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 taking a look at a few of the
guns that they are going to be selling in their
upcoming May of 2019 Premier firearms auction.
And today we have a really cool intermediate pattern
of Mauser. This is an 1892 Mauser,
which is not either of the standards we normally see.
So the bolt-action Mausers, the repeating magazine fed
bolt-action Mauser as we are aware of it,
was first sold to the Belgians in 1889, and then this rifle would go through almost 10 years
of iterative development until it finally reached the stage of the Mauser 1898 which was, of course,
adopted by the German military and then used world-wide
for decades and is probably the best bolt-action design ever created.
But, as with so many other guns, what made the Mauser 98 so excellent was not an initial
spark of pure brilliance, it was this iterative process of building a bunch of guns,
shipping them to somebody, getting them tested, getting them used in the field,
discovering what the problems were, iterating a little bit, improving the gun a little bit,
making a whole lot more of them, sending those out, getting feedback on those. And this process
is what makes any initial interesting design into a truly excellent final product.
So, with the 1892 what we have here is actually a rifle with a lot of
little intermediate elements to it. And it would fall in between the 1891,
which is the last of the single stack Mausers, where you have this protruding box magazine,
and the 1893, which is the first of the double stack rifles.
Now, this one is a Spanish contract, in fact the Spanish I believe are the
only country to have purchased the 1892 Mauser.
They were busy... Well they were testing the Mauser at this point
and they were actually at this point still testing it in 7.65mm.
And it was only in 1892 that Mauser introduced the 7x57mm cartridge
(which by the way is an excellent cartridge, arguably one of the best that Mauser ever produced),
Spain would end up standardising on the 7mm, but first they actually ordered about 400
(in fact 400), of these guys for the Spanish Navy in 7.65mm.
They kept doing a little more testing, Mauser showed up with a 7mm rifle
and so they did some testing with that, and they ended up deciding that they preferred the 7mm.
And so in late 1892, November of 1892
this rifle was formally standardised as the Spanish Model of 1892 Mauser.
And an order was placed, it's a little fuzzy exactly what the details are, it appears
the first order was for 2,000 rifles, of which I believe this is one.
That went through field trials, troop trials, further final testing and they decided that, yes,
we definitely like this, we'll go ahead and order a lot of them, like 70,000 of them.
However, right about that time Mauser presented them with a new option, and that was
a new version of the rifle that, most significantly, had a double stack internal magazine,
instead of the single stack external magazine.
And one of the things that is notable about Mauser throughout all of its development history,
1880s through, well through the '98 pattern,
is that when a country bought a large quantity of these rifles, they generally
had a clause in their contract allowing them to restandardise on any new improvements
that were made during the production contract. So you'd see this in particular with Turkey
as they were making 100,000s of rifles for the Turkish military
Mauser came up with improved design elements,
and so the new guns superceeded the old ones in the production contract.
And that's basically what happened with the Spanish. When they got this option
for the double stacked internal magazine, they realised this is definitely an improvement.
it's not liable to be damaged, it's just a more efficient, a more elegant magazine design. And so
they basically cancelled all the production of the 1892s, and replaced them with 1893s
before they really had a chance to get any of these. So only a few 1000 of these rifles were made in the first place,
they are quite scarce today, and they are a really cool intermediate design step in the Mauser bolt-action.
So, I have off-screen right now, an 1891 and an 1893, and we are going to pull those out
and show you those two, compared to the intermediate 1892.
Before we do an exact comparison, I just wanted to point out a couple little details on this rifle.
It is serial number 852.
A bit curiously, to me at least, it does not have any marking on the receiver side rail.
The other ... one example I have seen of a Spanish 1892 is marked "Waffenfabrik Mauser" on the side. So,
I'm not sure exactly why ... If this was part of a troop trials batch, it is possible that it wasn't marked.
It also doesn't have any proof marks up on the receiver.
However we do have 852 on basically all the parts that are numbered.
I went ahead and took the stock off of the action just to see if there was anything interesting underneath,
and I did find this. These some of the specifications of the calibre, so this is a very early 7mm Mauser rifle.
Other than that, we just have a couple of serial numbers.
Rear sight is standard for Spanish Mausers. It goes from 500 out to 2,000 metres.
And then our sling swivel and stock arrangement is also
exactly what you would expect on ... an 1893 Spanish Mauser.
Alright, so here we have an 1891, an 1892 and an 1893.
and you can clearly see the progression of the magazines here.
So, single stack, single stack and then double stack.
And this was by far the best of the three.
Let's take a look at the two changed here.
Internally these are both basically the same, you have kind of a built in sheet metal
box there with your feed lips, and then a single stack follower. Both of these are set up for stripper clips
that was something that Mauser had introduced before these, with ... the very first pattern of 1889 Mausers.
But our disassembly on the 1891 is this rotating lug, and that's a bit clumsy and awkward.
And what they did on the '92 was refine that a bit.
On the '92 here, we actually have a really ... fairly clever disassembly system.
Unfortunately this is fairly stiff, and the only snap cap I have handy is a 9mm one
But, what you have here is a notch there and a notch in the top of this
and, in theory, you can take out the whole magazine assembly
by using a cartridge as a lever, right like that and pushing in.
Like I said though, this one's stiff. I suspect it hasn't actually been removed in quite a long time,
and it doesn't want to come out and I don't want to force it.
But that was the 1892 system, not bad.
But when presented with this flush fitting double stacked magazine,
well, the Spanish adopted it and this was obviously the clearly better solution.
There are a few differences in the tops of the receivers.
You can see that the ... full length handguard that wraps around the sight
was added on the 1892s. The handguard length changes slightly there.
And then also the ... bolt removal system is improved in the 1893.
In the 1892 it's actually part of the stripper clip guide.
In fact that pre-dates it, that goes back all the way to the very earliest rifles.
Here on this 1891 you can see that that is our ... bolt removal catch.
We have the same thing still here on the '92.
And then the 1893 introduces the system that they would use all the way through to the '98.
A guide rail was added into the receiver right there to help guide the bolt.
That's on the 1892, the 1891 that came before it of course does not have that.
And the 1893 here still does.
Aside from the magazine, the development we can see in the rifle was actually largely in the bolt.
So we have a '91, a '92 and a '93 here.
The '91 is clearly the very early style of Mauser. Note that it has an early, very small, little fixed extractor there.
Probably the most significant improvement of the 1892 was the switch to this long rotary extractor.
This would prevent double feeds, and the biggest hazard there was the potential of having...
If you had one round in the chamber and the extractor slipped off,
and you then cycled the bolt and tried to jam a second round into the chamber,
well, if the point of that second round hit the primer of an unfired first round,
you would have a pretty catastrophic out of battery detonation.
And this new extractor design prevented that from happening. And that was a big deal.
And this would become a significant part of the quality of the Mauser 98.
The 1893 bolt here maintains that, and they all would. However note that the 1893 has a flat bottom to the bolt.
That was introduced with the double stack magazine, because now,
instead of cartridges simply being presented in a single line, right here,
where the round bottom of the bolt will pick up the rim of each cartridge and feed it,
with the double stack system there were now two lines of cartridges coming up,
and so they needed, or thought they needed, the extra material at the corners
to pick up the rim alternating from left to right.
The other major improvement to the 1892 was the addition of a central position for the safety
for disassembly of the bolt. On the 1891 patterns we don't have that.
We simply have the fire position, and the safe position.
And disassembly is a bit more complicated or more tricky on the bolt.
It was with the 1892 pattern that this central position was introduced, you could then remove the bolt.
These are, by the way, all cock on close actions at this point.
Once the bolt is out in the disassembly position, you can simply unscrew the back
of the bolt shroud there, and remove your firing pin from the bolt body. So,
a very nice simplified system. This is the sort of thing that you look at a Mauser 98 and you think,
"Ah, that's super well thought out and easy". But it didn't start that way.
That took some iteration and some refinement to figure out.
Interestingly, the US government actually also tested the 1892 Mauser, among
several other Mauser designs, in right about 1892, and actually rejected it.
This was the trial that resulted in the adoption of the Krag–Jørgensen rifle by the US military,
and one might wonder why on earth would they adopt the Krag instead of a Mauser.
Like the Mauser is definitely the better rifle, if for no other reason we can see that from
the fact that the US, 10 years later, would adopt basically a Mauser in the form of the 1903 Springfield.
Well, at that time the US military was using the .30-40 cartridge, which was a rimmed cartridge,
and the Krag is in fact better at dealing with a rimmed cartridge than Mauser was.
The rimmed cartridge was obsolete, there was no reason that Mauser should go out of their way
to make a system that would work really well with an obsolete rimmed cartridge.
In addition the Krag had a decently good system set up for single fire,
where you could lock off the magazine and single load the rifle until you wanted to engage the magazine.
That was kind of also an obsolete concept by this point. That's another thing like
the rimmed cartridge, where why would Mauser put that in? Like really there aren't a whole lot
of people who are seriously interested in that any more.
It's kind of sort of like, "You don't know what you want, we know what you want,
we'll build the rifle that is what you actually want."
But the US Ordnance Department was stubborn enough that they said, "No no, we
actually want a rimmed cartridge and a magazine cut-off. So we'll take the Krag–Jørgensen,
thank you very much." And they did, and it lasted about 10 years.
At any rate, that's not quite germane to this particular 1892 Mauser, but it is an interesting side note.
If you would like to have this one, if you would like to add it to your own collection,
have a cool intermediate example, it is of course coming up for sale
here at the Rock Island Auction Company. Check out their catalogue,
you can see their pictures, and description, and price estimate
and you can actually bid for it on-line if you are so inclined.
as well as taking a look at everything else that they have in the upcoming sale.
Thanks for watching.