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by A while back, I came across a rifle that looked unfamiliar. It turned out to be a 1905 Canadian Ross rifle. I remembered very little about the Ross. Mostly bad. However, it was controversial, so there were defenders as well as detractors. It would be interesting to find out what the truth about it was. It was worth a closer look. The rifle was not very promising, but it was not very expensive, either. The rifle had been sporterized. The barrel was cut off from what I would later learn was a standard 29" down to 24" with a decent looking crown on the shortened barrel. The inside of the barrel was not great. The rifling was strong, but the bore was frosted and there was some pitting. Still, I have shot worse that were still accurate. There was a front sight, but no rear sight. The holes in the barrel for the original military rear sight had been plugged and ground off flush. There were two threaded holes on the left side of the receiver and a square notch in the stock directly below them. A pretty strong clue that a peepsight had once been mounted. There was no buttplate and no gripcap, but there were threaded holes for both. It looked like the rifle had been complete at one time, but stripped at some time in the past. The stock was a plain, straight grained piece of wood that looked OK. I later found out that it mimicked the shape and even the checkering pattern of a commercial Ross rifle, but it was not commercially made. I worked the action a few times. It seemed to work OK and the firing pin dropped when it was supposed to. There was nothing obviously wrong with it (at least mechanically). After a little dickering, I bought it for a winter project. The first step was to find information about the Ross. I did not find much. Evidently, very little has been written about the Ross. Most of it was derogatory, and most was second or third hand. That is no way to get to the truth. It seems that the Ross came into being when the British refused to sell any .303 Lee-Enfields to Canada and also refused to let the Canadians start manufacturing them under license. Granted, the British were in the middle of the Boer War at the time, but the decision was shortsighted. After the snub, the Canadians decided to build their own. A transplanted Scottish Baron, Sir Charles Ross, offered to build the Canadians a target/hunting rifle that he designed. The resulting Ross rifle cut a wide swath in military target shooting circles prior to WWI, but failed miserably early in the war. It was withdrawn from service and replaced by the Lee-Enfield. The recalled Ross’ were sold to the general public (including through the NRA in the US) as surplus shortly after the war. I was finally able to track down a 475 page book called "The Ross Rifle Story" by Phillips, Dupuis, and Chadwick. Even used, it is not cheap, but it is the definitive source for everything Ross. It seems that the serial number and other important information on the Ross was originally stamped on the rear-right-side of the military stock, not on the metal. The original stock was gone, so any information that was there was also gone. By stripping the gun down and comparing the internal parts to the pictures of the various versions of each part in the book, I was able to narrow it down to a 1905 Mk II** rifle made in about May (give or take a month) of 1909. I got an oversized replacement buttplate from Brownell’s and fitted it. They did not have a gripcap that was big enough so I put that off. I verified that the bolt was put together correctly and it was operating correctly. Then I bought a box of commercial .303 British ammo and went to the range. Everything worked correctly, although the front sight was listing 15 degrees to the side by the time I got done shooting. The cases came out of the gun a completely different shape than they went in, but more on that later. I could not check accuracy with a moving front sight and no rear sight, but it looked like it was worth continuing to work on. The first step was to work on the sights. The front sight was not a relocated military sight. It was from a commercial .280 Ross rifle with a small German silver bead on top. It was supposed to have a groove in the top of the barrel and a pin through the sight, resting in the groove. Neither the groove nor the pin were there, which was why it rotated. It was easy enough to file a small groove and set a pin. The rear sight was a little more difficult. The 1905 and the 1910 Ross receivers are different in shape, so the sights for either one will not fit the other. The only two aftermarket sights I could find listed for the 1905 Ross were a Lyman Model 50 and a Redfield (AKA Western) #102H. In over a year of doing searches and looking at web auction sites, I have not seen either one. The 1910 model (if you have one) is much easier to find a sight for. Any sight listed for the 1903 Springfield (not the later 03-A3 version) will work on the 1910. It just so happened that the holes in the receiver matched the diameter and spacing of the machine screws in a Lyman Model 48 peepsight. I had a lefthand Lyman 48 in poor shape that I took off a Krag rifle. It would have fit except that shape of the backside of the Lyman base and the shape of the Ross receiver were different. I looked at the two for a while and decided that I could grind off some of the base where it was high, add a little more to the base where it was low. Hopefully, it should work then. I ground it down, added some JB Weld where it had to be built up, and filed it until the whole thing fit. Not exactly square with the world (the holes in the receiver were not put in exactly square) and certainly not pretty, but at least I could see what it could do now. The next thing I did was to thoroughly strip down the mechanicals and clean them. This is where I learned about some of the things that went wrong with the Ross. The 1910 Ross bolt could be reassembled incorrectly. It took some forcing, but it was not only possible, it actually happened with dire (and documented) consequences. When this was done, the locking lugs did not lock and the bolt came flying out the rear the first time it was fired. I looked very carefully at the 1905 bolt and cannot see how it could be reassembled wrong. I won’t say it is impossible because I learned long ago that idiots are much more creative and persistent in doing something wrong than anyone gives them credit for. Later 1910’s had a rivet placed in the bolt so it could not be assembled wrong. That was not done (and was probably not needed) with the 1905. There was also a problem with the size and shape of the bolt locking lugs, again, with the 1910 only. The 1905 has two large, conventional locking lugs, set 180 degrees apart. The 1910 changed to seven (4 on one side, 3 on the other) small, sawtooth-like locking lugs. Evidently, the single, frontmost little locking lug took the brunt of the closing when the bolt was slammed forward. It would eventually peen over, and would prevent the bolt from locking. Again, this does not appear possible with the 1905. After CAREFULLY reassembling the bolt, I put it back in the gun and cycled it back and forth a few times. The bolt is a straight pull action, similar to several other guns being built at about the same time (the 1895 Lee Navy, the 1895 Mannlicher, the 1896/1911 Schmidt-Rubin, etc.). You pull back against some spring pressure for about 7/8" or so and then the lugs rotate and unlock. It slides back easily from there. Pushing forward, it slides easily until about 7/8" or so from closing and you again push against some spring pressure, which rotates and locks the lugs. It slides easily, but does not seem to have any problem with unlocking unless you actually pull on the handle. The next thing learned is that this gun had its chamber hogged out (rechambered) during WWI. One of the criticisms you see about the Ross is that the tolerances it was made with were too tight for the mud and muck of trench warfare. Maybe so, but maybe not. Although the original rifle had what could be considered a "target" chamber (at minimum tolerances, it was slightly smaller than the cartridge size at maximum tolerances). However, this was corrected before WWI. According to the book, the jamming problem during the war was traced back to wartime .303 British cartridge production. Evidently, a lot of it exceeded maximum tolerances on the large size. The oversized cartridges would jam the gun whether or not it was dirty. This was a problem with both the 1905 and the 1910. However, neither gun had a problem with commercial or pre-War .303 British ammunition that was made within correct tolerances. Both models were recalled and rechambered to a larger size more than once in order to make it easier to extract oversized cartridges. The final chamber is really, REALLY big. As an aside, the .303 Lee-Enfield had sloppy dimensions from the very beginning. This is one of the reasons it is still seen as a great battle rifle, but for the same reason, it never made much of an impact among military target shooters. The standard .303 British cartridge has a noticeable taper from base to bottleneck. It has a diameter (just above the rim) of about 0.460" which tapers down to 0.401" at the start of the front bottleneck and has a neck length of 0.332". (The wartime production which caused all the problems was approx. 0.007" to 0.008" larger in critical dimensions.) When fired in this Ross, the base comes out about the same as it went in. However, the start of the transition is enlarged to 0.426", and increase of 0.025". That does not seem like much, but it is easily visible to the naked eye. The shoulder is also moved forward and steepened with a neck of only about 1/4" long, a reduction of about 1/16". Some have suggested that this gun may have been rechambered to .303 Epps (a blown out version of the .303 British), but it is not. The dimensions match the chamber dimensions shown in the Ross book for the last (and largest) rechambering and do not match (they are smaller than) the Epps. Other than that, the cases feed, extract and eject easily. None of the cartridges shot so far have torn, cracked, or otherwise failed during firing. It is somewhat similar to fireforming a standard cartridge in an Ackley Improved chamber. The stock was not in bad shape on the outside (although I did decide to refinish the outside). The inside was not quite as good, but it was salvageable. The area under the receiver (in the trigger area) had been hogged out and then some kind of epoxy was used to build it up to loosely bridge the gap between the stock and receiver. It was NOT glassbedded, just loosely filled. The epoxy was still strong, not weak and crumbly like some old glassbedding I have seen. I decided to stay with it. I thought about glass bedding everything, but instead decided to free float the barrel and pillar bed the receiver. The reason was that the three bolts that connect the receiver to the trigger guard (through the stock) didn’t touch the stock at any point. The holes were way, way oversized. There was no place I could point to and say that this would prevent the receiver from moving in the stock when fired. Pillar bedding was fairly easy and I can always glassbed the rest of it if I decide to later. The magazine was pretty badly beaten up. I pounded out some of the dents, but did nothing else to it. It seems to feed well enough. After everything was done, the rifle was reassembled. As a personal opinion, I think the exterior single-stack, 5-shot magazine of the 1910 looks worse than the hidden, staggered, 5-shot 1905 magazine. I bought another box of .303 British cartridges at a gunshow and headed to the range. Considering the barrel and the size of the chamber, I don’t think it did badly. I was able to shoot 1/4" to 1/2" 3-shot groups at 25 yards (maximum distance at the indoor range). I will be trying this at an outdoor range that goes out to 200 yards later this year (in the summer). This was with my elbows on the cross shelf, but otherwise "offhand". Unfortunately, this means the old Ross now shoots better than my beautifully restocked Krag. Now, I am going to have to spend time on the Krag to get it to shoot better. Because of the shape of the fired cases, I cannot reload them with standard .303 dies (the fired shoulder is too large). I ordered a Lee collet-type neck sizing die to try loading them that way. It did not work. The length of the neck that it sizes cannot be adjusted to the new, shorter neck. I decided NOT to buy a custom set of dies. They would cost more than the gun is worth. That means I only shoot it when I am able to buy a box of factory cartridges fairly inexpensively at a gunshow. Summary. The 1905 Ross seems to me to be a better gun than the 1910. The bolt is better (both assembly and locking lugs) and the magazine is better. I have no explanation on why the Ross was changed for the worse in 1910. It seems to be a generally competent hunting/target rifle, but has serious shortcomings as a battle rifle. If it had stayed as a .280 (Magnum) commercial rifle, it would have probably been lionized by now, eagerly sought out by collectors like the original Newton rifles from the same era. Unfortunately, it was miscast and failed for reasons that were at least partially out of its control. However, the main problem was that the Baron was an idea man, not a detail man. When dealing with rifles, you had better get the details right – every single one of them. Mr. Ross did not do that. Repeated problems with poor heat treating in many of the critical parts, mismatched tolerances, and Mr. Ross’ refusal to listen to the people who actually used the rifle shows that it never really had a chance. It is another example of coulda, woulda, shoulda.
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