Oh my goodness, it's a German ACOG!
Well, not really.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company, where we're taking a look at this,
looks like, but isn't a German World War One ACOG.
This is a Carl Zeiss two and a half power [2.5x] Glasvisier 16.
And this is one of the most interesting, most unusual,
German sniper optics used during World War One.
This is distinct (obviously, distinct) from the standard sort of
sniper scopes that were used on Mausers during World War One.
Germany, of course, had a pretty robust sniper program
during that war, and almost all of what they used were of ...
were really a variety, an array of pretty typical three and four
power telescopic sights that mounted right over the action.
There was some difference between, say, the Prussians and the
Bavarians over whether it was better to have the scope mounted
centrally on the bore, or offset it to the side
to allow for stripper clip loading.
But all that aside, that's like the normal sniper stuff,
what we have here today is really the unusual one.
And that is because this was designed not to be a permanent
converted sniper rifle, but rather to have an optical setup, that
could be basically just clipped onto any rifle and taken out
in the field with minimal extra training or problems.
Now it doesn't appear to have actually really worked out that well, but we'll get to that in a minute.
First, let's take a look at how this actually works because you'll often find pictures of these,
but nobody really talks about what is inside there. Is this actually some time-travelling ACOG?
So this thing is called a bifocal scope (or a bifocal optic), there's good reason for it.
But, in order to actually show you much, well, it's hard to do with the thing attached to the rifle.
Handily, this is a quick-detach sort of optic. So, let me show you first how this attaches,
then we'll pull it off and we can easily take a look at the insides.
We have two little spring-mounted plates right here,
that snap into (as you can see, these two spring out like that) ...
those snap into these two little recesses on the sides of the rear sight on the Mauser.
Squeeze that together, pop it off and ... boom ... it's off.
Now we can take a look at this thing from the front,
and really show you what's actually going on there.
So, what you see there is a line in the glass - and that's not a crack,
that's ... the 'bifocal' part of the bifocal description of this optic.
You have a 2.5x magnifying lens in the bottom and just a normal lens up top.
This is actually, as best I can tell, the exact same system
that is used for the SeeAll sight, which is a neat little sort of
unusual sight that's still available today,
and they're under a hundred bucks today,
and they use this exact same mechanism.
So, you've got a little magnified bit at the bottom,
you're actually going to look through it from here ... A little protective eye cup
which really isn't necessary because ... this is a long eye relief scope,
in fact, it's a no eye relief scope.You can use this from any distance
because the straight-through image of your sight isn't actually magnified.
All you're magnifying on this, is actually your front sight.
So as used by the Germans this scope, this system, included a clip-on front sight here.
You can see on the side there it's also got this Carl Zeiss, Jena mark.
And then that really big white triangle is your replacement front sight.
And that's what you're actually looking at through
... the bifocal magnification of the scope.
And you're going to line that up just like you would line up a SeeAll sight today.
So, the line here just above the point of the front sight,
that line is pretty clearly visible, and that's the top of the bifocal
magnifying lens. What you want to do is line up your target
so it's right at the tip of that triangle
(which is magnified two-and-a-half times).
If you go too low - like this - the tip of the triangle disappears, that's no good.
And if you go too high - like this - now your target's going to be above the triangle.
Basically, what you want to do is line up the top of the bifocal lens with the point of the triangle and your target, like that.
I apologise for the quality of that footage.
Unfortunately, while this is mechanically intact, the
lenses themselves are awfully heavily fogged up,
and so I'm happy we're able to get any sort of usable, visible, sight picture through it.
But, if you set this up and try and actually take a sight picture on
the rifle it's pretty difficult to do, just because of all the haze.
I can also show you the markings there, Carl Zeiss, Jena.
This one's numbered 4807, that's a pretty high serial number for
this thing. If that implies that there were actually at least
5000 of these made, I don't know, to be honest.
They do have it marked two and a half power.
And then there's a little bit of a close-up of the
mounting system, which is pretty clever.
The idea was you could just drop this onto any rear sight.
Now, that does require the rear sights to be ...
... made to a relatively high level of accuracy.
That was an issue that Germany would run into with the ZF-41.
When they were manufacturing rear sight blocks on Kar 98ks,
no one anticipated that the sides of the rear sight block
would become, you know, optics mounting points
and would have to be toleranced for that.
Because normally just like the side here, it doesn't matter
if that's, you know, in or out of spec by a fairly wide margin,
because it doesn't do anything, as long as this can slide along it easily.
So, what they actually did for a period in the manufacture
of these rear sights ... you'll see them marked GLV.
... Basically it's a mark noting that this rear sight was
made to a higher standard, a higher tolerance,
and is acceptable for attaching one of these 2.5x scopes to.
So, if you start looking at Mauser 98s, especially 1916 and 1917
production ones, you will ... at some point, you'll start
noticing some of those specially made high tolerance rear sights.
I should also point out there are two little flat springs, right there, that allow this to kind of wiggle on its mount.
And that's going to allow...
the scope to kind of find its own...
resting point.
There we go. That's nice and tight down in there.
Snug on the other side as well.
And there is our Glasvisier 16 bifocal optic ready to go again.
Unfortunately, I don't have any good production numbers or timelines for these optics.
As far as I can tell that information is lost. None of the good reference books have it and, frankly,
you're lucky to find a reference book that even talks about this in any depth more than just having one snapshot of it.
So, I think we can pretty safely assume that it didn't work out as well as had been hoped,
just by the fact that these things are so incredibly rare today.
They're far rarer than standard pattern German sniper scopes. And you would think if this was something
that worked out well, they would have made more of them and more of them would have survived to this day.
But this is not the case.
I can also see, just from the mechanics, this kind of has a lot in common with some of the early British sniping
sight attempts. Things like the Galilean scopes, where they would put one lens on the rear sight
and one lens on the front sight and give you this, like ... really narrow field of view, but magnified, optical setup.
That's another really unusual and interesting World War One sniping system that just didn't work out well,
and didn't last very long. And I would lump this, the 2.5x Zeiss, in with that.
It remains, of course, a really cool piece of military history here because as I said, they're very rare to find,
especially ones that also have the appropriate front sight on there.
That thing, you know, it snaps on snaps off, it'd be pretty easy to lose and most of them are gone.
Usually when you see pictures of these rifles, they don't actually have that on there.
So, this is, of course, coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
So, if you've been really wanting one of these, perhaps if you're a collector of sniper rifle type systems,
well, take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com.
From my site (Forgotten Weapons) you can then click over to Rock Island's catalogue page on this rifle,
take a look at their pictures, their description, their price estimate, all that sort of good stuff.
Thanks for watching.