Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
they're going to be selling in their upcoming
May of 2019 Premier firearms auction.
Today we have a very cool Belgian trials rifle.
This is from the trials that resulted in the adoption of the Model 1889 Mauser,
one of the first of the truly modern Mausers that would ultimately lead to the Mauser model of 1898.
Now the Belgian trials are a really complicated affair, there were more than a dozen guns involved
in three or four separate rounds of testing. And what's particularly interesting about these trials
is that they occurred just after the ... invention of smokeless powder.
So the French developed and introduced the Lebel rifle in 1886,
which was the first military rifle to use the new smokeless powder. And it truly was
a fundamental change in military technology. And after that everyone else had to scramble to catch up.
And so these Belgian trials you will see a combination of some of the old black-powder
mechanisms, the styles of manufacture that had become common to deal with black powder cartridges.
And then you also see new technology creeping in that's better suited to smokeless powder cartridges.
So it's really an interesting trial. There were 3 or 4 different rounds of competition
leading up to about 1890, and there were slews of rifles, 6 or 7 or 8 rifles at each stage.
Now, if you want to know more about all the details of the Belgian trials, and the Mauser that they
ended up developing, I would recommend you check out C&Rsenal's video on the 1889 Belgian Mauser.
He does a great job of describing that whole process.
But there's one of the rifles, well, there are many of the rifles that he talks about only very briefly
because they showed up as competitors to the Mauser which ultimately won.
And there's very little documented about them, and one of those is this guy,
this is the Marga rifle developed by a Belgian army officer by the name of Uldarique Marga.
And this is one of those rifles that's a really good example of some of the new and some of the old.
And I think once you take a close look at it, you'll understand
pretty easily why it was defeated by the Mauser.
The Belgian trials at this point were based around an 8mm cartridge, and that's what this rifle is designed for.
It has what I believe is a 5 round box magazine here.
Bolt-action, of course, and we'll touch on the actual construction of the bolt in a moment.
However, it has rear locking lugs. The rear locking lugs are very much a black-powder style of manufacture,
and the rationale here was that you have fouling that tends to creep back into the action.
And if you have your locking lugs at the front they will tend to get fouled by that black-powder fouling.
If you put your locking lugs at the back, they're much more separated and much more likely to stay clean.
You'll see that on the Lee-Enfield rifles as well.
And you'll notice the Lebel, the first of the ... smokeless powder rifles,
has front locking lugs, and that's really not coincidental.
There are exceptions to this rule of course, but that's the general standard.
So there's our bolt, we have a follower down in here. This is a blind magazine,
so if you take out this screw you can pivot the cover down if you need to clean it out,
but that's just an administrative task. This would be loaded through the top.
One of the big advantages that the Mauser brought to this competition was his development of the stripper clip,
which is pretty ubiquitous today, but actually began with Paul Mauser ... in the time of these trials.
So there is a little bit of a cut in this rifle,
I don't know exactly what feeding device it was supposed to use.
That looks like it was there for an early sort of stripper clip style loading device,
but I don't know for sure. It's possible that that is an artifact of the machining processes used to manufacture
the receiver, you know, to get a nice square edge at the back here, but again, not 100% sure there.
What I can show you for sure is this lever,
this is the magazine cutoff. So note that the screw here is eccentric and
as we rotate the lever forward and back this plate moves up and down.
That plate is connected to this guy, which is your interrupter.
So there is the upward position, which is the magazine engaged. When you push the bolt forward at this point
it will pick up a cartridge off the top of the magazine. When we rotate the lever forward, we have now
disengaged the magazine by dropping that ... interrupter down.
That's going to push the top cartridge in the magazine down,
it's going to push it far enough that the bolt won't pick it up. So in this position you would drop a cartridge in,
chamber it, fire it, extract and eject it. And you simply continue firing single shots, firing and loading,
until such time as you need the magazine, when you could
flip that lever back, and then you have your 5 rounds in the magazine at the ready.
There is also this little knurled pad here which allows us to pull ... the interrupter in.
Could be handy for loading probably, [or unloading],
or clearing any sort of malfunctioning issue you might have with the interrupter.
Note that that can only be done when the magazine is engaged.
When you pull this down that lever is connected to
the interrupter and you can't move it once it's in the downward position there.
The safety on this thing is rather unusual, it is a latch here at the back of the bolt.
And in theory you look at it at first and you think, well,
OK, it flips over and that prevents you from lifting the bolt because that's blocking the bolt from moving.
However, this doesn't do anything to the trigger.
So in this position the gun can still fire, which isn't much of a safety,
and the reason for this is that the actual way you use the safety is to lift the bolt vertical,
and then you can engage the safety and it locks down into the back of the receiver.
And in this position you have now disengaged the trigger.
However in order to put the rifle back in firing position
you have to undo the safety and then close the bolt the rest of the way.
... I can easily see this being counted quickly and heavily against the rifle in trials. That's a very awkward style of safety.
The rear sight here is very much from the old-school black-powder style.
We have a ladder sight, you can flip it up.
For close range shooting, quote-unquote, you have four settings here on the side,
400 out to 700 metres. On an 8mm rifle like this with a muzzle velocity of 2,400 feet per second
(which it was by the way),
400 metre minimum zero is pretty darn long. You would have to hold rather low to make
any hits at a reasonable, you know, at 100 to 200 metres you'd be holding off a lot to get hits.
You can then lift this up and adjust this slider out to 1,900 metres
at the high end, with one more notch at the very top of the sight which I presume is 2,000 metres.
However, being of the old black-powder style, this slider is held on by tension only.
So it's really stiff right now, but you know that if this actually went into service in the field
these would loosen up and you would quickly be in a position where
you'd set your sight, fire, and the recoil would cause your sight to fall down, and that's not a good thing.
That's another element that certainly I'm sure counted against this rifle in trials.
Mauser came out with a much better, more positively engaged sight.
Pretty typical muzzle end here. This does have a Barleycorn pointed front sight, cleaning rod.
No apparent attachment for a bayonet lug. It may have been set up for a socket bayonet,
or simply no bayonet at all.
There are no names or manufacturer's marks on here.
We have a serial number repeated in a couple places and that is 213.
It's on the rear sight base there,
it's on the rear sight leaf there.
And it's on the butt plate.
The only other marks are some Belgian proofs on the receiver, the barrel, and the bolt.
Now speaking of the bolt we can take that out quite easily
(this by the way, is sticky just because of old grease in it),
to get the bolt out open it up, pull the trigger,
and then the bolt slides out the rear of the action.
You can see the little .... notches cut right there for the safety now that we have the bolt out,
and looking down inside the receiver, you can see the cuts for the locking lugs right there.
This has two sets of five locking lugs top and bottom.
Note that this has a relatively small little extractor, especially compared to the Mauser extractor.
That would have been an issue in the trials, I'm sure.
We do, by the way, also have one more 213 serial number on it.
Now this large, bulbous bolt handle will look familiar to some folks. This is basically taken
from the Beaumont rifle design, and the key point here is that this does not have a coil spring
to ... power the firing pin. It has actually a V-spring, and I can show you how that works.
I'm going to go ahead and decock it there, and then there is one screw that locks the whole thing together.
Go ahead and take that out.
So that's like the security screw, once it's out we can pop this
apart and take ... the back piece of the bolt handle off. And then
that, right there, is our firing pin spring, and we can also pull out
the firing pin. It's a very long firing pin.
So there's the bolt disassembled.
The idea here is that this spring is held inside the back of the bolt, like so.
This compresses it down, and you can see that goes in and then locks forward like that.
And then this long tail of the spring pushes on the firing pin, so when it's locked back
against the sear it's held like this, with this V-spring compressed.
And then when you release the sear that pushes the firing pin forward.
As I said, this was the system used on the Beaumont rifle.
It works. The problem is these springs tend to be less durable than coil springs,
also typically not quite as strong. It's a little trickier getting this to be a reliable
and long-term durable spring. And so that's why this system never really found
... any major use beyond the Beaumont, and it definitely would have been a design element
that would work against the Marga in the Belgian military trials.
Standing alone on its own merits, it's easy to look at this rifle and say, well you know, it's not that bad.
It's got a magazine, it's got a magazine cutoff which would have been popular.
It is a repeating bolt-action rifle, probably pretty reliable at it.
However, when you put this in context of the competition it was facing,
primarily rifles from Mauser and Mannlicher, then you realise that well, you know what?
There's no good reason the Belgians should have adopted this, or given it more consideration than they did.
You know, it has an out-of-date firing pin spring system, it has an out-of-date rear locking system,
it has out-of-date sights. And while it may be fine, it was certainly not the best, and the trials reflected that.
Marga himself would go on to better success and better recognition
developing a number of things related to ammunition.
Some blank firing rounds and some other things.
So his rifle here never did go into commercial production,
or see any other further production after it failed in the Belgian military trials.
I don't know exactly how many of these were made. This one, as you saw, has that single serial number 213,
but that doesn't necessarily tell us a whole lot.
It is however an extremely rare rifle.
It's very cool to get a chance to take a look at trials rifles like this.
I do also have a video on the Liegeoise,
if you're interested in this subject, check that one out as well.
And of course if you're interested in owning this one yourself, it is of course coming up for sale
here at Rock Island. If you take a look over at their catalogue
you can see their pictures and description of this rifle,
bid for it online if you would like, and also take a look at everything else that they have coming up.
Thanks for watching.