Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today, courtesy of Inter Ordnance
/ Royal Tiger Imports, we're taking a look at a
pretty darn scarce variation of
the Steyr-Mannlicher straight-pull rifle system.
This is a Model of 88/95, although to be clear
that's a current day collector designation,
not an official period designation.
So to go back a little bit, this rifle started off as a Model 1888.
Which was not quite the first of these that was adopted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
They began with the Model of 1886, in '86,
which fired a black powder 11mm cartridge.
Now it would only be a couple years before they decided to move from that
to a small-bore higher-velocity cartridge in 8mm.
Although it would still initially be a black powder cartridge,
and that was the Model 1888. That's what this gun is based on.
Once again, only a couple of years later, the cartridge would continue to develop,
and this would result in the 88/90 pattern.
And ultimately in 1895 the Austro-Hungarian Empire
adopted an entirely new pattern of straight-pull rifle.
It was still a straight pull, but it worked differently.
These '86, '88 and 1890 style rifles
have a single locking wedge at the back of the bolt as a locking device.
The Model ... 1890 carbines, 1895 rifles (they are the same mechanical system),
they would actually use a rotating bolt.
It was much stronger, it was much better suited to the modern
smokeless powder ammunition that they were using by that point.
And by the way the easiest way to differentiate between
those rotating bolt guns and these earlier wedge guns,
is that the wedge guns have a gap,
right here, between the trigger guard and the magazine.
Where the 1895s and 1890 carbines do not.
So, skip forward to World War One.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire has pretty much fully equipped
all of its forces with these nice new M95 straight-pull rifles.
But World War One doesn't go very well for them.
They have substantial losses within just the first few months of the war,
and it becomes clear that they're going to need a lot more rifles.
So they start pulling stuff ... basically out of inventory, out of storage.
As far back as actually pulling out Werndl rifles, single-shot Werndls,
as well as all of these older straight-pull systems.
Now, by this point most of the 1886 guns were gone,
they'd been updated to 8mm configuration.
And that left a lot of 8mm guns that were functional,
but still set up for black powder ammunition.
And because the cartridge was black powder,
a lot of these guns had pretty rough bores at this point.
And so it was decided to re-barrel a bunch of them.
And if you're going to re-barrel them to use modern ammunition, which they did,
you might as well use the modern sight system as well.
And that is the core of the 88/95 pattern. Let me show you up close.
It's kind of nice that these rifles are really pretty easily distinguished,
considering some of the earlier patterns can be pretty tricky to tell apart.
So what you have here is the gap between the magazine and the trigger guard
which indicates an '86 or '88 pattern rifle,
plus the flat rear sight that indicates an 1895.
So you put those two together, that's your 88/95.
For comparison's sake here is an original 88/90
with its substantially different style of rear sight, and here's our 88/95.
And here's our 88/95 compared to a full-on 1895 pattern.
So you can see that the rear sights here are the exact same style.
It by the way looks like something's missing from these adjustment sliders,
they're not, you actually just push the two sides together.
(This one actually does it a little bit better.)
You push these together, and that allows the sight slider to move up and down.
Frankly, there's really not that much else to show you on one of these rifles,
because not that much else changed.
I will point out that original guns will have
their military acceptance dates stamped on the barrel here.
Because this has a replacement barrel it doesn't have that original stamp.
So you won't find those on 88/95s.
One additional modification that was made typically when the guns were re-barrelled
was the addition of a rear handguard.
Because the original '88 and '90 patterns of rifle did not have handguards back here,
but those handguards proved very helpful to have in actual trench warfare.
So some of the guns have them, there are lots of period pictures of troops
especially Bulgarian troops, who also got these rifles with rear handguards.
They typically go from the middle barrel band here back to the rear sight.
And they were typically clamped on by a spring clip.
So I suspect the two cutouts right here in the stock indicate that
this particular rifle did at one point have an upper handguard.
But they never did change the barrel bands on these to go around the outside of the handguard.
Instead the handguard clipped on and went over the barrel bands.
And that's a design that makes the handguard relatively easy to break or lose.
And that's the case on a lot of existing 88/95s.
In fact, for what it's worth, every single one of these that I saw that came out of Ethiopia,
not a one of them had the original handguard on there.
The external barrel diameter on the 88/95s didn't have to change,
because it was an 8mm barrel replacing another 8mm barrel.
So to keep things simple they kept the outside diameter the same,
which means the stocks and all of the original fittings could go right back on.
So the front sights are unchanged. The bayonet lug, the stacking rods, those are unchanged.
These use the same bayonets as the 88s and 88/90 patterns.
I will point out that this rifle still has its long-range volley front sight.
I believe these were usually ground off on the conversions because
the 95 style of rear sight does not have any sort of long-range volley element
to it the way that the original 88s did.
And last but not least, I will point out there's about half of this stamp remaining visible.
This was originally an AOI stamp on the buttstock of the rifle,
that indicates Italian East Africa.
Which explains how this rifle came into the possession of the Ethiopians.
I think the story of what happened to these rifles after World War One is
really as intricate and interesting as what happened to them during and before the war.
These are certainly guns that have been there and done that.
After the war of course Austria-Hungary lost,
and so it had to pay substantial reparations to the Entente powers.
And as with other losing nations, a lot of those reparations
were actually paid in the form of small arms, well, and heavy arms as well.
But rifles, machine guns, you name it,
the [Austro-Hungarians] gave a lot of that stuff to, in particular, Italy.
And so a lot of this would be kind of dispersed
throughout Europe and Africa, around the world.
The Italian Army obviously had its own equipment,
it had Carcanos, it had its own machine guns.
It was not looking to try and augment its own main military force
with a bunch of basically oddball Austro-Hungarian equipment.
However, oddball Austro-Hungarian equipment was perfectly suitable
for the Italian colonial forces in places like East Africa.
Hence the AOI Italian East Africa stamp on the buttstock of this rifle.
So a lot of these guns of all sorts of configurations and patterns
went to Italy, and thence to East Africa.
In fact this particular example came out of Ethiopia fairly recently
through Inter Ordnance / Royal Tiger.
In fact I was there when the crate with this particular one was opened.
It was, just to give you reference for quantities,
it was a crate of 200 Mannlichers.
And it included a roughly 50/50 split of M95 patterns and M88 ... and 90 patterns.
Approximately ... 90 to 95 of each of those,
and then about 5%, about a dozen, of these 88/95s were in that batch.
And ... without any specific data to go on, because I'm not aware of any
specific inventory lists of what went to Ethiopia,
or what went specifically to Italy after the end of the War.
I am assuming that that is basically the ratio of guns as they came to Ethiopia originally.
These were not very common, I don't have any exact numbers
on how many were converted, but it wasn't a ton.
Because, frankly, if an 88 had a good bore,
it was less likely to be re-barrelled with a new rear sight like this, so.
Anyway, I think it's a pretty cool story.
These ... were quite rare rifles in the United States,
or in the collector market worldwide really,
before the guns that came out of Ethiopia.
And just given the numbers that were in Ethiopia, they're still really quite rare guns today.
So, very happy to have the opportunity to show you guys an example like this one.
Thanks for watching.