 minute of O2 which gave the grunts enough time to evacc if they went into ‘submarine mode’

So, if the crew wasn’t paying close attention and the M88 was travelling at speed, and they didn’t see/realize that it was a bog in front of them?  Yeah, it probably got ugly real quick.

Especially since a M88A2 weighs in at fucking 70 tons.

THAT amount of weight would ‘torpedo’ that track and all aboard to the bottom of whatever bog it was in like 0.5 seconds, leaving like ZERO possibility to bail. Especially if they were in their gear, which wouldn’t have helped in performing a quick evac.

ALL this talk of conspiracy and whatnot is pretty much a cope. To me? This was, like oh so many before, a tragic unavoidable accident. Of which the Active Duty Army seem to have faaaar too many of…

May God have mercy on them, and give their families Peace.

So, on that fucked up note,
More Later
Big Country