Krugwevaks, Krugweovats. Kragwevatc? Kragujevac.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today is the conclusion,
the finale, of our week-long "Adventures in Surplus!" series.
These were of course based on the four rifles that I picked up
as a single batch at the February Rock Island auction,
sporting and collectors aka regional sale.
And I figured you guys might be interested in taking a look at,
basically, four sort of at random guns of the surplus variety.
So this is a Yugoslav M48 Mauser. It is in
very nice condition, which is not uncommon for this pattern.
A lot of them came into the country unissued, or refurbished, or generally in really good condition.
And by the way, I'm going to point this out right at the beginning here,
this is one of those rifles that very commonly falls into the trap of,
"Ah, you know, it's Yugoslav, who cares about that? You know, they're cheap, they're all over the place.
Like, eh, I don't need ... I'll get one of those later, they're not that interesting to me."
And then they all sell out, they all dry up, and
five years later you go looking for one, and all of a sudden it's gone from being,
"Eh, it's Yugoslavia, who cares?" To, "Ooh, it's this really interesting east-west thing,
you know, middle ground in the Cold War and they did some really neat stuff.
And, oh, did you know the standard M48 was actually a relatively uncommon gun,
especially in brand-new, un-issued condition. And, oh, now it's $1,000."
This is an easy trap to fall into.
If you're interested in affordable surplus, look at the stuff that is currently available.
Because while it's currently available and selling from a bunch of distributors and retailers it's relatively inexpensive.
And once everyone buys them up, then the prices go up.
Anyway, let's get back to the M48 a little bit.
A brief history of this thing's development I would say would be,
this was produced at the arsenal in Kragujevac (hopefully I'm pronouncing that somewhere near correctly).
This would eventually become Zastava (or Zastava).
However, it was interesting in that it's like ... the one really big Yugoslav arsenal
that was not put to use by the Germans during World War Two.
They had some plans to do so, but they didn't really work out, and what they ended up doing was
just taking the best of the machine tools back to Germany to use in some of the German plants,
scrapping the rest, and not really doing anything with the factory.
It was still there at the end of the war, but it took Yugoslavia a couple years, until frankly about 1948,
to get the plant retooled and re-equipped and bring in new machines,
and get it back into a condition where it could actually produce something.
Now during that time, Yugoslavia after World War Two was in pretty serious need of military re-equipping.
What they had access to was a lot of German Mausers.
And so they spent a couple of years refurbishing and rebuilding and repairing a lot of old German Mausers.
... Well, a lot of all sorts of Mausers that they had on hand, 1924 pattern Mausers that they'd made themselves,
German ... Gewehr 98, German Kar98ks, you name it.
And there's this whole interesting smorgasbord of 24/47s and ... anyway.
Ultimately, they decided upon a single standardised design that they were going to make from scratch brand-new.
They were tired of dealing with rebuilding and repairing old production guns.
And that new design was the M48.
It took them a couple years to get it going, the first production was not actually until 1950.
And they would make a total of about 238,000 of these rifles.
And what's kind of interesting to me is that this is kind of like the original
pre-war version of the Kar98k. It's all milled, it's very nice, it's fancy parts.
And over the course of about 10 years the Yugoslavs would look at this and go,
"Well, you know, it's really kind of expensive. I wonder where we can simplify it,
save some money without really cutting into any of the practical handling."
And that led to the M48A and the M48B, with a bunch of stamped parts that end up looking kind of like
later-war German Kar98ks.
But by goodness, they started out trying to make it look really good, and really nice, and really fancy.
So let's take a little bit of a closer look at this one.
I'm not going to bother showing you the whole disassembly of the gun, it's the same as any other Mauser.
But if we take the stock off, we can find a relevant and interesting piece of information.
That's this number. This is the assembly number of the gun. And it's unrelated to the serial number, which is here.
Now the assembly number is going to be located on the receiver, and the barrel, and the bolt.
And on these two it's located under the wood line, so you have to take the rifle out of its stock to see this.
Now, assembly numbers have been used by a lot of rifle factories over time.
The idea is until the rifle is actually completed and accepted, it doesn't have a serial number.
You're just putting them together in batches and using these numbers. ...
basically you fit the gun, and then you take it all apart, or take apart the major components,
and send them off for finishing processes like bluing.
And then these numbers allow you to reassemble the right barrel with the right receiver,
so that your headspace remains the same.
Now what this tells us is whether or not the gun has its original bolt in it.
So on the bolt here at the top, where it's visible all the time, is our serial number and that matches the receiver.
However, if the bolt were replaced as part of a factory overhaul, it would be renumbered to match the receiver.
If we look on the underside of the bolt we'll find its assembly number.
And this would not be remarked if the gun were given a new bolt when it was refurbished.
So this is the same, 3295 (although it's a little difficult to read)
as the barrel and the receiver. Which tells us that this is the original bolt.
In addition, if this rifle had been factory or arsenal refurbished,
there would be a punch mark after that assembly number.
And there'd be a punch mark for every time it was refurbished.
Some of these M48s have been refurbished two, maybe even three times over the course of their life.
For example, if they were used for training and heavily worn.
So this particular example we can tell both is all original, it has all of its original parts, and has never been refurbished.
Which is pretty cool because it's in really nice condition.
From a practical perspective, the M48 is basically identical to the Kar98k.
It's the same length, the same basic system, same safety, same trigger, same bolt basically.
However, there are a few differences.
So, you may or may not be familiar with the concept of large ring versus small ring Mausers.
Basically the early patterns of Mauser rifle in the early 1890s, mid 1890s,
had one particular diameter of receiver. Important for fitting the barrel.
With the Model 98 Mauser that receiver diameter was increased. And that's where we have the large ring versus the small ring.
... The M48 is sort of an intermediate rifle.
The ... actual diameter of the receiver threading is the same as the standard large ring Mauser.
However, the length of the receiver is the same as the short ring.
So in terms of features Yugoslavia generally copied the Kar98k, but with a few little subtle differences.
So for example, the bolt handle is not quite as severely bent as the Kar98k.
They did not checker the bottom of the bolt handle, but they did cut it off flat.
They didn't bother to cut a recess in the stock here for the bolt handle, because they didn't fold it quite as sharply down.
The German Kar98ks will of course have a recess here.
The sling attachment is just a standard German style slot, with a buckle on one end of the sling.
So that it just goes through there and stays put. Makes for a very simple sling.
The butt plate is the cup style. So it protects the end of the buttstock fairly well.
It is smooth on the back here.
This particular rifle is serial number 38007 on the stock,
that number is matching on the bolt,
as well as the side of the receiver here, which is really cool.
This does have the prefix "T", and this brings up some interesting issues.
These rifles were only in production for three years, from 1950 until 1952.
After '52, they started making the M48A, so notice that the receiver here is marked M48, not "A".
It does have this cool Yugoslav crest with the five intermingled torches,
which I believe represent the five nationalities, or ethnicities, in Yugoslavia.
You would think that with a serial number like this it would be fairly simple
to date the exact year that any given rifle was made.
However, this system is not as simple as that, unfortunately.
They made these rifles in batches because of issues getting the plant up and running.
And the batches aren't of a specific uniform size. So they would make a bunch of ... parts,
and then stop and then assemble those parts, finish, test the guns.
And then they'd go back to the beginning and start a new batch.
And every time they started a new batch they switched batch letters.
And that's what this letter indicates, is what batch the gun is from.
The serial numbers are never more than five digits.
So we don't know exactly what order or how many were in any given batch.
This is a really complicated question that I don't frankly completely understand exactly how they were using these.
The upshot is the letter prefix here does not directly correspond
to any sort of system that would allow us to actually date these rifles.
So what I can tell you is if you have a standard M48, it was made between 1950 and 1952.
Here on the left side of the receiver we have a few more markings, kind of where you would expect them.
This is our manufacturer's mark. This is actually a code name.
They decided to give code names to the different production facilities in Yugoslavia at the time.
This translates into either Enterprise or Institute Number 44,
which was the code designation given to the factory that would later become known as Zastava.
Then we also have this marking over here.
And that is an abbreviation. If you translate that in English, it stands for Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia.
Which is the name of the country as used from 1945 until 1963.
The sights are just like Mauser Kar98k sights, we have a 2,000 metre rear tangent.
If I lift that up we have the range designations on the bottom as well,
so that if you're lying prone and you need to adjust your range,
you can lift this up and read them on the bottom there, without having to look up over the top of your rifle.
The handguard design they chose is a very nice full coverage style.
This will do a great job preventing you from getting burned by the barrel.
It is held on by, of course, the barrel band here, as well as a little spring steel clip
on the underside of the wood back there.
And there's a little screw here as well, so if all goes wrong, that screw is still going to
... hold the handguard in place until you take it out.
Our front barrel band is just a plain simple band there.
Where earlier versions of these rifles, earlier Yugoslav rifles, would have a variety of different sling attachments,
they just went with a single simple sidebar for the M48.
And then out at the front we've got pretty much again the same sort of stuff.
We've got a nice milled front band, bayonet lug, cleaning rod, a hood over a barleycorn (or triangular looking) front sight.
Like early Kar98k production these have a very nice milled trigger guard and floorplate.
Serial number is on the floor plate as well and matching.
Note that we've got the sort of very Germanic style of attachment screw.
This holds the trigger guard into the receiver, and then we have a locking screw so that this screw can't start to come loose.
That's done instead of thread tighteners, or peening screws, or any number of other potential solutions.
Now starting in 1953 they would look for ways to economise the rifle a bit.
The first one was to replace the floor plate with a stamped floor plate.
That was designated the M48A, and those rifles are actually marked M48A on their receivers.
They would eventually also go with some stamped parts for the nose cap and also the trigger guard.
That version was called the M48B. However, when they adopted those they didn't change the receiver markings.
So the A and the B are both marked "M48A" on the receiver.
And then there is one ... final version that was made for export, which is the M48BO.
Which translates into "not marked", so it doesn't have the receiver crests and all of the other markings on it.
Those BOs can be either M48s like this, or M48Bs with a bunch of extra stamped parts.
By 1967 total production of the M48 family, the regular ones, the As, the Bs etc.
had reached almost a million. They made 932,000 of these rifles.
238,000 of those being standard original M48s.
And they did actually look at doing a lighter, handier carbine version, which is really cool,
and I'd love to find one to film someday.
Instead, they ended up getting the technical data package for the SKS from the Soviet Union.
And so they went ahead and started producing what would become the M59,
and then 59/66 SKS rifles instead of continuing bolt action rifle production.
On the other rifles that we've looked at in this series there have been, I think at least, some neat
interesting things that we've been able to tell from the specific markings or condition or state of the gun.
This one's a little bit different in that, aside from the general history of the model,
there's not much that I can show you about this particular example.
And part of that comes from the fact that it is all matching, original configuration, never been refurbished.
So nothing was done to it, and often it's the things that were done to a rifle that give it a unique interesting character.
This one instead is ... representative of exactly how these guns came out of the factory.
So that's very interesting from a collector's perspective as well.
There are of course people who prefer one or the other, original condition versus
long service life that can be read in the characteristics of the gun.
Both totally valid.
And I think it's pretty cool that in this batch of four rifles that we looked at this week,
we have some good examples of both, as well as some middle ground.
So that has been the Yugoslav M48, or this particular Yugoslav M48.
I hope you guys enjoyed both this video and this entire series.
I am filming them all as one batch, so at this point if you didn't like them,
I've probably been reading about it for like four days straight now.
But let me know down in the comments, this is something that may come back again
if a bunch of you guys really like the idea of taking a look at some individual rifles
instead of going through the general history of particular models.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]