Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at a Mauser Model of 71/84.
This is the German Army's evolution from a single-shot
Mauser 71 to a magazine fed repeating rifle.
This was what pretty much all of the major military powers
in the world were doing around the mid-late 1880s.
Although, while it might surprise us today,
there was actually a substantial amount of debate
as to whether this was really actually a good idea or not.
You see, there were arguments that a single-shot rifle
was actually gonna be better than a repeater.
Remember, these were all black powder rifles at this point, ... and you had masses of troops in a line firing volleys.
And there's a lot of argument that, well, you produce so much black powder smoke when you do this,
that ... repeat firepower doesn't really matter because you can't see the enemy anyway.
You can't keep firing until some of that smoke clears.
And is it really that much faster than just single loading the rifle anyway?
For the the significant extra complexity that you get in a repeating rifle
is it really worth the cost, and the time, and the expense, and the potential for breakage
for what is maybe not that effective or useful of an advantage over the single-shot rifle?
Well, obviously of course, everyone came to the conclusion that, yes, it was an advantage.
And everyone ended up adopting repeating rifles, but not necessarily
without going over the objections of a lot of members of various military staffs.
Now Mauser had been working on this since the late 1870s, and they actually patented a design in 1881.
It didn't get adopted by the German military until 1884, but when it did, it was a significant windfall for Mauser.
They actually got a much greater royalty on this design than they had on the original
1871 pattern single-shot rifles. Mauser at that time had been a small company,
and by '84 they were a better known name and brand, and they were able to command a premium for their new technology.
Now unlike some countries, these were not modifications of existing Mauser 71s,
these were all-new production rifles, although they shared a large number
of features and design elements with the 71. Hence the 71/84 designation.
What's interesting is that after this was adopted, Mauser actually continued working on a magazine
conversion for existing 71s, although it was never actually adopted, so.
Let's take a look up close, and I'll show you how this thing actually works.
Starting with some markings on the side of the receiver, we have
(and by the way, the receiver was left in the white on these guns, the receiver and the bolt both),
now what we have there is I.G. Model 71/84. And that's Infanterie-Gewehr, infantry rifle, 71/84.
There's a serial number on the receiver as well as on the barrel. We have a crown over F.W.
That F.W. is Friedrich Wilhelm who was, well, in charge.
And the top barrel flat has the arsenal marking where the rifle was manufactured.
All four German state arsenals took part in the manufacture here, so Spandau, Erfurt, Danzig and Amberg.
And Mauser, I believe, also made some of these themselves.
And then on the on the right side flat we just have a couple of general proof marks.
Lastly, we have the date of production here on the right side of the receiver.
So this is one of the very last ones, which is probably part of why it's in such really nice condition.
Some of the old style elements remain in place on this rifle, like having the sling swivel
at the front of the trigger guard, instead of on the stock.
And I suppose I should point out this has a Mauser type flag safety, so safe and fire.
And then it has a magazine disconnect on the back left side of the receiver.
So, if we open the bolt, (this is very similar to a Mauser 71 bolt),
we have a tube feed system inside.
This is very similar to the Kropatschek style of system, although this was patented by Mauser for this rifle.
And to load it you would put a cartridge on this lifter and push it in against the follower.
You repeat that until the magazine's completely full, it holds 8 rounds.
And then when you actually cycle the rifle, closing it pushes the lifter down (and it's already down now),
and then when you open the bolt you have to actually kind of open it with a little bit of force,
(there we go), that pops the lifter up.
And a cartridge on the lifter is now pushed into the chamber by the bolt.
Now you have to actually also use a bit of force to close the bolt.
And when you do, that drops the lifter back down, and releases a cartridge from the magazine onto the lifter.
So now when you open it again, you'll eject the spent case and
there's another round sitting on this lifter ready to chamber.
You can also notice that there are no locking lugs on the front of the bolt.
That's because this shares the original Mauser 71 pattern of locking, which is that, right there.
The locking lug on this is the stem of the bolt handle right there.
Now this would actually cause some relatively serious problems for the gun.
Once they got into production they realised that somehow, during all of the testing that they did,
they'd managed to not notice the fact that these rifles tended to shoot off to the side.
They tended to shoot to the right, and ... after some testing they determined that it was actually
because of this offset asymmetrical locking system.
So they had to do some modification to the sights to actually fix that.
The solution of course was to move the front sight.
But that was a problem that really should have been addressed in production before they got nearly this far.
Anyway, the tactics of the day generally stipulated that you would have the magazine tube loaded,
but kept in reserve. And you would fire this as a single-shot rifle
until such time as an officer informed you that it was time to release the magazine and use it.
So in order to engage the magazine cut off, we have to actually open the bolt,
lift the magazine up, and then you can engage that switch, and that locks the lifter in the upward position.
So you can now just drop a cartridge on, close the bolt, extract, eject, drop a cartridge,
and so on until you are ready to release the magazine.
And you do that, and then the next time you close the bolt,
(there we go, takes more force now), and it drops the elevator.
These are chambered for the 11mm Mauser cartridge, the same standard cartridge as the Model 71 used.
They did investigate the possibility of going to a smaller cartridge, a 9.5 to maybe 10.5mm cartridge.
Did a bunch of testing, determined that those were in fact better cartridges,
but that the cost of changing the whole logistical system for a new cartridge
wasn't worth the advantage that they would get. So 11mm Mauser.
Sight here goes out to 1,500 metres and there is a standard battle sight zero, as well as a secondary
battle sight zero leaf that you can flip up. Although this one's really quite stiff,
... there's probably some dried grease in there and it doesn't want to lift up.
For shooting at extended ranges you would lift the rear sight up of course.
One thing we know about black powder cartridges is that they tend to get barrels hotter actually faster than
smokeless powder rounds, and yet the 71/84 here was issued without any sort of handguard.
And that's not a matter of, like, the handguard's missing, these were never made with handguards.
And in a sort of perverse incentive kind of thing, it turns out that this was actually considered an advantage.
One of the major concerns about repeating rifles was the use of ammunition.
Like, we won't be able to supply enough ammo to the troops because they're just gonna start panicking,
and fire everything they've got, and we won't be able to control it, and this will lead to
troops being completely out of ammo, and then they'll be completely overrun.
And not having a handguard meant that the barrel would get hot if you started shooting a lot,
and that was seen as a good buffer on the soldiers rate of fire.
Like, you know, if they shoot too much the gun will get so hot they can't really hold it,
and then they'll have to stop shooting and slow down, and this is a plus.
That's how it's supposed to work. That's not actually really, I think, a good idea.
But the 71/84 was not in service long enough for that to become an actual problem in the field in a conflict.
One more element to take a look at is at the front here. This is the cap on the end of the magazine tube
(there is, of course, a bayonet lug), and then this is just a stacking rod
so that troops can stack the rifles up when they're in bivouac or doing other work.
You'll notice that there is no cleaning rod on this rifle,
and that's largely because the tube magazine in the stock takes up all the space.
There isn't anywhere that you can put a cleaning rod. Of course on the Mauser 71
it went right under the barrel, can't do that anymore.
Now the solution that a lot of countries had, what the French did, what the Portuguese did with the Kropatschek
was to stick the cleaning rod on the side of the stock.
The Germans instead did something that I think is in the long run a lot smarter,
they got rid of the cleaning rod and they started issuing a pull-through cleaning kit to their soldiers.
And would continue to use that pull- through for, well, I think they still do today.
So a relatively early development of what would turn out to be a really effective cleaning kit.
I guess people don't normally think about cleaning kits as being particularly interesting bits of firearms technology,
but certainly in the black powder days they were absolutely essential.
You get too much black powder fouling in something like this,
it becomes very difficult to load cartridges, to chamber cartridges.
Your chamber pressure spikes as the barrel is effectively reduced in diameter from the fouling,
and you do actually need to put some effort into keeping those guns clean.
This rifle was adopted as part of this ongoing arms race between France and Germany.
And there are a couple interesting details to that. So
initially Germany wanted to kind of hide the fact that they were adopting a fancy new rifle,
because as of 1884 the French were also still using a single-shot rifle, the Gras.
And so twofold, and first off they didn't actually announce this rifle until 1886.
And with the initial production they tried to basically hide it in the military budget
as simply money being used to buy the regular ongoing requirement of replacement rifles.
You know, you always have some losses through training and such, and so they were always
allocating some money to buy a few new rifles and just keep everything kind of topped up and in good shape.
And they were hoping that they could sneak a brand new repeating rifle ... kind of in that budget line.
Now that didn't really work out, but they tried it.
And, while the gun was adopted in '84, it of course took some time to get it into production.
The first deliveries weren't made until relatively late in 1885, and they kept the whole thing secret until 1886,
when they actually made the manuals available instead of being classified material.
... And of course in the German parlance there was no note in the name of this rifle that it was a repeating rifle,
it was just "rifle 71/84". And I think they were kind of hoping
to disguise the fact that it was in some way new technology.
In total, the four major state arsenals produced 1,161,148 Mauser 71/84s.
And they were producing them right up until 1888, which is when of course,
well, they stopped producing these to start producing the next
escalation in the ongoing arms race between France and Germany, the Gewehr 88.
Of course, they had the bad luck to adopt this and get production really substantially under way
just in time for France to render the whole thing completely obsolete by introducing a smokeless powder rifle.
So this is a gun that ... when it was in active service, very short period of time,
we're talking 4 or 5 years when this was the primary German Imperial rifle.
Never saw use as a front line rifle in any significant conflict,
although these would see some use as backup rifles by World War One.
Even some of this stuff was still being issued when they had to really scrape the bottom of the barrel
and get everything back out of ... inventory.
So that said, I think it's still a pretty cool example. ... You know, a bunch of different countries
adopted tube magazine rifles, and they're kind of this perfect intermediary between
when they had single-shot rifles and when they had repeating smokeless rifles.
Right in the middle there is where we have this brief period of tube-fed guns.
So this particular one is in really quite nice condition. If you'd like to see more about it
... you can take a look at Rock Island's catalogue page for it.
You can get to that by way of Forgotten Weapons, which is linked in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.