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Title:	RIFLE, LIGHT -  WINCHESTER RIFLE LIGHT .224 SN# 26
Maker/Manufacturer:	CLARKSON, RALPH
Date of Manufacture:	1957
Eminent Figure:
Catalog Number:	SPAR 1803
Measurements:	OL: 96.5CM 38" BL: 50.8CM 20" 6 lbs.

Object Description:

WINCHESTER RIFLE LIGHT .224 SN# 26
Manufactured by Winchester, New Haven, Ct. - Winchester's entry into lightweight rifle competition. Essentially a scaled down version of the larger Winchester Automatic Rifle (W.A.R.). Gas-operated, select-fire. Complete with box magazine. Weapon weighs approximately 6 lbs. Broken tab on magazine otherwise complete and in good condition.

Markings:
Receiver: CAL.224/26. (Left): WINCHESTER.
Triggerguard: 26.
Stock: Label taped to butt cautions for use of lubricated ammunition only. Tag in catalog folder.

Weapon transferred to the Museum on 7 January 1965. At that time weapon was appraised at $5,000.00.

Notes: "In the summer of 1957, the Continental Army Command requested the Winchester-Western Division of the Olin Corporation to develop a lightweight selective fire rifle to fire a .22 caliber projectile weighing between 50 and 55 grains at approximately 3300 feet per second. A similar proposal had been made earlier to Armalite Division of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. This latter firm developed the AR-15 lightweight rifle.
Ralph E. Clarkson, then a member of the Winchester staff, undertook the development of a suitable rifle. Clarkson has been a small arms designer for nearly half a century. During the early year of this century, Clarkson worked with John M. Browning in the development of the Browning Machine Gun and the Browning Automatic Rifle. In the years immediately preceding the Second World War, Clarkson also assisted Jonathan Edmund Browning (John M.'s brother) and David Marshall 'Carbine' Williams. The concepts embodied in the .224 Lightweight Military Rifle evolved from his work with these latter men. Working with David Mathewson, of the Mathewson Tool Company, Clarkson was able to complete the first firing prototype of the .224 Lightweight Military Rifle in less than two months.
Winchester first demonstrated the .224 Lightweight Military Rifle to the U.S. Army and representatives of the North Atlantic alliance at Fort Monroe, Virginia, on October 25, 1957. The Army scheduled further user trials for November 6th at the Army Infantry Board. The success of this latter exercise led the Ordnance Corps and CONARC to order fifteen .224 Lightweight Military Rifles for further testing.
Winchester completed this lot of rifles in the spring of 1958. To speed testing of the Winchester rifle and the Armalite AR-15, the Aberdeen engineering tests were conducted concurrently with the user tests at the Infantry Board. Each contractor shipped ten rifles and 70,000 rounds of appropriate ammunition directly to Fort Benning. Each contractor sent two rifles and 20,000 rounds of ammunition to Aberdeen Proving Ground. Of the remaining weapons, the contractors sent one rifle and 5,000 rounds of ammunition to both Frankford Arsenal and Springfield Armory.
The Infantry Board reported that the performance of the .224 Lightweight Military Rifle during the trials was comparable to that of the M14. The only exception was the penetration of the projectile through heavy brush. General Maxwell D. Taylor test fired the rifle, and he is reported to have commented that he liked the weapon's handling characteristics. Only one serious difficulty was encountered during the user trials. Clarkson reports that due to the hasty construction, the rifles had an erratic ejection pattern. This defect was easily remedied. Ten improved version of the Lightweight Military Rifle were tested at the Combat Development Experimentation Center, Fort Ord, California in 1959.
The official opinions of the Army Infantry Board and the Continental Army Command have not been determined. Some indication may be gathered from the results of the Engineering Tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Conclusions: The Lightweight Military rifle has the advantage of light weight, light recoil, favorable handling qualities, and convenient disassembly and assembly, but it has poor accuracy, function and endurance characteristics.
Recommendations: The mechanism be redesigned to improve function and endurance. The automatic fire feature be eliminated (Also recommended for the AR-15).
The barrel be redesigned to give a higher level of safety when fired under adverse conditions and improved accuracy.
The rear sight be replaced with one which permits elevation and windage adjustments.
Winchester did not continue the development of the .224 Winchester Lightweight Military Rifle. The Army dropped the rifle from the trials at the request of the contractor. The reasons for this are unknown, but it is believed that the Winchester management did not want to embark upon the full scale development effort that would be necessary to compete with the more vigorously prosecuted AR-15." Edward Clinton Ezell, "The Search for a Lightweight Rifle: The M14 and M16 Rifles." Unpublished Dissertation. June, 1969.

"Meanwhile, to the consternation of Fairchild's board of directors, Armalite was not alone in the development of a new SCHV rifle. Back in the summer of 1956, CONARC had also invited the Winchester-Western Division of the Olin-Mathieson Chemical Corporation to submit an SCHV rifle design of their devising, for competitive trial along with the Armalite entry. Winchester lost no time in coming up with a sleek little rifle, weighing only 5 pounds with an empty 20-shot magazine, and a fluted steel barrel like the AR-10. It featured a conventional walnut stock and handguard, and a short-stroke gas tappet system operating a turning, two-lugged bolt. In these and many other details it resembled nothing so much as an improved M2 Carbine, but significantly, great pains were taken in the Winchester literature to describe the new arm's lineage without reference to the disgraced Carbine itself:
'...From the very beginning of the development work on this weapon it was considered of utmost importance that reliability must not be sacrificed to obtain low weight. As a consequence a policy decision was taken that the new Lightweight Rifle was to be designed on he basis of well proven earlier guns whose field reliability ahd been established in extensive tests. As a result the best elements were taken from the Winchester .30 caliber Experimental Light Rifle, the G30R Semi-Automatic Rifle, the WAR Automatic Rifle and the .50 caliber Semi-Automatic Anti-Tank Gun, to serve as a basis for development of the Winchester Lightweight Rifle. Thus the locking system is essentially the same as that of the .30 caliber Winchester WAR Automatic Rifle which has successfully passed extensive field tests carried out by the Army and the Marine Corps. The short stroke gas system is derived from a type successfully used on several proven guns, while the trigger mechanism again is based on the WAR... which also had successfully passed military tests. The bolt design is based on the WAR and G30R rifle.'
Designed by Ralph Clarkson, the first Winchester Lightweight Military Rifle prototype was successfully demonstrated a CONARC headquarters on October 25, and at Fort Benning, on November 6, 1957. Winchester/Western had also been given a relatively free hand in the cartridge design, the only specified criteria apparently being a .22 centerfire cartridge capable propelling a 50 to 55 grain bullet at 3,300 fps. The resulting round was called the .224 Winchester.
The prototype of the Winchester .224 Light Rifle had been ready a few months before the first AR-15s. However, in their determination to 'get the drop' on ArmaLite and gain the prestige of presenting the first rifle, Winchester had been caught short when the early, informal Infantry Board range requirements were upped to 500 yards. In attempting to pack the short-necked .224E1 case with more powder, Ralph Clarkson discovered the same high chamber pressures Gene Stoner had recorded in his attempts to load a 500-yard capability into the standard .222 Remington case. (Stoner later estimated the .224E1 round, in a hot chamber, consistently gave pressures in the 60,000 psi range: this was about 2,000 psi over what they were then using as a proof load.) The Winchester entry was accordingly withdrawn for ballistic impWinchester's chamber pressure problems led them to the same decision Stoner had made: they made the case neck a little longer and used a different powder. Not simply a different lot of grain size of powder, as Stoner had done, but, interestingly, a completely different type of powder, not even their own product. Remington, a DuPont subsidiary, had dimensioned both the commercial .222 Remington and ArmaLite's .222 Special cartridges around the properties of one of DuPont's proprietary Improved Military Rifle (IMR) powders known as IMR-4475. In fact, according to later testimony and the events related above, Stoner expressly designed the AR-15 around IMR powder. It is interesting to consider Olin here being 'forced' to choose IMR over ball powder in the 224E2, a round with the same chamber profile as the .222 Special, while later advocating the fateful switch to ball powder in the 5.56mm.
Meanwhile, the very heart of the Winchester Light Weight Military Rifle, the bolt, receiver and magazine; had all been built around the original .224 E1 round. Time had flown: the intended Infantry Board comparison of the two rifles had already begun, without Winchester. Expediency therefore suggested seating the flat-based 53-grain bullets more deeply into the longer-necked E2 cases, so the cartridge would still fit and feed in the existing rifle. The .222 Special would chamber in the Winchester rifle, but it was .090" longer overall, and would not feed up through the magazine well. Hence, as Stoner recorded, in order that ArmaLite's results could be compared to later tests with the Winchester rifle, the AR-15 initially had to fire the common but ballistically inferior .224E2 round:
'...About this time Winchester managed to get a contract similar to ours on the light rifle program. They demonstrated a rifle firing a .224E1 round loaded with ball powder and... a .53 grain flat base bullet. The velocity of the Winchester round was the same as ours, 3,300 fps.
After the program was under way I was notified by Winchester that they would have to make some changes in their round. This change was brought about by the fact that the ball powder they used develop too high breech pressures in a hot chamber. They were forced to switch to an IMR type powder, and needed more case volume.
Winchester and ArmaLite agreed on a common cartridge size so that either the Remington loaded (.222 Special) round or theirs would function in the ArmaLite rifles. One problem did exist, however; the Winchester round not called the .224E2 was loaded with the bullet deep in the neck of the cartridge. This was done to keep the overall length down to fit their existing gun design....The final results were that the AR-15 would fire either round, but the Winchester could only fire the .224 round in the Army test programs.
This made almost all the test results poorer than would have been with ...(with) the .222 Special round. Armalite's tests showed that the better bullet design in the .222 Special had much better penetration at long ranges. Another fact became apparent later on when it was noted that the Winchester rounds would lose a considerable number of primer cups in various adverse tests. In a rain test (of the AR-15) at Aberdeen the Winchester rounds used had 50% of their primers loosened in 600 rounds. This test was repeated with the Remington loaded .222 Special with no cartridge case casualties." - Stevens & Ezell

References:
Stevens, Blake & Edward C. Ezell. THE BLACK RIFLE: M16 RETROSPECTIVE. Collector Grade Publications, Inc. Cobourg, Canada. 1992.