Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com, I'm Ian McCollum.
And I'm here today at Inter Ordnance, IO Inc, down in Florida
taking a look at a substantially large batch
of guns that they have recently brought in from Africa.
There's a bunch of weird cool stuff in here, and this
is a very unusual version of a German Gewehr 88 Commission Rifle
that I wanted to take a look at and show to you because
it's a very non-standard pattern. Now I suspect that
this is not factory but rather was rather well converted
by somebody, probably in Ethiopia.
So let's just take a closer look at it.
So what makes this particularly interesting is the fact that it is a carbine length
Gewehr 88 or Karabiner 88, but it has the standard rifle pattern nose cap with the side mounted bayonet lug,
front sight like this. The actual official carbines
had a stock coming all the way to the end of the barrel jacket, and a flush engineer-style nosecap on there.
You see the problem with this as a carbine is that if you go to put this into a typical
carbine scabbard, you're gonna catch on the front sight, you're gonna catch on the bayonet lug.
For a proper mounted carbine you really need something that is smooth and easy to drop into a scabbard.
Now if we look at the markings here. On the side of the receiver we have Gewehr 88,
which strongly suggests that this was originally a full-length rifle.
It's in fairly rough condition, but we can still read the serial number there, 3837,
and the bolt remarkably, very remarkably, is actually still matched.
But the bolt handle has been slightly turned down. The standard original carbines had a spoon style bolt handle
that came straight down on the side. Where the original rifles had this pattern but straight.
So I think whoever rather skillfully cut down the front end of the gun also gave the bolt handle a slight bend.
The gun was originally made at the Danzig Arsenal in 1894.
And then we have a couple of ... Imperial German proofs there.
And we have some Amharic writing here on the receiver, and I'm not entirely sure what exactly that translates to.
Hopefully I can find out. Perhaps one of you guys can read Amharic and can tell me down in the comments what that means.
The rear end is a pretty standard Gewehr 88.
It's got a sling swivel here on the bottom instead of a slot through like the carbines did.
Curiously, the rear sight is missing. You can see the spot here where it was originally soldered in place and it's gone.
Maybe it just fell off, maybe it was banged off. Obviously this rifle has been through a lot,
it's in pretty rough condition, or maybe it was left off for some reason.
Maybe this was someone's kind of point-and-shoot spray-and-pray sort of mounted carbine
that they ... decided they just did not need that extra complexity of a rear sight.
This was in German service at one point, because we have a unit marking on the barrel band there.
And then as I mentioned at the beginning, it has a standard sort of rifle pattern front end,
complete with a nosecap with the standard side-mounted bayonet lug.
I wish I knew more about the specific history of this particular one.
You know, who cut this down and under what circumstances, and why didn't they put a rear sight back on it?
Unfortunately, that sort of thing is all lost to the sands of time, so to speak,
leaving us only with the physical carbine or rifle itself.
So like I said, this is one of the very cool, unusual and interesting guns that came out of this
large batch from Africa that Inter Ordnance brought in.
So the the cool stuff like this, the kind of cream of the crop, they're going to be selling directly through their own website.
I can't link you directly to it because of YouTube's rules, but it's [Royal Tiger Imports].
Shouldn't be very hard for you to go ahead and find them on your own,
and check out all the very cool stuff that they have up for sale.
Thanks for watching.
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