Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of
the guns from their upcoming June of 2016 Regional auction. And I wanted to take a look at this one today,
it is definitely not a forgotten weapon. This is a German Gewehr 98 Mauser,
the main rifle for the German military in World War One, and of course the mechanical base for the main rifle of the German army
in World War Two, and also the main rifle of a whole lot of other countries, for a whole bunch of decades.
The Mauser 98 is generally considered to be the best bolt-action rifle ever made.
It is certainly the most popular military bolt-action rifle ever made.
Adopted by scads of countries for many decades.
Now, the Germans ... Actually, a lot of these countries were adopting Mausers before the Model 98,
Models 96, 95, 93, 91, 1889.
Through this whole period Paul Mauser was improving
and tweaking the design, getting it a little bit better every single time.
And by the time the Germans were ready to get rid of their Gewehr 88s,
their commission rifle, which wasn't necessarily a totally bad rifle,
but it had some shortcomings, especially in, like, how it handled leaking gas if you ruptured a cartridge case.
The safety elements on the Gewehr 88 really were kind of lacking.
And that's one of the areas where the Gewehr 98, the Mauser, really shines.
It has a lot of built-in safety features.
And they are things that we don't really pay that much attention to today.
The idea of a ruptured cartridge case is a lot less likely today with modern manufacturing
and quality control on ammunition. A hundred years ago, or a hundred and thirty years ago,
this was a more significant issue. You'd have a lot more ruptured cases due to poor materials.
And what the gas did, how the action was able to handle and redirect that vented gas
was a lot more important at that point. So I'll leave some of the developmental history for another day.
We'll just stick with taking a closer look at this particular 98 today.
These were adopted by the German military in April of 1898.
And even after that adoption they did go through a couple changes, the most significant one being
this change from a round nose bullet to a pointed one, or a Spitzer as it was called.
This was something that virtually every military in the world did.
Everyone had started with round nose bullets, because that was kind of the default.
And it was discovered that a pointed bullet has much better aerodynamics, it drops less,
it travels farther. It's better in pretty much every way.
And this was generally development done in concert with also lightening the weight of the bullet.
Realising that a lighter bullet for the calibre will also have better ballistics, better aerodynamics,
and work better in general. So, for the Germans this was about 1903 that they changed
from the round nose to the pointed. Now, pretty much every country that did this also, ...
They usually made the cartridge hotter at the same time. So they made some changes to
the chambering to make sure that the hot new ammo couldn't be used in older guns
that may have been chambered for the old round nosed cartridge.
Now in the German case ... they actually changed the bore diameter.
They went from a round nosed .318 diameter bullet to a Spitzer .323 diameter bullet.
Now the exact details of what's safe and what's not with that conversion and especially in some
of the older guns like the Gewehr 88s, that's a really detailed topic that we'll get into another day.
Suffice to say, one of the problems, or one of the issues, that comes up
when you make a change like that, is you have to change your rear sights.
This applies to everybody. In the case of the German military they had this, it was called a ... Lange Visier,
what's in today's parlance commonly called a rollercoaster rear sight.
And with the original round nose ammo this went from 200 out to 2,000 metres.
And because the bullets got more aerodynamic when they changed to the Spitzer,
they discovered that this sight actually couldn't go any lower than 400 metres. Which OK, that's fine.
In the prelude to World War One, everyone thought that with these new high velocity,
long-range projectiles wars were going to be fought at much greater distances.
You know, we now have a cartridge that's effective out to 2,000 yards and, you know,
I can actually set this sight and legitimately aim at 2,000 yards.
Now whether I can see anything out there is a different issue, but
people thought this was actually how wars would be fought.
So the idea that our rear sight is now, you know, the minimum sight is now 400 metres.
Oh, OK, no big deal, that's where we're planning to be shooting at people anyway.
Well, turns out that's not the case. World War One breaks out and it's
discovered that, you know what? A lot of this shooting is done at very close range.
And a 400 metre zero on the rifle means that you are going to be shooting way high at close range.
If you aim at the centre of a man's body at 100 yards with a 400 metre zero,
the bullets gonna go, like, way over his head.
Which was a problem, and the Germans looked at a number of ways to fix this problem.
... There were some modified taller front sights that were tried.
They sometimes tried cutting out, or deepening, the notch on the back of the rear sight.
Ultimately, nothing really happened in World War One, they just stuck with this
change in zero, and you learned to aim really low with these guns.
Now after the war they would come up with a different pattern of rear sight that could go down lower.
And ... that evolved into the sight that we commonly see on the K98k,
the Karabiner 98, that was used in World War Two.
Anyway, this Lange Visier rear sight ... is one of the defining visual characteristics of the German
98 Mausers. These weren't really used by anybody else.
Now I should probably bring the camera back here so we can take a closer look
at some of these details. So let's go ahead and do that.
Alright, let's start at the front end here. We have a cleaning rod.
This is a half-length cleaning rod and it's threaded at the end,
so if you were going to use this for cleaning, you would ... find your buddy
and you'd both pull out the cleaning rods, thread them together, and then you'd have one
that's long enough to actually use. Now, the Germans also used pull-throughs,
that was probably the more common way to actually clean the guns.
This is our bayonet lug. The Mausers, the German Mausers, are a little bit unusual
in that the bayonets didn't use a muzzle ring. Instead they just had this very long engagement
surface back here that snapped into the back of the bayonet handle.
And that was deemed to be strong enough for mounting the bayonet.
I think the other idea was that would do less to deflect
your point of impact when you had the bayonet hanging on the end of the rifle.
Better to do it here than to actually have it hanging directly on the barrel.
Now this hook is a little bit unusual to a lot of people. That is actually a sling attachment point.
We have what appears to me to be an original World War One German sling on this rifle,
which is actually a fairly rare thing to find, fairly valuable piece. One thing you will notice on these rifles
is this wire hook, that loops or snaps into
that front sling hook like that. And that's an alternative way to hang the sling.
You would have it hooked here and in front of the trigger guard.
Now here's that rear sight. You obviously see where the rollercoaster name comes from.
And it's got a button right here that you can depress, and then the whole thing slides
forward and back. So this cam track in your base here determines how far up it's going to go.
The one advantage to this sight is that it is not dependent on a spring at all.
So there's no spring tension that you can lose in this sight,
and I suspect that was a big part of why it was adopted in the first place.
Unfortunately, the downside is this actually is not a particularly good rear sight picture.
These wings kind of get in the way.
Might not seem like they would, but they're a bit annoying to have in your field of view the whole time.
At any rate, we have a little pointer down here that tells us what range we're set at.
This one, of course, is the upgraded pattern,
this is for the Spitzer. So it starts at 400 metres and goes out to 2,000.
Now we have the receiver ring here, this will have our Imperial crest.
It'll have the manufacture location and the manufacture date. Now prior to World War One,
or rather prior to 1915, these were made by about a half-a-dozen different arsenals.
They were made by Amburg, Danzig DWM, Erfurt, Mauser and Spandau.
And this, of course, is a Spandau example. After World War One got going
they added a another handful of manufacturers to try and pick up on the increased demand of wartime use.
Those additional ones would be Saur, Schilling, Simson, Haenel, and Oberspree.
So, as for the dates, not all of these factories were making these guns continuously, so there's a whole
special set of date ranges that you can look for if you get really into these.
We'll ignore that for now. Simply, this being a pre-World War One gun is pretty cool,
I think. You'll also have the exact bore diameter, in this case 7.9,
stamped up on the barrel ring. That was something that was done ... when the barrels were made.
So you may notice that the barrel is nicely blued and the receiver has no finish on it at all.
That is actually correct.
When originally made as Gewehr 98s, a number of parts of these were left in the white
without finish, the receivers, the bolts, also the cleaning rods and the butt plates should not be blued.
However when the guns were re-arsenalled after the war, or sometimes by other countries,
those parts were generally blued. So if you find one with a finished receiver or a finished bolt,
that's a clue that it's been refurbished, or parts have been changed,
or it's in some way not directly World War One original.
Moving back to the bolt we have, well, the same thing. The bolt is in the white as it should be.
This one is a matching bolt. And we'll take the bolt apart in a minute
after we finish going through a bunch of these features. So
next up, our trigger guard. One of the interesting things about these
World War One German slings is that the rear of the sling actually comes with a
quick-detach swivel. You thought quick-detach slings were this modern fancy thing,
eh, no, the Germans had these over 100 years ago. Now there are two positions where this sling can be attached.
You've got the front of the trigger guard and you've got a rear sling attachment. If you're going to carry the rifle
you would put it back here. If you want to have the sling basically strapped up out of the way,
you would put the rear sling swivel here, and you would use this front
hook here to snap the front of the sling all the way up here out of the way.
Now looking at the very back on the butt-stock we have a disc back here.
That was a place where you could put a unit mark on the gun.
This would be abandoned at a later point, and actually replaced with
a reinforced hole in the stock that was used to aid in disassembly of the bolt.
So you'll normally see that, it's a bit unusual. And again, this is a sign of an early,
unmodified gun that it still has the stock disc. There are a couple of proof marks,
Imperial proof marks, in the stock. These are a bit worn but
not surprisingly, this rifle is over 110 years old.
We're going to see more of those proof marks here on the side of the receiver.
And that's a variety of things. That's a nitro proof, a final inspection proof, etc
Seeing a series of them like that is correct. And that's how the guns would have come.
On the opposite side of the receiver, I'm going to have an Imperial proof and a serial number.
Now this one's number is 4898 'd'.
There's a script alpha suffix after the serial number. The way that these were numbered,
every year they would start at 0001, and then run up to number 10,000
and then they'd restart at 0001 'a', and go to 10,000 'a', and so on and so forth.
So each batch is a group of 10,000 rifles.
So in 1905 production, because this is a 1905 gun, this would have been in the fourth batch.
So this would be number ... 44,898 rifle made by Spandau in 1905.
On the side rail of the receiver here we have the rifle model, in this case Gewehr 98.
If this were a carbine, you would expect it to say Kar 98, and then there are other
designations that were used later on in smaller numbers.
Alright, now a quick bit of disassembly on the bolt, obviously I have the bolt out here.
First thing we're gonna look at is, the bolt handle is straight, as it should be for a Gewehr 98.
These are all straight handled. Only if you had a carbine did you get a bent bolt handle.
These two holes are part of this on-going series of gas safety upgrades made by Mauser.
These give a vent location down and out of the way for gas that happens to come back
through the firing pin hole into the inside of the bolt. That way it doesn't get
channelled to the back of the bolt, and maybe come out in the shooter's eyes.
Now at the same time, we also have this round extended shield. So any gas that comes
back along the outside of the bolt will be deflected away from the shooters eyes by that.
One of the defining characteristics of the Model 98 Mauser is this third lug at the back.
It's not used in regular service, but it gives you a backup in case both of these
locking lugs shear off which, by the way, is a phenomenally unlikely thing to happen.
But if they do, you've got this third lug that will engage at that point,
and prevent the bolt from coming out of the gun.
Now in many cases a similar function is performed by the bolt handle itself,
but on the Model 98, Mauser specifically put in this third lug to do that.
The extractor on the 98 is quite the stout and impressive piece. And it does actually
slide back and forth, which allows it to do a couple things. It actually improves its performance at
extracting really tight cases, and at the same time
it allows it to snap over cartridges when single loaded.
So this is really an elaborately, well designed extractor.
They are renowned for being very strong and very durable and long-lasting.
And the extractor is one place that you can often get a lot of problems in a combat rifle,
and the Mauser 98 extractor is one of the best designs out there.
It is for good reason that the 98 was considered one of the best bolt-action rifles of the war. ...
It's not just that they were potentially quite accurate and they were, you know, had a good extraction.
It's also that when it comes to issues like only a military will see, like long-term field durability,
the Model 98 proved very, very successful.
These didn't have a lot of parts breakage. They ... didn't go down in the field.
They tended to just work and work and work, and when you're in World War One, that's really what you need.
Well, thanks for watching guys. I hope you've enjoyed the video
I know this isn't a forgotten weapon, but this is actually a really nice example of a World War One
pattern German Mauser 98, and those are getting harder and harder to find, so
I thought it'd be a good idea to take a close look at this one while we have the opportunity to do so.
Now maybe you'll already have one of these, maybe you have several,
but if you don't have one and you'd like to add one to your collection, of course
this one is coming up for sale. If you take a look in the description text below,
you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on this rifle.
You can take a look at their pictures, and if you decide you really need to have this ...
hanging on your own wall, or taken out to your own shooting range,
then place a bid right there on their website.
Thanks for watching.