Are you the Austrian army? Did you upgrade all of your nice
M95 long rifles in 8x50 to M95 Stützen carbines in 8x56
heavy hitting, hard recoiling, machine gun ammunition?
Now your troops have real trouble actually practicing, you have to hike way out into the countryside.
The recoil is horrendous, the noise is concussive,
and your troops just really can't get any good practice in?
Well, we have a solution.
No more of this sticky bolt, heavy kick, unpleasant recoil.
Ooh! You don't need that! What you need is the Erma EL-24 .22 calibre conversion kit.
It's a fantastic shooter, try yours today!
[Erma EL-24 .22 kit for Steyr M95 Carbine ]
Alright, this should be a much nicer shooting experience.
Peeuu! So it totally makes sense
why you would want something like this for training army recruits.
Because you can actually focus on marksmanship, and trigger press, and ...
And I don't think I'm going to be able to run a spinner with this, but it's still lots of fun to shoot.
So instead of having the deafening concussion of 8x56 out of a tiny carbine,
and the fairly brutal recoil of the same, you can actually just focus on shooting.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have an
Erma EL-24 .22 calibre
basically tube conversion system
for a Steyr M95 carbine.
Now this is on loan to me thanks to
Select Fire Weaponry in Wisconsin, big thanks to them.
And the reason that this was adopted by the Austrian army
actually doesn't have much to do with the recoil and the concussion
of shooting 8x56 out of a little carbine, but I'm sure the troops were happy about that.
But the actual motivation for adopting this thing was much more about cost.
So the ... rationale for having .22 calibre training rifles, ... there's several major elements to it.
One is cost of ammunition. It costs a lot less to get some .22 rimfire practice ammo
than it does to use full-power, full-size regular 8mm service ammunition.
There is also a matter of training ranges.
It's hard to practice with full-power ammunition
say in an army base or in a barracks that's in a city.
It's loud, it's annoying to the neighbours, it doesn't work out well.
You can't get a particularly long range if you're in a city, there just isn't that much space.
And so you have to go do your training on ranges
that are outside the city limits, out in the countryside.
And especially if you think back to the 1920s,
a lot of European armies were having financial issues.
These weren't necessarily well ... mechanised armies in the first place.
So if an Austrian company is going to go do some rifle training
on a full-size range outside of town, they're going to walk there.
And it's actually going to take quite a while, they're going to be marching quite a lot
to get to the range and to get back from the range.
That's going to limit the amount of time they have to actually practice.
Well, what if you could build a little short range in the barracks?
... With these things they even talk about using like the barracks hallways.
You set up proper safety rules and you can use the barracks hallway for your rifle training.
But you can only do that if you have a low-powered cartridge like .22 rimfire.
So the convenience of training, the ability to train in lots of places,
and the cost of training are all the main reasons
that the Austrian army was particularly interested in a system like this.
Now they had sort of a similar kind of thing for the ... the Wänzl and the Werndl rifles,
but they're more like dummy cartridges.
Full-size cartridges for those guns that you would retrofit a .22 into.
And you had to mess with each individual cartridge for firing, and it wasn't all that practical.
In 1925 a delegation of Austrian army officers
was invited up to Germany to take a look at Germany's small arms.
Which actually they probably weren't supposed to have very much of in 1925,
but that's beside the point.
They went to the Kummersdorf Training Range.
And there, among other things, these Austrians saw Erma's .22 calibre
tube conversion kit for the ... Mauser Gewehr 98s.
And they thought that was a really interesting system,
and they came back from this liaison visit really interested in it.
So they got a couple of samples from Erma in 1926.
They got a testing batch of them in 1928, they did some testing in the field with some troops,
determined that, "Yeah, these things are actually really effective and good."
Interestingly, they were testing them at 200 and 400 paces for accuracy at range.
Which is a little weird given that the whole point of this
was to shoot at very close range like 50 paces.
But whatever, they were doing their due diligence.
They decide these are really good, they decide to adopt them,
and they decide to introduce them to the army in the 1929-1930 fiscal year.
So they start purchasing them in small batches and there are a couple of orders of
100 and 200 ... items at a time through the early 1930s.
It's determined that they're going to issue 10 of these per infantry regiment,
they're going to issue 9 of them per artillery regiment.
And then there's some of the smaller organisations and units would get some as well.
But this was going to be the training system for the Austrian army.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at how this actually works, and what it is.
The idea here of course is that you can use your actual service rifle as your training rifle as well.
So the cost is reduced, the concussion is reduced,
the recoil is reduced, but the handling is essentially the same.
Now that's not quite 100% true for the case of the M95 rifles here.
This is a kit that was developed by Erma for the Mauser 98 system,
and so it is a turn-bolt rifle, it's not a straight pull like the M95 originally was.
In fact Erma made some versions of this for the Mausers that actually have 5 round magazines.
This one is just a very simple single-shot mechanism.
And what's interesting is it actually attaches
in a much more simple manner than the Mauser pattern ones do.
But this was designated by Erma as the Model EL-24,
and it should actually be marked as such up here, some are, this one is not.
I don't know if all of them aren't, or if this one has
just had the marking removed, or exactly what the deal is there.
But operation is very simple, you open the bolt, drop a cartridge in, close the bolt.
Note that we have a spring compressing here when I close the bolt.
We have a safety flag right there. If I flip that safety down,
it's not going to fire. ... This again is designed to mimic the Mauser 98 system.
The Austrians just adopted this as it existed.
They didn't try and get it redesigned to mimic all the functions of their M95s.
... But when I pull the trigger that striker drops.
(I'm going to keep a hand on it because it's a rim fire, and I don't want to damage it.)
And it fires, open the bolt, it'll eject the empty case,
cocks on closing like so, very simple.
Worth also pointing out that the only locking surface on here is
the stem of the bolt handle and that cutout.
It's a .22 rimfire, that is plenty strong enough for the purpose.
Now I can take the bolt out, and you'll notice
there's a little recess here that the bolt comes into when you cycle it.
If I push that forward to there, I can then pull the bolt down,
and pull it out of the gun.
And then I can do a little more disassembly on the bolt here,
I can actually just unscrew the front half.
So that's our firing pin right there and an extractor.
And the firing pin just sits inside this extension.
You can actually see it right down there at the back.
When ... you pull the trigger,
this is directly connected to this plunger up here, like so.
When it's cocked ... that sear right there, the standard firing sear in the M95
is holding this surface right here.
So when you pull the trigger, the sear drops, it releases this.
And that plunger snaps forward under spring pressure,
hits the firing pin inside there and detonates the cartridge, very simple.
Now to completely remove this from the rifle, we have a screw right here on the side.
... Now the Mauser version of this had a rather complicated system
where it actually had a rotating piece up here
that you would lock into the locking lugs of the Mauser receiver.
But that's not really necessary, this thing is it's ... own whole self-contained system.
So if I just pull this out.
This is actually its own receiver.
We've got a barrel here. It's a .22 so it doesn't have to be a particularly thick barrel.
This is actually sized specifically to fit inside the unmodified bore of the 8mm rifle barrel.
So if I put the bolt in and lock it in place
there's nothing when I fire that's going to cause this whole thing
to move, other than a little bit of recoil back.
But the bolt is locked into the receiver here,
this receiver is pinned to the barrel so none of this can move.
The only thing that you have to do is prevent
this from sliding inside the rifle, and that's what this little screw is for.
It threads down just like that, and it's got an un-threaded round [end], it's basically just a peg.
And it sits right in this cutout that is in every standard M95 rifle.
There's another standard M95. That notch there is actually for the safety, right there.
So when the bolt on an M95 is closed I can push that safety lever in,
and it locks down into ... that little notch in the receiver.
Well, if you've taken the bolt out anyway to put in a .22 conversion kit,
you can use that to hold the .22 kit in place.
I mentioned at the beginning that this should be marked EL-24
right up here on the top, I'm not sure why this one isn't.
We do have a couple of markings on the bolt assembly.
The safety is marked Erma, the bolt handle is marked Erma.
And we have a proof mark there, and we have a serial number.
That looks like 84 upside down there, but a serial number on the safety flag.
There was a resurgence in orders for these training kits in 1936.
At the very end of 1936 100 of them were ordered.
Then in the spring of 1937 somebody apparently found some leftover money
in the military budget and they ordered another 200, those would all get delivered.
And then a whopping 5 days before the Anschluss, before German troops occupied Austria,
another 500 of these things were ordered and that order never actually was fulfilled.
It's unclear to me exactly if it was cancelled or
if there was government pressure from the Germans put on Erma not to supply those,
or exactly what the deal was, but they weren't actually sent to Austria.
So in total something like 1,500 of these were ordered,
905 of them were actually delivered to the Austrians.
Now in 1930 the Austrian police also took a brief interest in this system.
The police at the time were using full-length M95 rifles,
where the army was using the shortened carbines, Stützen.
Stützen/carbine - carbine/Stützen that's a whole mess of designations for another video.
But the police got some test units that were sized for full-length M95 rifles,
they apparently did some testing, liked them, but never really followed up on it.
Never really ordered any, so of the 905 that were delivered in total,
something like 10 of them ... were full-length rifle kits for the police,
all of the rest were carbine-length [kits] for the army.
So they are actually pretty darn scarce today.
And it's really cool to get a chance to not just take a look at this one,
but have also been able to take it out to the range to do some shooting with.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks again to Select Fire Weaponry for giving me
access to this one on loan to film for you guys.
Thanks for watching.