[ Ethiopian Oddities: Single Shot 1878 Marine ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
InterOrdnance, aka Royal Tiger Imports,
taking a look at "Oddities from Ethiopia".
Because they've been importing guns out of Ethiopia,
and amongst all of the standard pattern stuff, they've come up with
just some really weird oddball guns that I thought you might be interested in.
So our first one here is this, which started off life mostly
as a French 1878 Marine Kropatschek, which is a very rare pattern
of sort of transitional French repeating black-powder bolt-action rifle.
This would have originally been a tube magazine fed gun,
chambered for 11mm Gras, that was adopted by the French Navy in 1878
and purchased from Steyr. So this is actually a Steyr manufactured gun.
However, what happened to it in Ethiopia is that for some reason it has been dropped into a Gras stock.
And a Gras was a single shot rifle, there's no space for a magazine tube in here.
So this has been demoted from a magazine-fed gun to single-shot gun,
but it still has the action of a Kropatschek tube feeder.
And then on top of that they gave it a totally different rear sight. So let me show you up close.
If we go ahead and take a look at the markings here, these are marked in French,
indicating that they were manufactured at the Werndl factory in Steyr, Austria, "Autriche".
And it is the Model 1878 Marine, or Navy Kropatschek.
A total of 25,000 of these were purchased by the French,
... and they all had an "A" prefix, this is A 19437.
And the bolt actually matches, which seems surprising.
But actually maybe it's not that surprising because there weren't that many of these guns around.
So it's not like there were a whole lot of them to be accidentally swapping parts with.
And we have our production date there of 1879.
As originally built this of course was a tube-magazine gun,
and so it has an elevator here, or a lifter.
But that lifter only goes down a few millimetres, because it runs into the bottom of the stock.
There's supposed to be a much deeper stock here with a magazine tube in it.
But that has been ... abandoned.
They figured out a way to make the gun functional as a single shot.
So all you would need to do is drop a cartridge onto that lifter,
and then you can close the bolt, lock it home, and fire the thing.
And it will work as a single-shot rifle, you just ... lose that magazine capacity.
Now I mentioned the rear sight as well, and I believe this is the rear sight off
of an 1895 Steyr-Mannlicher long rifle.
It has been rather crudely attached here to the shank of the barrel.
It's missing its elevation slider, and also its spring and detent,
but that will lift up for the theoretical long range use.
The barrel bands have also been kind of crudely hand fitted here.
And they still have the Gras cleaning rod.
Which really goes to show that there is in fact definitely no magazine tube in this,
because there's a cleaning rod going right down the middle where the magazine tube ought to be.
And it looks like the butt plate was also a bit of a sort of kludged in afterthought.
Not all that well attached, definitely not the original butt plate from this stock.
In fact, given
some of the border configuration here,
this might actually be a stock that was not a Gras stock to begin with
but simply modelled on a Gras stock.
It's certainly been [custom] inletted ... to fit this action.
So this is the sort of thing that you get,
not all the time but periodically, in a country like Ethiopia where it is,
"I've got some broken stuff and I need to make something work."
And guess what? This is how you ... improvise, adapt, overcome,
and get a working rifle out of a non-working rifle.
I suspect of course that the reason this was done
would have been damage to the magazine tube assembly.
There weren't a lot of these guns made in the first place,
there were not very many of them that went to Ethiopia.
We don't have any exact numbers, but total what I've seen from InterOrdnance
bringing back from Ethiopia is about half a dozen of them total, maybe 8.
So even if we assume that ... there's a relatively low survival rate of them in Ethiopia,
if at some point the magazine tube assembly was damaged,
it was unlikely that they would have any spare parts.
And it may have simply been a lot easier to rebuild this
- just drop it into a stock and make it a single-shot rifle -
than try to rebuild the complexity that was the magazine feeding system.
As for the Mannlicher rear sight? I have no idea, you got me.
I don't know why that exactly was chosen,
presumably it was what was there and available.
But it certainly makes for an unusual rifle. Hopefully you guys enjoyed taking a look.
Thanks for watching.