[ Mauser Model 1912/14 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look at
the Mauser Model of 1912 and 1912/14 automatic pistols.
These are, well, they're quite scarce. There were
no more than about 200 of these guns made in total.
And I think they're a really cool example of something
that Mauser was trying to do, starting in about 1907.
And that is to create ... like a continuous family of pistols
that all had the same basic shape, and the same basic design,
but would scale in cartridge from .25 Automatic (or 6.35mm) at the bottom, up to 9mm at the top.
And the idea was we have one basic style of pistol,
and you've got army versions, and holster versions,
and pocket versions, and everything you could need.
In some ways this is kind of analogous to like what Colt did with
a .31 and a .36 and a .44 calibre revolver. Same sort of idea.
So, the first of these guns that was tried was actually the Model of 1909,
which was a straight blowback 9mm semi-auto.
And it proved fairly quickly unsuccessful.
The problem was the 9mm cartridge was just too strong for the system.
So Mauser kind of did a quick pivot, and they switched over to the small version,
and they went to the 1910 pattern in 6.35mm.
Now we'll talk about those guns in a different video,
but suffice to say that became quite popular and very successful.
.25 Automatic in a blowback worked just fine.
So, as the 1910 started to develop sales and the engineering process kind of ... finished up,
the R&D guys went back to working on 9mm.
And they wanted to come up with some way that they could get a 9mm
version of the same basic style of pistol to work.
And so that brings us to the Model of 1912.
Now at the very beginning they tried a couple of different options for delaying the blowback system.
The first one was a vertically ... pivoting wedge, actually they had two different versions
of vertically pivoting wedge, and they just didn't work very well.
Finally however by 1912, or by probably 1913 at this point,
they had come up with a mechanism that would work.
And that was basically taking the flapper locking system from the 06/08 pistol,
and converting it from flapper locking to flapper-delayed blowback.
Another analogous system here, kind of like we have roller delayed and roller locked,
well, we had flapper locked in the 06/08 and later the Mauser Flieger carbines,
and then we have flapper delayed in the Model of 1912 pistols.
So, we have a couple of different iterations of these,
from some very early ones up through some very late ones.
So let's take a look at how this pistol changed over its development process.
Alright, we're going to talk about some of the very early
production guns that have a few little changes,
but first I want to actually take apart one of these and show you how the
thing actually works, because it's a really unusual mechanism.
So, this is serial number 51.
They are numbered both on the back of the gun and on the spine of the magazine.
It has a single line roll mark for Waffenfabrik Mauser in Oberndorf, Mauser's Patent.
And if you're familiar with this family of pistols, you'll recognise a lot of things.
Things like the safety here. So the safety you pull this lever down, and that engages the safety.
And then to release the safety you push the button, and now the gun will fire.
Kind of an unusual system. In fact the place that you might also recognise this from is the CZ 27,
which, as an aside, is actually the final iteration of this family of Mauser pistols.
But again, we'll talk about how it got into Czechoslovakia in a separate video.
For now, let's stick to the 1912s.
So our magazine release is a heel release,
it's easy to think that this button would be the mag release, but it's not.
The magazine is just a single stack.
It is numbered right there on the back of the spine.
And again, it looks very much like just an up-scaled version of the .25 and .32 calibre
Mauser 1910, 1914, 1934 pistols.
This has a bit of an interesting mechanical feature, in that
when it is empty it will lock open,
and you can then take the magazine out.
However, there is no slide release, and
the slide stays locked open until you put a new magazine back in the gun.
And presumably loaded, but even with an unloaded magazine,
when I click that into place, the slide will automatically drop.
And if it is a loaded mag, chamber a cartridge, and the gun is then ready to fire.
Now, I didn't show you the trick. You can't just pull the slide back.
You can, but it takes a ton of force
because of the delaying mechanism that was built into the gun.
So they had to add basically a cheater lever.
So you've got this little lever underneath the barrel.
When I pull that down, it's going to disengage the flapper-delay mechanism,
and allow me to very easily pull the slide back.
So, no lever, no movement, push that lever in, slide opens nicely.
So, let's take this apart, and see how those flappers actually work.
In order to do that I'm going to lock the barrel open,
this is very similar to the other pistols in this family.
I'm then going to rotate the guide rod, pull the guide rod out.
I can then take the barrel out, this just lifts out of the gun.
Now I need to take the slide off, so I'm going to hold it in place,
pull the magazine out, push the magazine back in to release the slide.
Pull the mag out so that it doesn't catch.
And then this just comes off the front of the frame.
There's our slide and our recoil spring.
And I'm going to leave the striker in place, I'm not going to take that down.
So here is our flapper delay mechanism.
And I've got this lever on the bottom, when I pull the lever back
these two flaps are going to pull outward.
So what this lever is actually doing is pushing that middle piece forward,
which is going to force these two levers to cam open.
Now they're under spring tension so I can pull them open by hand out here,
but notice that they have a little bit of an angle cut at the front.
Then if we look at the slide, you can see that the front of the slide has this big steel lug
that's going to drop in there when the gun is assembled.
And it is the front of this square lug that is going to push against these angled surfaces.
And if you push hard enough, that will force the flaps apart like that,
which then allows the slide to cycle backward.
So that is the delaying mechanism. It actually has fundamentally a lot in
common with the roller-delayed system that would come some 40 years later.
30 years later I suppose. 35 years later - it would come later.
So this is the final system that Mauser came up with which did actually work.
However, it works based on some very careful engineering of these interface angles,
and precise design of all of these parts, so not a cheap pistol to make.
And you'll notice that each of these little parts is serialised because
once you get the gun fitted together and properly tuned,
it's important to keep all those pieces together.
We'll take a brief look at the back of the gun here, but basically
just to show you that it is a striker-fired pistol.
You can see the sear right there, when I pull the trigger
that front part of the sear is going to drop down which releases this striker.
That striker travels inside this channel in the slide,
so the tip will come out here and fire a cartridge.
Alright, so that flapper-delay mechanism would remain unchanged
throughout all of the 1912 and 1912/14 pistols.
And by the way, the "Mauser Pistolen" book by Weaver, Speed and Schmid
refers to these guns as a 1912 second model,
because they have the flapper-delay mechanism.
With the original 1912 being,
basically, the ... vertically-tipping locking blocks, the experimental guns.
Some of the collector community refers to those as 1912s, and these guns as 12/14s.
According to Mauser Pistolen, the 12/14 is only the version with the tangent sight,
which we'll get to in a moment.
So you may see the nomenclature differ depending on who you're talking to.
Unfortunately, none of these guns have a model designation written on them,
and so that's where some of this disagreement comes from.
At any rate, while the ... flapper-delay system would remain standard,
the early guns would go through a little bit of variation
before they kind of standardised on a production version.
So what I have here is number 29, number 35, and number 51.
And by 51 we have the standard final production version.
But there are a couple of changes that we see in these two.
So first off, you'll notice that there's an extra plane,
there's some extra detail here on the front of the frame on both of these two,
where by 51 it's just smoothed out.
They were able to change the frame enough that they didn't need to have the extra machining step
to have ... two different steps in the frame of the gun.
And that's on both sides by the way.
You can also see a change in the slide serrations.
So, on the very early guns they just put serrations on the slide,
but then fairly quickly they decided that that didn't give you enough purchase on the slide.
So they changed the design to have two actual extended lobes
coming out of the side of the slide with closer serrations on them.
And that actually works really well, that gives you a really good grip on the gun.
Maybe the most significant of the changes is to the markings themselves.
So our very first gun
has a hand-engraved three line address mark:
Waffenfabrik Mauser, Oberndorf A.N. (that's "am Neckar") and Mauser's Patent.
By number 35 that has changed to a two line address mark, but it's still hand engraved.
And then by 51 they have standardised on a single line marking
that is now being done with a roll stamp.
So that's when you know they are serious about production is when they've got the roll stamp done,
so that all the pistols can be very quickly and uniformly marked.
A couple of other minor changes to point out.
You can see the trigger return spring back here on ... our very first gun, number 29.
Just by 35 they have extended the trigger back a little bit,
so that ... you don't have the opening between the trigger and the frame.
And then we can also see some variation in the flap release lever.
So this is our very earliest gun, 29,
it's a little bit larger of a lever, and it's like fully checkered.
By 35 the lever has got smaller, but it's still got the cross hatching.
And then by 51, when they're standardised,
you've got the smaller lever and just a couple of horizontal serrations on it.
There are a few other even yet smaller changes, just little things like the grips.
So the grips are all handmade.
On number 29 here, the checkering on the grips goes all the way to the bottom.
The other two it doesn't.
And a little bit of a change in the pattern of the safety lever.
... It's getting really subtle at this point, but effectively what we have here are
handmade individual pistols, and they're iterating features
until they get the final version that they want to actually put into production.
Including a change in serial number font.
So the early guns have these little tiny serial numbers.
On the later production ones, by the time they standardise, they go to a larger font.
And that allows me to segue into the later production guns.
So about the time they get to serial number 100 they start offering a shoulder stock,
or a ... combination holster/stock because
this is the same pattern of holster as the C96.
This becomes an option, of course this requires having a slot
in the back strap of the gun to lock that ... holster into.
Holster stocks were kind of in vogue at the time, and Mauser was no stranger to them.
So what we have is a metal slot with the grips cut out to fit around it.
Now this wasn't done on all of the guns over 100, it simply became an option at that point.
And there are only a handful of stocked guns that are known.
So this particular one is number 135.
The stock is serial numbered to match here on the ... top of the wrist.
There's our locking mechanism, a little sliding lug.
It is also numbered on the ... trap door.
Again this mechanism is basically identical to the C96,
although the stock itself
is a little bit smaller than a C96 stock.
It's only as big as it has to be to properly hold one of the pistols.
Now what's interesting is, despite there being something like 10 or 20 stocked pistols
made in total, there are actually reproduction stocks that were made.
So all of the original production stocks are this dark walnut,
all of the reproductions are a much lighter coloured walnut.
And you might wonder like, who on earth would make reproductions of something this rare?
Like what do you do with it? If you can't find a slotted
1912 or /14 pistol, what are you going to do with the stock?
Well, the answer is the reproductions were made by Henk Visser,
who was a ... very noted Dutch collector who had an ownership stake in Mauser.
And in the 1960s he did in fact get his hands on a pistol like this
with a stock cut but no stock, and he wanted to have a stock.
And so he found one that he could borrow, he took it to Mauser,
who originally made them in the first place,
and Mauser made a run of 20 ... beautiful, like perfect, reproduction stocks for him.
But as far as I know, they are all a much lighter shade of wood.
So, on the off chance that you are the sort of person with an interest in
very esoteric stocked handguns, and you're looking for one of these, be aware of that.
Those reproduction stocks were originally not numbered.
However, at least a few of them I think have become associated with slotted pistols
whose original stocks have been lost, and numbers have been added.
Just be aware that that's not really an original stock.
Now the very last version that we have to take a look at here is one that was made
more specifically with a military contract in mind, and thus it has a tangent sight.
That is calibrated out to 500 metres here at the back.
So you can set that for much longer ranges,
as opposed to the standard fixed sight on all the regular versions of the gun.
The earliest known one of these is serial number 141, this particular one is number 174.
Again, there were only a very small number of these
tangent sight models made right at the end of production.
So the idea was, "Maybe the military will be interested,
they wanted that tangent sight on other guns."
This again was something that was kind of in vogue at the time, so let's make it an option.
On that topic, it is interesting to point out that none of these pistols are actually proofed.
These were all done as like experimental shop pistols, or early versions, or
well, to be entirely honest, I don't know exactly
the circumstances ... why none of them would be proofed.
A number of them did find their way into commercial trade.
Of course, things like the stock slot ...
those were offered as an option, there were people buying these guns.
But production was small enough, and for whatever reason Mauser opted
not to actually take these through the formal proof house.
So unless they've done something like, say, get sold into commercial trade in England,
where they're required to be proofed upon entry into the country,
and will thus end up with British proof marks.
Unless something like that has happened,
these Mauser 1912s or 12/14s, none of them are proofed.
In total, as I said, there were no more than 200 of these pistols manufactured.
And a couple of things kind of came together all at the same time
to end the development of these guns.
Now they did actually work, but they were very expensive guns to make.
And by the time the last iterations were being made with the tangent sights
that might ... draw a military interest for a military contract,
well, now we're talking about it's the summer of 1914.
The first thing that happens is ... Paul Mauser dies in May of 1914,
and he had been very heavily involved in the R&D side of the business.
And so the whole research and development side of Mauser
took a really big hit when he passed away.
And then three months later, in August, World War One breaks out.
And World War One is really what clobbered the development process
once and for all for these pistols.
Because the German army, ... now they're not looking for like,
"What hypothetically might be a good system that we can use,
and maybe we can replace the Luger."
Now they're looking for a lot of guns inexpensively,
and this is not an inexpensive system. The Luger's not either.
But ... finishing up the development of this, and replacing the Luger with it
would have been a disastrous enterprise, ... it would have really hurt the German war effort.
So, those two things together ended development of this.
Now the family idea may have fallen through,
but they would go on to continue working on the small versions of these pistols.
There would be the Model of 1914 in .32 ACP,
and then there would be a follow-on model, also in .32, in 1934.
So Mauser kept working at this system, they just kind of stuck to the plain blowback,
and abandoned the ideas of the delayed blowback iterations of it.
If you're interested in more information on these guns
or some of the other stuff that Mauser was doing at this point,
... including, as well as beyond, the more commonly recognised things like the C96,
I would recommend "Mauser Pistolen" by Schmid, Speed and Weaver, it's the best reference out there.
That's where the information in this video came from,
so you can check out a copy of that if you're interested.
And thanks for watching.