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
that they are going to be selling in their upcoming
May of 2019 Premier auction.
This is a German trials rifle from about 1897, this is actually a Model of 1896 Schlegemilch
bolt-action trials rifle. And so this dates to that period between 1896 and 1898
when the German military was doing some testing to determine what rifle they would adopt to replace the Gewehr 88.
The Gewehr 88 had been a relatively unsuccessful rifle in their trials,
it had some problems with double feeds in particular,
and it was a rifle designed by committee, and kind of just not great overall.
And the German government was ready to replace it with something else.
They would ultimately, of course, choose the Mauser Model 98, but this is one of the chief competitors.
So this was designed by Louis Schlegemilch, who was
at the time chief engineer, I believe, at the Spandau factory.
And he thought he could ... (he had actually been one of the prime contributors to the Gewehr 88),
and he thought he could come up with something a lot better,
and was hoping he could win the new German trials with this guy.
So, they only made a handful of these, a dozen, two dozen,
20, two dozen, something in that range. And they were ultimately unsuccessful,
but there are a lot of cool features to this rifle. So let's dig right into it.
So the most obvious first thing that you see when you take a look at this rifle is
this very distinctive cover over all of the working bits.
Normally you'd expect to see the top of the bolt, not so much here.
This seems like it would have been perhaps a really good idea
in the trenches in World War One, but of course it didn't get that far.
It is a cock on open gun, (so there we have it cocked).
And this is really ... sort of integral to the bolt. And you can see that when we open this back up
we have only sort of half a receiver with a charger bridge,
kind of added on as an afterthought. A little bit Enfield-like there.
Now I can pull out the bolt by pulling down the trigger and
pulling this off the back. This is a two lug bolt right there,
has a little short extractor right in there.
And then we can actually rotate this like so
(and I suspect this is part of the procedure for removing the bolt body from the bolt shroud,
but not really sure exactly how that works).
The safety is just like a Mauser safety in that it is in the fire position here,
and you rotate it 180 degrees over for the safe position. It is a striker fired gun.
In that way pretty standard, but that whole big bolt shroud is a cool distinctive feature.
Looking at the receiver here you have, of course, your sear right there. And then this acts as your bolt stop,
so when you pull this all the way down, it allows you to pull the bolt out the back.
There's the ejector, spring loaded so that it can go down under the bolt when you close the bolt.
Charger bridge. And then the bolt, of course, locks into the end of the barrel extension there.
We have a five round magazine here. This was actually chambered for the 6x58mm cartridge,
as were the early Mausers.
This was a cartridge that the German military was looking at fairly seriously during these trials.
They would end up going to 8mm, but only after this element of the testing was done.
These rifles also have basically the same sort of Lange Visier sight that would show up on the adopted Mauser.
In this case, it goes down to 300 metres, which is actually...
Unlike the 400 metre zero on the 8mm guns that were adopted,
300 metres on a 6mm rifle probably makes a lot of sense. That's probably basically point-blank range.
This thing would have had pretty high velocity and not a whole lot of drop. So a 300 metre
default zero kind of makes sense.
We have a cool handguard here, and you can't even see why yet, but
this is one of the most unusual and interesting elements of the rifle. We'll get to that in just a moment.
Out at the front end, basic barleycorn sight, bayonet lug, hook for a standard sort of parade sling.
And then we can take some of this apart, so we'll depress that, take the band off,
Take this one off as well.
I should note that this is entirely devoid of markings except for serial number 7, which we have here on the barrel.
We'll see it on several of the internal parts, as well as the bolt head there, and the safety flag.
The next really cool disassembly element is the trigger group and magazine floorplate.
And we have this little lever right here, slide that back, and this just pops right off the rifle.
It's got a toe on the front and it has this little stud on the back,
which ... locks in with that little lever.
So instead of all the ... screws that are usually required for something like this, this one is nice and easy.
Our ejector is of course right here on the back of magazine box.
Now we can lift the action out of the stock.
And now you can see what's so cool about the handguard.
In order to avoid the problem of it basically cracking, or being lifted up,
you know stuff getting under the handguard where it meets the stock.
In this case this is a wrap around wooden handguard. A slot there allows it to clear the front sight, and
we have a recess in the stock here for this to fit in.
So it's got to be super nerdy to be excited about a rifle handguard, but
that is as cool as any other part of this rifle to me.
That is pretty much... As far as I've been able to see, that is a unique idea. [Except the Mondragon 1894]
And the unique ideas don't end there. Note right here, instead of the barrel being threaded into the receiver,
it's actually dovetailed in. This works because the bolt actually locks into the end of the barrel here, so
somewhat like an AR-15 ... lower receiver isn't really a pressure bearing part when you fire,
... Neither is the Schlegemilch receiver.
Looking a little farther back,
you can see how the stripper clip bridge is a separate part that is dropped onto the assembly,
and then held in place by one of our sear pins there.
We have another serial number 7,
and a bunch of them here. Every little part is serialised.
The trigger is a pretty standard sort of thing.
So in theory, this probably would have been a pretty cost-effective receiver to make.
Certainly compared to a lot of the other bolt-action receiver designs out there.
It does have a fair number of machining operations to it, as they all do, but
the initial block of material that you would use here would have a lot less waste
than a receiver made out of three or four times as much material to get, you know,
the full height of the barrel, as most of them did.
This also avoids any of the issues of having to
broach out recesses for the locking lugs to travel inside the receiver.
Pretty clever.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate any specific trials reports on the Schlegemilch,
so I can't tell you exactly why it didn't do better against the Mauser.
I think there are a lot of interesting and clever manufacturing elements in here.
The takedown is really quite handy.
However, it may well have been that the German army was a bit skittish of
Schlegemilch after his contributions to the Gewehr 88
that they were trying to replace (the whole reason this rifle existed in the first place).
This also may not have done enough to fix the double feed issues that the Gewehr 88 had suffered.
So while it seems like a really slick and handy rifle, it's hard to say that they
... that they made the wrong decision by going with the Mauser,
considering how magnificently successful the Mauser 98 has been.
After this rifle lost out to Mauser in the German trials
they never did attempt to sell it commercially.
A small number of them were actually made for German aristocracy as hunting rifles,
but that's as far as it went. And this particular one is one of the German trials rifles.
So a really cool interesting look at another
honestly a really pretty well designed, svelte, nice rifle that just didn't quite have
... all the capacity, all the capabilities, all the characteristics necessary to beat out the Mauser 98,
which is probably, arguably, the best bolt-action rifle ever designed and put into service.
So you certainly don't see these come up very often, it's very cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
It is, of course, coming up for sale at Rock Island.
So if you're interested in having one of these trials rifles yourself, take a look at their catalogue.
That'll show you the pictures and details on this rifle, and everything else that they have coming up.
Thanks for watching.