[ Gras Cavalry Carbines from Ethiopia ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
Inter Ordnance, aka Royal Tiger Imports,
taking a look at some subtle but relevant
variations of Gras cavalry carbines.
So yeah, this is a video that's going to appeal to about three of you guys.
But that's cool, because it is a video that is worth doing
because these are relevant variations that haven't really been on the US market before.
And I think we need to do a good layout of what the differences are and why they exist.
Because a bunch of these guns are coming on the market now,
a bunch have already been sold, there are a couple more crates here
that ... we just sorted that they are going to be selling.
For the record, I don't have any financial ties to Inter Ordnance,
I'm not getting anything from sales of these.
But I want to have a video out there showing the different variations
so when people start getting these and wondering
why there are these little differences, they can identify what they are.
So the backstory on this is Belgium did a lot of refurbishment and gunsmithing
and modification of surplus arms in the late 1800s through to the World War Two period basically.
... This wasn't the Belgian government, this was Belgian commercial enterprises.
There was a lot of activity of buying up guns and reselling them,
or modifying them, reworking them. And a bunch of these went to Ethiopia.
So Ethiopia wanted carbines. And they got all sorts of carbines,
like everything conceivable went to Ethiopia, but in particular here we have French Gras carbines.
And some of the ones that they got were just straight up
surplus French military guns in their original configuration.
But some of them are guns that started off as full-length infantry rifles
and were shortened into cavalry carbine configuration.
And at a glance they look just like cavalry carbines,
and at a close glance they look pretty much just like Gras cavalry carbines.
But if you know what details to look for, you can distinguish between
a Belgian reworked one and an original French one.
So let's dig in here, we've got five different examples of different variations that I can show you.
To start with there are two different patterns of standard French Army
configuration Gras carbines that you will find out there.
And ... all of these are represented in what Inter Ordnance has.
But the first is the actual Gras cavalry carbine made from the factory as a Gras carbine.
And when I say as a Gras, what I mean is it fires the 11mm Gras metallic cartridge.
The other variation, which the French used in significant numbers, is the Chassepot-Gras conversion.
So this is a carbine that started as a Chassepot,
a needle-fire paper-cartridge cavalry carbine
that was updated to the 1874 pattern to use metallic cartridges.
And the majority of French Chassepot carbines were in fact updated to Gras configuration.
So both of these are authentic and original, and this is what the French used.
So if we take a little bit of a closer look here at the receiver markings,
we have
And here we have
Now this part will also appear as
but there were a couple of different receiver markings
that were used during the Chassepot manufacture.
So this is one of them, and you will see that they have added the "-74"
when they converted this to fire a metallic cartridge.
We also have a metallic-cartridge bolt here.
And the easiest way to distinguish between a Chassepot and a Gras bolt
is that the Gras has a separate bolt head like this.
And that is because it needs an extractor, which is on the bolt head.
Which is not something that the Chassepot uses,
because the Chassepot uses a ... case-less disintegrating paper cartridge.
Now a couple of things that are distinctive about the cavalry carbine configuration.
... First off, all the furniture is in brass.
The trigger guard has a sling swivel here at the front of the trigger guard.
Note it has a very short front tang to the trigger guard.
The buttstock is also a little bit shorter than a standard infantry rifle.
If we move up, we are going to have three brass bands,
well, nose cap and two brass bands.
Our front sling swivel is on the middle band.
And yeah, that's the cavalry carbine.
Now on the Chassepot-Gras conversion all of those elements are exactly the same.
The most common variation on this that we will find
(and there are a lot of these, especially in this last batch from Ethiopia)
are infantry rifles that were converted to the cavalry carbine configuration.
So at a glance this looks the same. We've got our brass trigger guard there,
we've got our three brass barrel bands, sling swivel in the right position.
Obviously all of these originally had rear sights on them,
but the Ethiopians apparently really hated rear sights and took them off quite regularly.
So this looks like a standard carbine, but there are a couple of distinctive differences.
Primarily, we have the fact that full-length rifle stocks
were converted down to cavalry carbine configuration.
And so the rifle stock has a longer tang up here in front
and actually also behind the trigger guard.
And you can see that.
It's subtle, but you can see the ... distance from the screw to the front here and here.
So the Belgians actually they made hardware for these guns,
and they made a longer trigger guard that would fit the existing inletting in the rifle stocks.
You can really see this as well if you put an original carbine, like this one,
side by side with an infantry rifle that's been converted.
Because the infantry rifle is going to be generally just slightly longer
because they didn't often cut the buttstocks down.
So this has a new brass butt plate on it, but it's the original length of an infantry rifle.
And so for that reason you can see the difference in the receiver tang position here.
The carbine was a little bit shorter, the infantry rifle a little bit longer.
The infantry rifles also had their barrel bands in a slightly different location than carbines.
And so on the converted infantry rifles
you will find a plug in the stock where the original barrel band was.
The barrel band has been relocated to put it in the correct spot
for one of the brass carbine barrel bands.
On our original gun here, you can see there has been no change to the stock down there.
And finally, this is a little more subtle, but the serial numbers here are also relevant.
So these are original French infantry rifle barrels.
And you can't always make this distinction, but on this one you can see
we have an "FG" serial number here.
Which means this was produced like hundreds of thousands of rifles in, over a million rifles in.
Because Saint-Étienne, who made this barrel, started with an "F" prefix,
and then G and then H and then J, K, L, M, N, P, Q.
And then they came back and started doing double letters as FG.
So we are well over a million rifles produced before they get to an FG serial number prefix.
Total carbine production was just a couple of hundred thousand guns in total,
so you would never get to double prefix serial numbers on a carbine.
So just a quick recap. You can identify an infantry rifle conversion by the long trigger guard.
Note the extended distance between the screw and the end of the brass here.
By the plug in the stock for the original barrel band.
And potentially by the serial number on the barrel.
But there are more than just those two basic variations out there.
... Like the closer you look at these, the more weird oddball examples you get.
So if we look at this one we have the short brass, so probably a carbine.
We have no plug in here, probably a carbine, looking pretty good.
But what's that? That's another double letter prefix.
The carbines had their own serial number range,
they never got to double letters. This is absolutely a rifle barrel.
So what we have here is a full-length infantry rifle
that was cut down to carbine configuration and actually placed in an original carbine stock.
Here's another oddball one. Again we'll start at the trigger guard,
and we have the long trigger guard here, so looking like an infantry rifle conversion.
We have a plug in the stock, so again looks like a conversion.
It's absolutely an infantry rifle stock.
And in fact back here we can see the original French property plug.
This wood plug in here was done to indicate
French military property, because there was really no way you could hide that.
This also by the way has an AOI, which is an [Italian] African ... colonial army stamp.
Which is cool, that's actually a really distinct good example of that stamp.
Our receiver marking is 1874,
So OK, that's a standard Gras.
But it gets a little bit weird when we get to the serial number.
This is "F" 80 some thousand,
and it has two dates on it.
So what we have here is actually a very late production original Chassepot.
Because the two dates here are the first one is the date
when the gun was originally made, when the barrel was originally made.
And the second one is when it was re-barrelled and converted into a Gras.
So this actually started out as a Chassepot.
And we have further support for that from the fact that the "F" prefix here is a block F.
Chassepots all used block serial ... letters, ... Gras used the fancy script alphabet.
So this was originally a [Gendarmerie] carbine,
that serial number is too high for 1874 to be a rifle.
So this would have been originally a Chassepot carbine, converted into a Gras cavalry carbine,
given a new receiver and then sent to Ethiopia.
So this is another original gun, but it's a weird one.
And those are the main sorts of examples that you will find among these guns.
Original carbines, infantry rifles cut down and put in converted infantry rifle stocks,
and then basically in smaller numbers, all of the different variations you could get with those parts.
So original carbines in rifle stocks, original rifles in carbine stocks,
and then the occasional just total oddball.
Hopefully for the three people who are still watching at this point, this video has been useful to you.
It was information that I wanted to get out there while I have access
to all the different variations at once here at Inter Ordnance.
Because once these disperse to the four winds of the market,
it'll be harder to compare them side by side.
Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching.