Another New NC Member

Greetings from North Carolina; old man here pushing 80 and not very active with firearms these days, however, early on I received training on and have experience shooting a wide range of USA and foreign firearms while serving in several airborne units ending up assigned to the 2^nd/503 Airborne Infantry Regiment during the Vietnam era. In addition, I was a competition shooter, and for many years a licensed firearms collector mostly focusing on old military firearms; 1800’s, WWI, WWII, and Korea.  With that said it may seem strange that the only M1 carbine I kept is not a collectable, however, don’t worry the originals are now in the good hands of younger collectors. 

Anyway, my M1 carbine keeper was built for me by the Fulton Armory back when they used military receivers. Mine was built on an Underwood receiver and included; the bayonet lug, all new GI surplus working parts, a new commercial barrel, a new commercial type III low wood style American walnut stock, and the M2 carbine magazine catch I ordered. I wanted a carbine able to hang on to 30-round magazines and one overall as close to a newly issued M1 carbine as possible; this one did not disappoint. I’ve shot it in standard military configuration and with an UltiMAK Forward Optic Mount and an EOTec with excellent results.

I did not become very familiar with the M2 carbine until the 1960’s after my unit finally received the much waited for M14 rifles to replace our WWII M1 rifles. The M14 rifles, unfortunately, had to be returned for replacements because it was impossible to keep their sights aligned.  Low level troopers like me were never given details on the analysis done by ordnance experts, we were just told our batch was manufactured with some kind of heat treating issue and could not take the impact stresses of parachute landings.  Of course our M1 rifles were already returned and the only rifles quickly available to fill in during the replacement delay was a cache of M2 carbines refurbished and stored away since the Korea War. Until the replacement M14 rifles arrived months later our unit was armed only with M2 carbines.

Interestingly the M2 carbine issued to me was an arsenal converted M1 carbine originally manufactured by the IBM Corp. in Poughkeepsie, N.Y; all I knew about IBM back then was they made business machines and had no idea they had manufactured carbines, the Norden Bombsight, etc. I also had no way of knowing that later in life I would work almost 50-years for IBM as an engineer designing computer electronic hardware.

IBM war time pictures in this thread