My take on the SMLE No.1 MkIII Airsoft conversion

Hi! This is jim from the Philippines.
Against all odds, I was able to import an old, battered SMLE No.1 Mk.III stock and some metal bits (very difficult with our country's importation laws). I know the No.4 was a lot more popular but i really really like the weird look of the SMLE No.1. I thought this was going to be a straightforward springer conversion but i was surprised at how slim and tiny the SMLE stock was compared to the Kar98 and Bar10! The handguards were tiny too.

I did a lot of research on previous builds (Thank you so much william, yith and the blokes from CIA/ww2airsoftUK)...what previous builders did was to cut down the bar10 outer barrel extensively, leaving the cylinder and hop chamber almost completely naked. I opted for a slightly different approach. It's because I don't trust my own tooling abilities to precisely align the cylinder and hop and barrel, without securing them to the outer barrel.

I decided to try and keep part of the bar10 outer barrel mainly for cylinder-hop alignment issues. This is difficult because of the large diameter of the outer barrel. I tried to think of several ways to cut it but this is finally what i settled on:

The triangular cut out minimizes the amount of wood i have to cut away from the thin portion of the stock while maintaining the ability to secure the hop to the outer barrel.

Here it is after some carving out the stock and some preliminary fitting. I used a 13.5mm od stainless steel pipe for the main outer barrel.

Started working on the aesthetics. I used the original Rear handguard. It was chiseled sandpapered to fit on top of the Bar10 outerbarrel and receiver. I superglued it to the outerbarrel and filled the gaps with epoxy putty. I also have the original rear sight guard but since i was going to cut it and just glue it to the outerbarrel, i tought metal might be too heavy and be prone to breakage. I used sintraboard for the rear sight guard instead.

Hollowed out the magwell. I must say, this weapons grade wood is much tougher than the airsoft Dboys woodstock worked on before. I had to use a big power drill because my dremel couldn't handle the workload. Another advantage of using this RS stock is that, even if it gets real thin in some areas, i'm confident the wood will hold up (hopefully). I also tried to incorporate the magcatch small parts into the wooded stock but i wasn't very precise in my tooling so i ended up cutting the whole assembly off the Bar10 stock and using it.

I decided to modify the hop on this project. I drilled a hole in my bar10 outerbarrel to expose the hop arm. Then i drilled a corresponding hole on the rear sight i was going to attach to the outerbarrel. I threaded it and placed a screw so i can adjust the hop vertically. I did this because there is very little space in the stock of the custom gun i'm building and i wanted to get rid of the sliding arms. Also, without this mod, i would have to completely disassemble the gun just to be able to adjust the hop. This way, i can adjust the hop on the fly. As a consequence, the rear sight is non-adjustable but this isn't really an issue because i plan to use a scope anyway.

Here you can see the hole i drilled into the outer barrel: Hop off

Adjusting the screw on top will push the hop arm down slowly: Hop on

Here is the cosmetic rear sight with vertical hop adjusting screw:

Also worked on the cosmetics of the receiver and rear sight.

I still have to attach the buttstock to the forestock, following william's advise to have a collar ring casted. I'm not sure weather directly joining the butt stock to the forestock with wood screws then reinforcing with metal epoxy will be able to withstand the tougher springs and edgi kit i plan to install.

So far, it shoots great and straight!

Again, a big thank you to everyone that answered the million questions i had about this project.

Will update soon....