Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
Today, we have an extremely rare opportunity
to take a look at a really cool and very rare early automatic pistol.
This is a Model 1898 Schwarzlose Standard Model.
... Only between 500 and 1,000 of these were manufactured.
They were first patented in 1896 by Andreas Schwarzlose.
(I'm going to try and pronounce this correctly this time.)
... Well, they came on the market in 1898,
and they were only being manufactured until about 1905.
And like I said, only 500 to 1,000 ever got manufactured.
Why so few, I really don't know and I've been trying to figure it out.
The only answer I can come up with so far is cost: they must have been expensive to buy.
Because in almost every way these are, frankly, close to competitive with modern pistols.
They are far better guns than say a Broomhandle Mauser or a Borchardt,
or many of the other early prototype semi-autos that existed before 1900.
This is chambered in 7.63mm Mauser, which means we can still shoot it today
because we can get this factory ammunition fairly easily.
It has ... actually very well set up controls.
We have a safety lever on this side in the front, up is safe.
If you're right handed this drops right under your thumb, easy to disengage.
And we have a manual bolt hold-open on the back, which also acts as a ... bolt drop.
So you can lock the bolt open, unload the magazine, reload it, put a new magazine in,
drop the bolt stop. The bolt drops nicely into place.
It's a short recoil gun (which is empty),
it's a short recoil gun, so when you fire the barrel and the bolt are locked together
and reciprocate back about half an inch, a little more than half an inch.
At that point the bolt unlocks.
And the bolt goes the rest of the way back, ejecting the empty case.
And then coming forward under spring pressure to load a new case.
It has a four lug rotating bolt to lock, which is a remarkably modern idea.
And one of the other really cool things about this design is that it
only really has one significant spring, which does about four different roles.
The main spring back here acts as the main recoil spring. It acts as the striker spring.
It acts as the trigger spring, and it also acts as the ejector spring.
Really a fantastically clever design by Schwarzlose.
The magazine holds 7 rounds.
One thing I've read, but I have not been able to confirm at all,
is that the German Army didn't even look at these closely because they only held 7 rounds.
And at the time the Germans had doctrinally decided
that they only wanted to look at pistols that held 8 or more.
I can't confirm that, but I've read that. That might explain
some of why this pistol didn't get a little more acceptance.
So, the one potential flaw in the design is that there's a bolt on the back,
we'll see it when we take the gun apart in just a minute.
And that's what holds everything from coming off the back of the gun when you fire.
So if the pin holding this in place shears, or if this piece cracks and breaks,
you do have the potential of the bolt coming out the back of the gun
and hitting the shooter in the face.
Now a lot of people are going to say obviously that's a huge, significant flaw.
On the other hand, consider that the first four or five models of Brownings,
what became the 1911, also had a very similar flaw to them.
So I have permission to shoot this one today
with the understanding that I am of sound mind and body, and that I have inspected this myself.
I'm confident that this one is in excellent working order.
And should it actually come back and hit me in the face,
you'll get some very interesting footage, and I promise not to sue the owner.
So let's go ahead and load it up, and take a couple of shots.
So what I really like about this gun, a number of things.
Aside from the modernity, the very simple and elegant design to it.
The controls work, but the grip just fits my hand fantastically well.
And the sights come right up into alignment when I bring the gun up to eye level.
Which is something that a lot of modern pistols don't pull off well,
but 1898, Schwarzlose had this down.
It's a remarkably mild pistol compared to a lot.
Broomhandle Mausers, for example, have a very high bore axis,
and they tend to have a lot of muzzle flip to them.
This is a very comfortable gun to shoot.
I'm going to go ahead and reload the mag, and put a couple more through it.
You'll notice I did have a malfunction in there,
the occasional double feed in this particular one.
I should point out this particular gun is serial number 1, the original example.
... What's interesting, apparently a small number were sold to the Boers in South Africa,
who were big fans of German automatic pistols.
By 1905 there was still a significant surplus of these pistols
that had been manufactured, but hadn't been sold to anybody.
And apparently what happened is they were actually sold in bulk,
basically wholesale to get rid of the stock, to Russian revolutionaries in 1905.
... Not the Communist revolution, but folks who were active during the Russo-Japanese War.
Well, the shipment got to Russia and it got inspected at the border,
and customs decided that sending 500 or 1,000 pistols to a bunch of
political adversaries wasn't a fantastic idea, so they confiscated the batch.
And apparently they all got issued to Russian police and border guards.
So the most common place you'll actually find these today is in Russia, oddly.
Let's put a couple more rounds through it.
You'll notice it locks open on an empty magazine just like a modern pistol.
It's a very controllable gun, there's not much flip to it, this is just a fantastic pistol.
I really wish I knew why these things didn't get more ... sales, more popularity, when they were new.
I also kind of wish someone would manufacture reproductions of them today,
because I'd love to have one of these myself.
The Schwarzlose is a reasonably simple pistol in construction,
it's a little bit complicated to disassemble though.
So let's go through exactly how we do this.
First off of course we're going to take out the magazine.
It's a really cool magazine actually.
... This magazine actually has a totally round normal coil spring as magazine spring.
Which is why it's got this big round area at the front.
It's just a regular cylindrical round spring in there.
Anyway.
The charging handles on this thing are designed not to be grabbed,
but to use two fingers to hook over like this, or like this, and you pull back.
And then this rear lever is our manual hold open.
Assuming I have the bolt all the way back.
So I lock that up, that locks the bolt open.
It does also lock open on an empty magazine,
and dropping that allows the bolt to close.
Our front lever is our safety.
So when it's down it's ready to fire, when it's up it's on safe.
You can see that the trigger doesn't operate.
This is also our disassembly lever.
So disassembly is the bit here that's a little bit tricky.
We need to make sure that the pistol is cocked, which it is.
And then the manual actually shows this, you hook one finger around the rear sight like this,
and you pull back about 15mm,
and then we can, when we get to the right position, pop that loose.
We can rotate this ...
(there we go) we can rotate this lever around to the front.
And then, like I said, this is the kind of tricky part,
once it's in the right position ...
it'll drop out, and the ... striker snaps down.
So now that we have this little guy out,
we can go ahead and take the whole slide assembly off, it just slides right off the frame.
We'll get to that in a moment, but first let's take a look at the frame itself here.
So we've got a nice set of rails that everything runs on.
This is actually our ... ejector.
So the bolt runs ... on top of this curved piece here.
When it goes back it pushes this guy up, which acts to kick the case out of the ejection port.
... This is also our magazine hold open,
so you'll see when I lift this lever up, this gets lifted up, that locks the bolt in place.
Our trigger is very simple, it's just an upward pushing cam there.
So that's pretty much it, the frame is pretty simple there.
We can actually pull out the [bolt hold open] quite easily,
these two bits just come right out.
So that's our hold open ... and that is our ejector.
Put these back in.
I just put this ... hole on the pin there.
And then these slide right in.
A little further in guys.
There we go.
Now one thing to be aware of is that one of the shortcomings of this design,
kind of like some of the early Colts in practical effect,
is that this loop is the only thing that holds the slide on when you fire.
So it's held in place by a cross pin here.
There it is on the other side.
If that pin shears, or if this piece shears right there,
this can snap off, and it'll send the slide flying back into the shooters face, not a good idea.
That's really just about the only problem mechanically and technically speaking on this gun.
So let's take a look at the slide, because that's where all the action is going on.
Alright, so here's our entire slide assembly.
Going to pull the recoil spring out.
Then we have a firing pin ... and extractor.
The firing pin is pretty simple, one solid piece.
It's got a track there which ... acts as a keyway in the back of the frame.
You can see there's that key there, so the firing pin can only sit in it the proper way.
So this is our extractor, the extractor claw itself is actually this little guy right up there.
And the way this works is that it simply (get the right side here)
drops through the firing pin like this.
And it's just mechanical pressure on the spring,
so the mainspring is actually also tensioning this extractor.
So a pretty simple system, and obviously extremely easy to replace.
We'll come back to that in a moment.
Now our slide and bolt.
These come apart, this is the front half.
This is a short recoil design, so the first bit of firing contracts this big hefty spring.
And this goes back about half an inch.
That is what absorbs a lot of the energy while pressure is still high in the barrel.
And you'll notice we have a four lug rotating bolt system at the front here.
So this is our actual bolt body.
... It's got the locking lugs at the front there.
There's a track for having access to the firing pin.
Grasping handles. Pretty simple. It's hollow inside.
So here's a neat safety feature. You can see there's this collar on the firing pin,
which sets how far the pin protrudes from the bolt face.
But it also has this raised section right here.
What that does is prevent the gun from firing out of battery.
So you can see right there the firing pin is protruding forward, so it's ready to fire.
If, however, the bolt is rotated (so let's see),
we know, because of this keyway, that the firing pin has to be facing this direction.
So if the bolt is not rotated into battery that little raised surface sits inside the bolt,
prevents the firing pin from surfacing, which prevents it from firing out of battery.
It can only protrude and fire, like this,
once the bolt has rotated enough that these locking lugs are fully locked.
So our lock up is simply like that, and then the bolt rotates.
So there's our lock up, and then the bolt rotates just slightly counter-clockwise to unlock.
So the whole thing travels together for about half an inch,
then a cam in the frame opens this up.
The front half, the barrel, stops. The bolt itself continues to go back under spring pressure,
ejects the cartridge and then comes forward, chambers a new cartridge.
And when it's all the way forward it rotates into battery.
So, you can see when I hold tension on the mainspring here ...
our extractor is under spring pressure.
So normally when this is in the gun, this surface is going to be
pushed up against the inside of the chamber,
and that's going to hold nice solid tension on the extractor on the case head.
Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I am absolutely thrilled to have been able to actually try shooting one of these things.
It always looked like a really good pistol, and you know what? It's every bit as good as it looks like.
Hopefully, maybe someone will decide to ... manufacture reproductions of these.
If not, thank you very much to Steve, a friend who let me shoot this very graciously.
And tune back into ForgottenWeapons.com for more early automatic pistols.