Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at
some of the guns they'll be selling in their upcoming June of 2016 regional auction.
And this one presented me with a little bit of a conundrum.
This is a German Jäger pistol, these were manufactured through World War One.
About one in six actually saw military service, couple thousand total.
Those are very scarce today. This is one of the civilian production guns, and
there's a lot of very interesting history behind the manufacture of these guns.
[Jäger] really was only interested in building nice sporting guns.
But when World War One hit he had no choice but to either shut down or make military arms.
So he came up with this design for a military pistol.
And it really is quite the brilliant design.
It was something that gave him a way to manufacture a military pistol,
which was something outside of his normal realm of experience and work,
but allowed him to do it with the tooling that he already had on hand.
And thus allowed him to keep his business operating through the war.
Now, I did a video on this a long time ago, and I figured we should do a new one in HD
and make sure we can get some really good quality footage of this gun.
However, in between when I started planning that and when I'm sitting here actually filming it,
Othais and Mae over at the C&Rsenal channel did their own video on this pistol.
And you know what? They did really a fantastic job covering the history.
So much so that I'm going to suggest you just go take a look at their video
for the history on Herr Jäger and his work before and after these guns.
And a lot on the construction as well.
There's not a whole lot that I can add to what Othais has already said.
However, there's something that he didn't do, and that I also didn't do in my earlier video on the Jäger,
and that is show you how the stupid thing goes back together, because it's really a pain in the butt.
So we are going to take this opportunity. ... I'm going to pull this thing apart,
and then we'll show you the actual step-by-step process for getting it back together.
Alright, while we've got this thing totally pulled apart, I do want to take a look at a couple of quick details.
First off: this thing, like so many German guns, is numbered all over the place.
So we have a number on the barrel, we have a number on the inside of the slide,
we have a number on the bottom of the frame plate.
This plate doesn't have a number on that side, because it has its number down here on the outside.
We have a number on the breech block, there.
We have a number on the trigger bar.
We even do have a number on the magazine.
(I don't know if you can see that right there.)
The magazine is the only piece that is not matching numbered.
This is magazine number ... 3758, where the rest of the gun is 3254.
Now this is also an early pattern of the Jäger, it has just two holes here.
One is for the barrel lug and one is for its screw and reinforcing sleeve.
And as Othais pointed out, later on they would actually add a third connector up here.
Now this is also a civilian marked gun, it has a number of crown N proofs.
So this is not one of the military issue Jägers.
Alright, with that in mind, let's go ahead and actually reassemble this thing.
So we're going to start by putting in the barrel.
So the barrel has two lugs on each side.
I'm going to go ahead and set that in that side plate hole.
And then you can see that there's a rounded surface right here.
That is going to lock into position with this reinforcing sleeve.
Then the opposite side plate can sit right there.
And we have a screw that goes through the lug, and into the other side plate.
(There we go.) I'm going to leave that a little bit loose right now
because I do need these parts to have some movement to them.
Now I need to partially install the front strap and the back strap.
We're not going to go ahead and fit them all the way into place,
we're just going to put in the screws that hold them onto the bottom of the frame.
Now these guys can still pivot in and out, which is important.
Alright, now we can go ahead and install the slide.
A couple tricks here. First off: you ... have to have the back strap unlatched like it is here.
Secondly, now I haven't ever found an original assembly manual for a Jäger,
so I don't know if this is how they were originally instructed to be done,
but what I've found is it's a lot easier to get the slide on if I leave the breech block out at first.
So we're going to set that aside for the moment.
I'm going to go ahead and slide the spring over the barrel, just like so.
Now we're going to hook the slide over the end of the spring,
slide this all back carefully so that it doesn't kink.
(Try and get it, there we go.) It can be a little bit of a trick getting it through.
One thing I would advise to simplify that is make sure that when you take it apart,
you put the ... spring back on in the same orientation.
Because, at least on this pistol for example, one end of the spring is
a little bit opened up at its very last coil, and it doesn't like to come through.
Put it on the other way, and it goes on much more easily.
So when you take it apart, keep track of which end is the front and which end is the back.
Now this is sort of together, however I still have to put in the breech block.
So what I'm going to do is flip the gun over,
pull the slide open,
lift the back strap out of the way,
and then, firing pin forward, we can drop the breech block right in like that.
Alright, now the reason that we had to leave the back strap open when we did the slide
was because these two little protrusions here
have to go into these two rails on the back of the slide.
And you cannot pull the slide back far enough to put it over those.
Instead you have to put the slide on first, and then snap the back strap up into those places.
So we're going to come over here, we're going to go ahead and push this button in.
Now, there we go, it just snaps nicely in place.
Now the slide is held down by the two little lugs on the back strap.
Now we're past the hard part really, that's the finicky and obnoxious part
that you will have to do 5 or 10 different times because the spring flies off the barrel,
the barrel tilts in the wrong way, the slide doesn't want to snap over the frame,
you'll find all of these problems if and when you do this.
Now, you do have to remember at this point, you may be nice and relieved that, phew, it finally all went together.
However, you still have your trigger bar, which just fell out of the gun when you took it apart.
So we have to make sure that this goes back in.
... It has a little channel that it rides in here,
and ... it's not held firmly in place, it just floats when the pistol's disassembled.
And of course, conveniently, you have to depress the button on this side to snap the front strap in.
Now, the front strap will hold it in place, but you have to flip it over to do that.
What happens when you flip it over? Of course this falls out of position.
So just to be safe, what I'm going to do is have it in the correct spot there.
And then I'm going to put magazine in.
Because the magazine's got this nice flat side to it.
That ...
... Oop, yep, it fell out of place and now the magazine won't go in.
Alright, the magazine is in place. Now it will hold the trigger bar in position so I can flip the gun over.
And now I just have to depress that little tab.
I can't do it with the magazine of course, because I just put the magazine in the gun.
But once that's done, we can snap this into place right there. That comes out.
And now the gun is all firmly locked back together.
So at this point I'm going to go in and tighten down these three screws.
That's pretty good.
You never really want to super over-tighten screws on a gun like this.
But I do want to make sure that they're nice and snug, so that they don't come loose.
And lastly, of course, we can put the grip panels back on.
There we go, one fully reassembled Jäger pistol.
Before we go, a couple of quick things I want to point out here.
First off, very cool inscription on the side of this thing.
Secondly, it's got this extra set of markings below it. Those are British proof marks.
That indicates that this pistol at some point was actually resold on the commercial market in England.
This would not be a World War One thing, this would be a commercial collector market type of thing.
And in order to be sold on the commercial market in England, it has to have been proofed by the British.
And so when they proof it they add these, ... right here we have a crown over BNP that's a Birmingham National Proof.
On this side we have our German commercial proofs.
You'll notice there is a BNP on each of these components, the opposite side of the frame, and the slide.
That crown over N is the German commercial proofing.
That German proof is what would have been applied when this gun was first manufactured.
Thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed the video, a pretty specific niche video here.
You know, very important that everybody understands how to properly reassemble their Jäger pistol.
It will however I expect to be particularly useful to the one person who ends up buying this one,
because of course it's for sale, it's here at an auction house.
If you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on this.
It does actually come with an original holster, which is pretty cool.
Anyway, you can take a look at their pictures of that.
And if you'd like to place a bid, you can do so right online through the website.
Thanks for watching.