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hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and today we are taking a look at the short magazine lee enfield mark 1 star star the two star version and this is a particularly unique version because it was only used by the navy and it was basically a way for the navy to have sort of an intermediate style of rifle they looked at the updates that the army was doing to the short magazine leanfield and decided well we want these but we don't want those and so they made their own unique naval version the army would go from the mark 1 to the mark 1 star to the mark 1 3 star and it was only the navy that used the 2 star so let me show you what the changes were that they actually wanted so the receiver socket markings that you'll find here are of course you have the manufacturer the date this is a short leigh enfield mark 1 2 star now the reason that this conversion needed to exist at all is primarily about sights so the army had adopted the mark iii rifle the short magazine lee enfield mark iii and with that adoption they had made a couple of changes to the sights they changed from what had originally been a v-notch and a barley corn front sight to a u-notch and a square front post they also changed from mark vi ammunition which was the last of the relatively low velocity heavy round nosed bullet cartridges to the new mark 7 ammunition which was a much higher velocity lighter weight spitzer bullet the navy wanted one of these changes but they didn't want the other what the navy did want was this u-notch rear sight and nice square front post sight however the navy still had a lot of mark vi ammunition to use and so they wanted to keep the sites graduated for the higher trajectory of the mark vi cartridge for comparison's sake here is a mark vi uh rear sight and you can see how this has a rather high arc to it here is a mark 7 rear sight which is much flatter because it's a higher velocity cartridge with less drop so the navy wanted the good new sight picture but they wanted to keep the old ammunition and thus we get the mark one two star rifle configuration so the other elements that you will find here are the charger guide attached to the bolt so you have a a stripper clip or charger clip guide only when the bolt is fully opened like this when you close the bolt it separates we still of course have a cartridge cut off this would last into world war one we have a windage adjustable rear sight and this style of rear sight protector wings built into a piece handguard and then we have the early style of mark one uh nose cap where the front sight protector wings are curved inward there's a second version of the mark one two star that came into being about 1912 and that is when the navy decided that they wanted to replace these mobile charger guides with a fixed charger bridge like the later well what would eventually become known as the rifle number one mark iii would have so they went ahead and just started replacing these with these charger bridges but they didn't bother to change the nomenclature of the rifle because they were taking all of the mark 1 2 stars and changing them to this configuration there wasn't going to be any partial half and half sort of sort of deal you'll note of course we have examples of each here because a few of the rifles did escape this later additional conversion so in addition at this point the front sight protector wings were straightened out again to fit what was becoming the standard pattern with the army as well however we still have the nice square front sight the u-notch backsight and the high angle rear sight base here still fitted to use mark vi ammunition i think it's important to point out that only the navy used this pattern and it was for this very specific navy purpose of getting the newest rifle features while still using the la the previous version of the ammunition so the two star was adopted formally in the list of changes in 1908 and it would be in just this interim period when there was both mark vi and mark vii ammunition that was in the inventory and being used once world war one began it actually took a remarkably long time for all of the mark vi ammunition to get used up there was a priority for mark 7 ammunition and rifles on the front and so the mark vi didn't quite get used as fast eventually of course the navy would run out of mark vi ammunition everyone did they stopped making it uh and it became it came time to update these rifles to the new general standard pattern to have sites that were set up for the mark vii the most modern ammunition and so eventually virtually all of these two star rifles were updated to progressive later patterns so it's really unusual to find these surviving today the mark the two star is one of the rarest variants to actually find so hopefully you guys enjoyed the video thank you for watching