Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have another edition of "Adventures in Surplus!"
This is of course based on this batch of rifles that I
picked up at the February Rock Island regional,
or sporting and collectors auction. And I figured
you guys might be interested in taking a look
at the four different guns that came in that lot.
Now this one I had initially written off
as basically the one junk rifle of the batch.
So the way auctions with lotted rifles typically work,
there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind,
a couple of caveats. So, an auction house
as a general rule, at least the reputable ones,
cannot mix guns of different consignors in the same lot.
Because then you end up with OK, someone pays X for the lot, how do you split that between the consignors?
There's absolutely no way they can ever figure out a way to do that equitably, so
every lot is all from a single consignor.
Most consignors are going to give them (most of the time) like a whole collection, or at least a lot of the time.
Often if it's an estate in particular, you'll get the whole collection.
And nobody really has only really good stuff in their collection,
everyone ... who collects has picked up an assortment of kind of junk, whatever, not so great stuff.
And so if the auction company lotted all those junk guns together, well, no one would buy it.
So instead what they do is they make sure that every lot has some good, cool, collectable, desirable stuff.
And then, depending on how many uncool, undesirable guns they have from the consignor,
they'll sprinkle them in across all the different lots to ensure that they all get sold.
So this lot that I bought had a couple of particularly desirable guns.
It had the Kar98a from World War One, and it had a mid-war production German Kar98k from World War Two.
This I figured was the garbage one, and it turns out - well, it looks like junk.
It's actually not sporterised, which is what I had originally assumed.
So just a very brief background on this. This is a Model of 1891 Argentine Mauser.
And in fact the Argentines went initially trying to buy Mauser 71/84s, that's the tube-fed repeating Mauser.
They were trying to buy them in 11mm Remington to match the rolling block rifles they already had.
And they actually spent a couple of years really trying really hard to buy that,
and nobody was willing to deal with the complexities of tooling up a Mauser 71/84 in this weird cartridge,
knowing that the rifle is already obsolete, they'd never sell them to anyone else.
And it's Argentina, they weren't trying to buy all that many.
Anyway, what Argentina ended up doing is basically just taking the Belgian experience,
the Belgian Trials Commission's work, which resulted in the adoption of the Model 1889 Mauser by Belgium,
and they just copied it. They're like, "Works for Belgium, works for us."
They ended up making a few changes. The Belgian Mausers had an external barrel jacket on them,
which it was discovered within just a couple years wasn't actually that great of an idea.
So they got rid of that, and they made a few other little changes to the gun.
But basically what we have here is an 1889 Belgian Mauser without the barrel jacket.
So, ... let's take a closer look at it.
There are a couple things we can tell from the various features on the rifle,
and then we can get into why these things are all chromed and why this gun looks so ugly.
So what can we learn about this rifle? Well, right off the bat, we can see here that the serial numbers
are matching on the receiver, the barrel, and the stock, which means it hasn't been too messed with.
We have a prefix of "K". When these guns were made, ... actually in this case they were made by Ludwig Loewe of Germany.
The Argentines tried to get them through the Mauser Company, but Mauser was busy making Turkish rifles.
And so they basically subcontracted the order to Ludwig Loewe who made them on Mauser's behalf, basically.
The rifles were made in groups of 10,000 with a single letter prefix.
So they started at A, got to ... A 9999 and then went to B.
"K" means that this rifle was actually part of the second batch of guns that were produced,
right at the beginning of the second batch. And this particular rifle would have been made in 1894.
The other serial number we would be particularly interested in is on the bolt, and this is also matching.
So this is in fact a fully matching gun, which is pretty cool.
We have the remains of an Argentine crest here on the receiver, which is also nice.
... Early imports of these guns had the crests intact, later on Argentina decided that they wanted to destroy the crests.
For example, on Mannlicher 1905 pistols that came out of Argentina
the crests are almost always ground off, which is unfortunate, it's really a bummer.
It's cool to have one that's intact. However this crest is very heavily worn,
which will perhaps make sense when we talk about why this thing is so badly chromed.
A couple of other features to point out briefly.
There is this locking screw that prevents the magazine from falling out
under really any circumstances. That was added to the design in 1893.
And at the same time the extractor was slightly redesigned.
So the original extractor was right in the top of the bolt. They had problems with the extractor tension.
They solved those in part by moving it over here, they also relieved the ... right hand locking lug.
When they were first produced, the locking lug came all the way out to the front of the bolt.
That was shortened, also in 1893.
We have a long pattern of handguard on here.
The original production of the rifles had a handguard that was only about half as long.
By 1895 they made this change. They found basically the short handguard left too much of the barrel exposed,
and it was too easy to still burn yourself if you did a bunch of shooting, and then went to grab the rifle to move.
And at that same time they also adopted a fully steel cleaning rod, where the originals had a brass tip on them.
And then lastly, there was a major update done about 1910,
(or initiated in 1910, it took a little while to actually get done on all of the guns),
and that is to modify the sights to use spitzer ammunition.
So when this was originally adopted it used the 7.65 Mauser cartridge,
which was a big round-nose bullet as were most rifle cartridges at the time.
They went to spitzegeschoss, or spitzer, or pointed, bullets in 1910.
That reduced the bullet weight to 182 grains, and it bumped the velocity up to just under 2,600.
Which was very nice, but required a significantly different calibration of the rear sight.
So they re-calibrated the rear sights. They also improved the slider.
There are two little spring loaded catches here, which make the slider more likely to actually stay in position.
Although this one doesn't, because it's very heavily worn.
Originally there had been a second little fold-up notch here, and ... that's been removed as part of the recalibration.
So, what we see from all this in general is that this is a rifle that went through basically
all of the official upgrades that Argentina did to its service rifles.
In general a rifle is going to be particularly collectable if it's in, say, ... a rare early configuration.
If you found one of these that didn't have for example the upgraded locking lug and extractor,
that still had the short handguard, that kind of gun would typically
command a premium because it's harder to find because most of them were updated.
This rifle has all the updates.
We have an import mark here up on the barrel and that will tell us a few things.
... For a long time this is how import marks were done. It's very unfortunate
that they now have to be done on the receiver itself instead of a place that's a little more subtle like this.
But what we do have here is 7.65 calibre, which is the 7.65 Mauser, which is correct.
We then have c-i-a-s-t-a-l-b-v-t, and that's Century International Arms, Saint Albans, Vermont. That's the importer.
They have marked it Germany, which I suppose is actually correct, these were manufactured in Germany.
This is, legally speaking, an antique because it was made before 1899.
And that's all we get on there.
Typically you would also have a model designation as part of the import mark. However,
they were able to leave that out of the import mark because it is written right here, Modelo Argentino 1891.
However, while this says Berlin, it does not say the country of origin, Germany, which is why they had to add that.
And what it also has is this really terrible condition chroming that was done on basically all of the small parts.
So the receiver and the barrel are left blued, the bolt was originally in the white.
But then the magazine, the trigger guard, the screws,
the rear sling swivel,
the front sling swivel and even the barrel band spring,
and the nose cap and bayonet lug,
all of those parts were chromed but have substantially worn away.
You can see it right there for example.
Even the butt plate was in fact chromed, although virtually all of the chrome is gone,
and the bottom of the butt plate has really been pretty heavily beat up.
If we look over here on the right side, the wear on the magazine is particularly bad.
And this made me start kind of wondering. Because ... I initially assumed that this was someone's one-off
experiment in how to refinish parts, and they probably just did a bad job of it,
and they figured an 1891 Argentine Mauser was a gun that wasn't really worth anything, and didn't hurt to mess up.
However, this wasn't done recently, and that gave me a little bit of pause.
But when I started looking around on-line, I found reports from a bunch of other people
who had the exact same style of gun.
Where the receiver and the barrel were still blued, but someone had chrome plated all the small parts.
And there was a lot of wear to them. Like these were not recently done, and they were not well kept.
And what I've found is that ... there's no real good documentation of who exactly did this.
However, enough of them came out looking basically of the same configuration
that they were definitely done in Argentina. And the suspicion that I see people
coming up with, and there's no hard evidence to support it, that I know of, as of yet,
is that these were done as either parade and drill rifles, or training rifles, used by the Argentine Navy.
And that kind of makes sense.
Parade rifles are generally gussied up. It would be a little more common to chrome plate the whole gun,
instead of just the small parts.
But, ... this makes sense, this ... fits with the idea of a parade or drill rifle.
The fact that the butt plate is so badly beaten up would also be indicative of parade use.
You know, having the butt of the gun slammed on the ground as part of a drill routine.
The fact that the crest is so badly worn here on top. Well, that's ... going to be a high wear place on the gun
if you're doing a lot of parade drill with it.
So, that provenance does not make this any prettier of a gun, I still think it looks frankly kind of grotesque.
But it's really interesting to find that it appears, ...
I think there's certainly very reasonable grounds to believe that this is an official,
Argentine government done, modification to these rifles with the chroming.
The 1891 of course has been obsolete for a very, very long time.
That's not uncommon for guns that are used in parade and drill, they keep the oldest stuff.
Often modern rifles are generally not as well suited to the sort of old-school drill routines
as early traditional-style bolt action rifles.
They keep them around, like you don't have to worry about what happens to them.
They're never going to be called upon to actually fire, they're just for performance and art basically.
And so it makes sense that these would be some of the last guns to be surplused,
and they'd hang around for a long time and only come into the US relatively recently.
When I initially bought this rifle, I didn't really have high hopes for it in terms of a video like this.
I figured well, here you go, here's kind of the crap you sometimes get. People do weird stuff to rifles for no reason.
And actually this has turned out to be a far better video example, I think, and a far better story about "Adventures in Surplus!"
than I had initially expected, because this is one of those things where we know that this is a "thing".
This isn't a one off done by some gunsmith here in the US.
This was definitely done in Argentina,
but we don't yet really know exactly who, or how many, or when.
Which is not that uncommon for surplus rifles. There's a lot of stuff that's very well documented,
and then there's plenty of stuff that we just don't really know.
And that's a big area where the collecting community and fraternity comes into play,
where you get people who have extensive experience, both in the United States as well as in
the country of origin of various other, you know, various interesting surplus rifles.
So ... if you can put together the information from a bunch of people who know small parts of the story,
that's often how the whole pattern of understanding emerges.
So if you are interested in Argentine Mausers, the book I would recommend is "Argentine Mauser Rifles 1871 to 1959"
by Colin Webster, this is a Schiffer book.
And it's actually a relatively old one, this has been out for a long time.
Now, this book does not mention anything about these chrome plated rifles,
but has a fantastic history of the development of the 1891 Mauser for Argentina,
as well as the 1909 Mausers for Argentina, and ...
all the variations and history and ammunition and all that sort of stuff.
Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed today's episode.
Thanks for watching.
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