Clips for firearms are generally divided into two main types: Mannlicher style and Mauser style.
Now for the purposes of today's video, we are ignoring
revolver moon and half-moon clips, we'll talk about these later.
And before we go further, I would like to point out that a magazine and a clip are different.
Historically the two terms have been interchanged quite a bit,
including by official and knowledgeable sources.
However, a magazine is defined as a loading device that actually has its own spring
built into it to push cartridges up into the path of the bolt for feeding.
So that's a magazine, we are also not talking about magazines today.
Clips are used to load cartridges into a magazine.
Now that could be a box magazine that you have an attachment and a little stripper clip,
and you load cartridges into this to make it simpler.
Or it could be something where the rifle, in this case, has a guide bridge built into it,
and you can put the clip on top of the rifle, and strip rounds into the rifle's internal magazine.
... The Mauser rifle is a stereotypical example.
As you can see from our two examples here,
clips do not have springs to push the cartridges around.
Now they may have small springs to put tension on the cartridges to hold them in place
as does the traditional typical Mauser clip. You can see the spring right there.
But there's nothing that will actually push a cartridge in this.
Now you can use a clip to either load the fixed magazine built into a firearm,
or as a tool to simply speed up the loading of a box magazine.
Usually through some sort of adapter that sits on top of the magazine.
Let's begin with Mannlicher-style clips.
These were invented first by Ferdinand Mannlicher in 1885 for his Model 1885 rifle.
Which, by the way, would eventually develop into the 1895 pattern,
and used a clip basically identical to this.
The concept Mannlicher had was to have a complete packet of cartridges,
and you will sometimes hear Mannlicher clips referred to as "packet loading", or "packet clips",
or of course "en bloc" clips is a term we often use for the M1 Garand.
And the idea was this entire thing goes into the fixed magazine of a rifle.
(Or potentially a pistol, typically rifles.)
Then there is a follower with its own spring that is pushing up from the bottom.
So the bolt will ... cycle the top cartridge into the chamber and fire it,
and then the spring built into the gun is going to push the rest of the cartridges up.
The next cartridge gets stripped off and fired.
Now we have three, two, one.
And when the final cartridge is pushed into the chamber
there is nothing holding the actual clip in place, and it falls out the bottom of the gun.
This style of clip was adapted into a wide variety of early military rifles.
We have it in the German Gewehr 88, we have it in the French Berthier,
we have it in the French self-loading RSC rifles,
the M91 pattern Carcano rifles.
As well as Mannlicher's own designs,
a variety of different styles of straight-pull and turn-bolt Mannlicher rifles.
And of course it continued to be used well into the Second World War,
with primarily the M1 Garand.
Notice that the M1 has a double-stack clip, this is relatively uncommon but certainly was done.
Typically they will hold 5 rounds, and typically they will be a single stack.
The Carcano of course holds 6, early Berthiers hold 3, there are exceptions to all of these.
But that is the Mannlicher clip.
Just a few years later in 1889, Mauser invented
what we typically call the stripper clip, or perhaps the charger clip.
This is a design where the clip itself is used simply to facilitate loading
the cartridges into the gun, and then it's discarded.
So where the Mannlicher clip actually resides within the firearm action until it's empty,
the Mauser-style clip never goes all the way into the gun.
And we see this on, of course, Mauser rifles starting with the Model of 1889.
We see it on Lee-Enfield rifles, which of course initially were designed without any sort of clip,
because the ... original Lee-Enfields just used a detachable magazine.
We'll see it on the Mosin-Nagant rifles.
And then of course the Mauser clip has remained quite common
... even to this day, where it's often used to load magazines.
So this is a clip that was designed for the SKS,
but it was then adapted to ... speed up the loading of AK magazines.
So you could use this clip with a little loading adapter
and use it to strip rounds into a box magazine, which would then be inserted into a rifle.
There are pros and cons to both the Mauser and Mannlicher styles of clips.
The Mauser-style clips of course are certainly cheaper, and easier, and faster to manufacture.
Some of them are easy to use.
Swedish Mauser clips, for example, are typically very smooth and easy to use.
Mosin-Nagant clips have a well-earned reputation for being quite difficult to use: slow, and finicky.
By the way, you will typically see rimmed cartridges used with clips
that have a greater amount of support for the cartridge.
As in .303 British, or 7.62x54 rimmed.
These are typically higher friction devices and a little bit harder to use.
Rimless cartridges can use a simpler, lower-profile clip that is typically easier to use.
Some people prefer Mannlicher clips as being easier to use because
there is no need to actually transfer cartridges from the clip into a rifle
(or into a magazine), instead the entire packet goes into the gun.
However, this does mean that the clip itself has the feed lips for the system built into it.
If a clip is damaged you may get feed malfunctions as a result.
On the other hand clips are traditionally, in a military sense, single use and disposable.
And a damaged clip is simply discarded and replaced with a proper, usable one.
There are some oddball clips that we can take a look at as well.
Typically the most common capacity of a stripper or charger clip is 5 rounds.
A lot of more modern stripper clips tend to be 10 rounds
and are used to reload detachable box magazines.
However, there have been instances where larger clips were used.
This is a 20 round clip that was used to refill ... a fixed Italian machine gun magazine.
There are also some non-traditional construction techniques.
The Swiss used cardboard to make their clips,
and they also had them much more fully encompass the cartridges than most other country's designs.
This is still a Mauser-style charger clip though, it sits on the top of the gun.
You strip all the cartridges into the rifle's detachable box magazine, and then discard the clip.
There have also been some interesting more complicated designs,
like this Roth-Steyr 1907 clip, which includes its own thumb pressure device
for smoothly pushing the cartridges into the gun's magazine.
Clips are primarily designed for rifles, but there were a number of handguns,
particularly early handguns, that did use them as well. Both Mauser-style and Mannlicher-style.
I'm Ian McCollum for Forgotten Weapons,
and hopefully that has answered some of your questions about clips.