Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company where we are taking a look at what is arguably the best
Mauser sniper rifle ever made, and that is the Swedish m/41B.
Now we'll get to the "B" as opposed to just the m/41 in due course.
But let's start at the beginning which would be Sweden in 1940.
They're sitting there being all cool ...
and they realise that off to one side they've got a bunch of Finns who are busy trying to fight off the Russians,
and on the other side they've got a bunch of Norwegians who are busy trying to fight off the Germans,
and this is looking like a rather dangerous world to be in.
And Sweden realises that while it has a very nice service rifle in the Swedish Mauser, the m/94 and the m/96 Mausers,
they actually don't have any scoped rifles, they have no sniper rifle at all.
And the Finns in particular are making pretty good use of this sort of thing,
and the Swedes decide that they really probably ought to get something along these lines.
So in 1940 they put together a program pretty quickly to get themselves a scoped rifle.
And they actually do it by contracting with Germany for their optics and mounts.
They don't really figure they have time to develop something internally and build it all,
and Germany's got a pretty good set up already going.
So the Swedes basically contract to purchase German- style short rail Mauser scope mounts and optics.
They get what is specifically a 4x power AJACK (that's short for Adolph Jackenkroll,
a German optics company that makes the scope), they get this scope, really a quite nice scope.
The reticle is just a basic German post, so you've got a pretty thick horizontal line,
and you've got a pretty thick centre line with a little point on it, ... that's all you need there.
... Well, we'll get into the details of the scope when we take a closer look.
What's more relevant is from 1941 to 1943 the Swedes go ahead and they make ...
well, they make 2,000 to 3,000 of these with these nice German scopes.
And then it's 1943, and the Germans are looking at their own situation and going,
"Why we getting rid of our scope mounts? We kind of need that stuff.
We're going to cut off Sweden. So you're on your own, we're using all of our scope mounts ourselves now."
And the Swedes were left with, well they wanted more rifles,
so what they ended up doing was using a domestically produced optic instead.
A ... 3x power scope from a company called AGA. And there was a 1942 pattern that kind of had some issues,
wasn't the greatest, ...
well, it wasn't perfectly well sealed against moisture so they'd kind of get foggy sometimes.
They improved that in 1944 with a 1944 pattern AGA scope.
And the Swedes went ahead and finished out their production using those.
All of these were made during World War Two, and in total they made I think 5,300 of them.
So really not all that many. They were issued out 6 per company, became a standard part of Swedish infantry armament.
Never actually had to be used in service, but magnificent rifles.
Then following up on that, in 1955 the Swedes came back and decided it was time to kind of rebuild all these things.
They weren't at war any more, they didn't really like having three separate types of scopes involved.
And the Swedish AGA scopes really just weren't up to the quality of the AJACKs that they really preferred to use.
So in 1955 they set up a program and rebuilt basically all of the rifles,
acquiring more AJACK scopes at this point after the war to make up for the ones that they didn't have.
None of the 1942 [Swedish] scopes survived the refurb process, they were all ditched.
A few, a very small number, of the 1944 Swedish scopes made it onto 41B refurbished rifles,
but the vast, vast majority are these 4x power German AJACK scopes.
At the same time they made a few updates to the mounting system,
which in fact we should go ahead and take a look at.
Now it's not uncommon to see like a release lever on ... a scope mount like this. ...
Usually what this is, is a locking lever. And one would normally expect to see it kind of in the horizontal position.
You know, you put the scope on and then you lock it down.
Well, the lever on these Swedish snipers works in a completely different way.
This is actually a release lever. So it's there to give you some leverage to cam the scope off of its base.
So if I push this backwards, it's going to run until it hits that pin.
It's gonna push the scope back, and it allows me to easily remove the scope from its mounting rail.
The way that actually works is in conjunction with this pin.
When I put the scope on, there's a little notch here in the lever that lines up with that pin.
And right there that pin goes into the lever,
and if I push the lever forward it locks it in place.
Now one of the original problems with this system is that people would pull too hard on the lever,
and they kind of crank this thing too far forward, to the point that it was really hard to get it back off.
So, one of the modifications they made with the 41B overhaul and upgrade
is to add this set screw on the front. And this just acts as a stop.
The scope hits this screw and stops there, no matter how hard you're pushing on this lever.
The mounts were not actually originally numbered, they figured the scope mount's not coming off, so why bother serialising it?
However, the scope mount actually is mounted directly over the part of the receiver where the original serial number was.
So that may have been a little bit awkward. At any rate, in '55 when they upgraded these,
they went ahead and ... put the rifle's serial number on all of the scope bases.
... You'll see this looks like it's missing some parts. When they originally did this they had
two pins which are still in here. You can just kind of see, there's one and
there's one.
And then three screws that hold this scope mounting rail into the receiver.
This is similar to how the Germans did them. And even with all of that, they found that the screws could come loose.
So they put second holes in, and they actually put in locking screws with a little semi-circular cutout.
You've probably seen that on some German rifles.
And those locking screws held the main screws in place.
Well, when they updated these in '55 they left that out, and instead they just peened the main screws into those holes.
So you can see how they've done that. That prevents those screws from rotating.
It means you don't have extra little locking screws that are now liable to get loose and fall out.
The scope itself is of course a 4x power, it has a 38mm ocular lens and a 44mm objective lens.
So on the large side for a World War Two era scope, 4x power magnification was pretty much common.
Most people in World War Two were using either 3x or 4x power, or somewhere in between.
There is a BDC up here.
This allows you to adjust for range out to 800 metres, and as you turn this
it simply elevates or drops the reticle in the scope.
So it's not actually moving the scope body at all, it's just moving the reticle within.
Also has an adjustable focus knob here.
And that's pretty much it. No other buttons or widgets that you need to play with on the scope.
When they originally built these they ... took rifles that were known accurate rifles,
particularly accurate rifles that were already in service. These were not brand new, factory made guns.
They were existing rifles that were converted at the Carl Gustav plant by adding these scope mount rails and scopes.
So they just took the guns they already knew were pretty good,
as a result there is no specific serial number range for the Swedish snipers.
And in fact you will find them with markings from all three manufacturers:
Carl Gustav, Husqvarna and Mauser, and over a fairly wide range of dates. This one happens to be a 1903 Carl Gustav.
One of the other things they did in '55 at the upgrade program was they replaced the rear iron sights on these rifles
with a much more fine-tuneable rear sight. And it's this dial style of sight.
So you've got notches there for every 25 yards from 100 out to looks like 600, right there.
The way this works is that it's simply running a screw down into the bottom of the rear sight
to push this thing up or let it down.
These rifles have really nice triggers and are perfectly usable with the iron sights
should you not want to use the scope, or should anything happen to the scope.
So they made a point that you can pull the scope off and still use it really well.
I suppose there might be a good excuse to do that should you actually get into combat
if you were operating at relatively short ranges perhaps.
Didn't want the enemy to recognise that you were a sniper, something along those lines.
I guess I should also point out here that this one has this cool little sheet metal sight hood on it as well.
Front sight is a nice squared off post.
Swedes knew how to do accurate rifles, that's for sure.
It wasn't actually until 1991 that these were completely taken out of service in Sweden.
And it should say something about the role that they were playing, that when they were taken out of service
they were ultimately replaced by the HK PSG-1.
Also a reasonably well-renowned precision rifle.
As they were being surplused (this happened in stages)
a lot of them were actually surplused into Canada and Europe before 1986,
because until '86 it was not legal to ... import this sort of rifle into the United States.
When that changed in '86 a lot of them started coming into the US.
And I believe the very last batch of them was surplused in 1996 to an American company called Samco.
So we have a fair number of them here in the US.
They're really kind of underappreciated rifles
... probably because Sweden was never really in a stand-up infantry fight during World War Two.
That doesn't change the fact that these are really nice sniper rifles, really nice precision rifles.
And will shoot I suspect just as well today as they did throughout their entire military service lives.
Sweden used nice clean ammo, these weren't ever abused in combat, and they're great shooting guns.
So anyway, if you would like more information about this one in particular,
Rock Island's catalogue page has everything you might want to know about it,
pictures, description, price estimate, all that sort of stuff.
You can get there by way of Forgotten Weapons, which is linked in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]