Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #92...

I've mentioned before how much I like my little Mauser 1910/14 6.35mm and its 7.65mm big brother, but at the NRAAM, RIA had an example of their ultra rare Even Bigger Brother:

I don't believe I'd ever seen one of those in the steel before. Check out the fire bluing on the trigger and the takedown latch at the front of the guide rod!
.

"Oh, the humanity!"

I do have a long, un-bubba'ed Mauser Gew.98, but it's a post-war re-arsenal; what's called a "transition" rifle. It's on a 1916-dated Spandau receiver and no two small parts have matching numbers. It's distinguished as a Wiemar-era transition rifle by the flat tangent rear sight.

What I don't have is a classic Great War-era Gew.98 with an intact lange vizier "rollercoaster" rear sight. Like this one that had been turned into a floor lamp at an antique shop...

"Oh, the humanity!"

To top it off, it was priced well beyond what the un-ruined rifle would have been worth, dashing any faint hopes of a restoration.

Little known fact...

When you import cosmoline hundreds of thousands of gallons at a time and run it through the strainer, you can find cool stuff like this caught in the filters...
.

Panic is so unbecoming...

A commenter at Sebastian's place reports that Numrich is out of magazines for No.1 Mk.III SMLE rifle.

I'm dubious that they ever really had them. It is a well-established fact that the Brits made, like, 10,000,000 SMLEs and 10,000,001 magazines.

The lone spare SMLE magazine in the world gets sold from one cranky old gun show dealer to another, who slathers it in fresh cosmoline and what appears to be tobacco juice, and marks it up another $5 before burying it under a bunch of rusty Turkish bayonets on the back corner of his table, next to a cigar box full of uniform buttons, an overpriced FN 1910 that someone has chromed like a Studebaker bumper, and a small stack of dog-eared Chick tracts.

Meanwhile, wizardpc reports sighting an $800 Mosin at a fun show.

McThag correctly points out that Mosin collecting has passed the collecting of H&R top-break revolvers in popularity and respectability and is rapidly closing in on collecting Latin American Mauser variants as the thirty-seventh most popular field of firearms curating, and therefore $800 might not be out of line for some of the more obscure Finnish variants.

Meanwhile, I will point out a basic bit of Capitalism 101: If Seller Sam asks $100 for a 50rd box of Remchester .22LR, and Buyer Bob gives him $100 for it,  then the price of a 50rd box of Remchester .22LR in that place, at that time, is $100.

Curator Needed, Part Deux...

...and then we have the longarms of the Allied Powers!

Up first is a Spanish M1893 Mauser, which is cool and all, except that Spain didn't participate in the '14-'18 festivities on either side.

Next up is a Dutch M1871/88 Beaumont-Vitali labeled as a Belgian M77(?).

Then we have a Swiss Gew. 78 Vetterli, another heretofore unknown ally in the fight against the Kaiser.

Below that is a rifle labeled as a British Enfield, although it is actually an American-made "Enfield", probably by Remington.

The bottom piece is labeled as a "US Remington 1917 Rifle". While it certainly was built by Remington in the United States in 1917, it is a Russian M1891 Mosin-Nagant, intended for the Czar's armies fighting the Boche. Several technical problems interfered with delivery, however, such as Russia not paying, then chickening out of the war, then falling to fighting amongst themselves in November of that year. Pretty much the only Remington-built Mosins to ever see Mother Russia arrived there postwar in the hands of US doughboys who used them to shoot at Bolsheviks (which is a fine and good thing to do with a rifle.)

Also, apparently it enhances the exhibit if every rifle's rear sight, whether ladder or tangent, is set vertically, never mind whether or not it is actually intended to be used in that position.

Curator Needed...

When Bobbi and I went to the Indiana World War Memorial, the trip through the museum in the basement was alternately fascinating and frustrating. Every now and again I'd run across some glitch or inaccuracy that activated my OCD like seeing a tee-shirt tag sticking out the collar of the person ahead of me in line at the grocery store: You want to fix it, but there's nothing you can do and it takes all your willpower to keep your hands to yourself.

Here's their display of Central Powers rifles from the Great War:

The top rifle appears to be a WWII-vintage Steyr-manufactured Mauser, given the turned-down bolt handle, wooden top handguard that runs all the way back to the receiver ring, and grasping grooves in the stock. The pistol grip isn't the distinctive Steyr one, so maybe it's not, but whatever it is, it isn't a WWI rifle with that bolt handle and the bolt disassembly disc in the stock. Corrected by Rob in comments: Looking at the position of the trigger guard in relation to the bolt handle, it's almost certainly a Kar 98a...

Note that the stock is "duffle cut", allowing the disassembled barrelled action and stock to fit in a Hoosier GI's dufflebag. I believe that the label should indicate that. Also it should indicate that somebody stuck that barrel band on backwards; the sling swivel's on the wrong side.

The second one down, a Kar 88, and the fourth one down, a Gew 88, might have seen service in the Great War, but the third one down is a Franco-Prussian War-era M62 Dreyse "needle rifle" that was already a wall-hanger long before Mons and the Marne. And it's mislabeled as a Gew 71, to boot.

The bottom one, an Austrian M95 that hasn't been chopped into a stutzen, kinda gave me the wantsies...

Once again, this brings up the phenomenon of "Gell-Mann Amnesia": Every time I looked at an exhibit in an area where I had some personal knowledge or expertise, I saw bunches of little flaws and errors, and yet get away from those areas and the natural tendency was to just accept what I saw as gospel truth... Why should they have been any more accurate with the other stuff?

Tab Clearing...

• #IfObamaDontWin, there will be subject-verb disagreement.


• I envision ADM Nathman being ushered into an empty room containing only a table, a chair, a Makarov, and one bullet.


• I have, buried somewhere in the detritus on my desk, the bolt handle from an absolutely pristine Argentine 1909 Mauser carbine that I couldn't talk the customer out of drilling & tapping & putting on a bent bolt handle. I has a sad every time I look at it.

Well, there's your problem...

So I'm loitering back in gunsmithing the other day when one of the sales crew brings a customer's rifle back. Seems the customer got a laser boresighter stuck in the chamber.

The rifle in question is a crudely-sporterized 1916-dated Mauser 98, still with the stepped military barrel and a pre-WWII-looking European sporter stock, with something halfway between a Schnabel forend and a tumor, cross-hatching in the wood to approximate checkering, and a wrist so thin that it's a wonder it didn't blow into splinters when the trigger was pulled.

Gunsmith Bob heaved and tugged on the bolt handle, but it wouldn't budge, and so out came the plastic hammer. A couple good whacks and the bolt flew open, sending a little shiny brass fingernail shaving of  the boresighter's cartridge rim flying through the air.

Next was an oak dowel down the bore, but the Mauser is known for its rather vigorous camming action on closing, and that boresighter was wedged in but good. The dowel splintered impressively enough to hit me in the neck with shrapnel.

Finally, repeated blows to a fiberglass shotgun rod managed to dislodge the thing.

What do you think fell out?

That's right, Cletus had a .243 boresighter in his 8x57mm chamber. It was burnished real shiny around the shoulder, too, where he'd grunted and strained in closing the bolt.

Here's the kicker: The rifle did not have pre-war Euro claw-type scope mounts on it, nor either was it drilled and tapped for regular mounts. The sight on the gun consisted of a blade up front and a fixed sheet-metal aperture silver-soldered to the receiver bridge. So what in the name of Paul Mauser was he boresighting in the first place?

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

Over at Lagniappe's Lair are some beautiful photos of an early-war Steyr-manufactured Mauser 98k that was retained by the rebuilt Norwegian army after WWII and converted to .30-'06.

It is in remarkable shape and the nicely-done stock repair shows that the Norwegians were definitely not in the habit of throwing things away if they could be fixed.

I have an especial fondness for military 98's in .30-'06, but I have to say that this one makes my Brazilian 1908/34.30 look shabby by comparison...

Guns, lots of guns.

When I was younger, I worked briefly in the seafood department of a grocery store. Come break time, it was always easier, and practically as cheap, to steam up a mess of shrimp as it was to go get in the car and get some fast food for lunch. Did you know you can get heartily sick of shrimp?

Once upon a time, I really, really, really liked guns. There were guns I wanted soooo bad: I remember when getting a Spectre, or a P7M8, or a Mateba Unica-6 was the highlight of my whole month. I fear I've burned myself out a bit: the Specter was as useless as training wheels on a jumbo jet, the HK was hard to find leather for, the Mateba was a pain in the butt to clean...

There's nothing that really lights my fuse like that anymore. Oh, sure, I usually find something of interest at a gun show, but a lot of the thrill is gone.

There are still a few guns, though, that pique my interest enough that if somebody handed me the winning lotto ticket, I'd try to find one for the collection. Robb Allen asked "What would you get if you could get any five guns, cost and practicality be hanged?" Good question. So in no particular order, here's the answer:

• M1868 Papal States Remington:
  Because if the dead rise and walk the earth in search of human brains, there's nothing better with which to put them back into the hereafter than a rifle with the Keys of St. Peter stamped right into the receiver, no matter what Hornady may state to the contrary. Too bad the 12.7x45R cartridge is a handloader-only proposition these days; maybe we can get them to do a run of Z-Max, just in case.


• Webley Mars Pistol:
  Because it's cool. Ammo is completely unavailable, but you don't even need to shoot it: You can go on at length about Sir Gabbet-Fairfax's long-recoil pistol that drew the cartridges rearward from the magazine and fired a bottlenecked .45 that was the most powerful handgun cartridge around until the hot .357 Magnum barely edged it out, and the ejection pattern would... and your assailant will be bored to death. Like the Webley-Fosbery semiauto revolver, this thing's practically a Trivial Pursuit answer in solid steel.
  


• Russian military contract Winchester M1895:
  A box-magazine-fed, Browning-designed, fully-stocked, 7.62x54R Winchester levergun with a bayonet lug that may have been used to shoot Bolsheviks in Russia and Fascists in Spain. What's not to like?


• Mauser M712 "Schnellfeuer":
  If you don't at least kinda want one of these, I'm not sure we can be friends anymore.


• Swedish m/35 LMG:
  It's a Browning BAR with a finned quick-change barrel and it's chambered in 6.5x55 and it's about dead sexy.

Most of those are pretty much fantasyland, for fiscal reasons if nothing else, but I figure I actually have a shot at the M1895 and/or the Pope Gun someday...

How 'bout y'all? What are your five?

Backlog...

I have got a ton of stuff that needs to be written up at The Arms Room, to the point where I've just wanted to curl up under the covers and whimper until it goes away.

Despite this problem-management technique never having worked before, it's still my primary response to crisis situations, for whatever reason. It's not so much "procrastination" as it is throwing my towel over my head so that the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal won't be able to see me and will maybe go away. But that poor blog doesn't deserve to languish like this, and so...

Anyhow, there's an adorable little Mauser 1910 that needs photos taken of it, a preliminary look at a T&E Boberg XR9-S (which will be getting a full-length review in Concealed Carry Magazine,) and closeups on my two Pedersen guns, a Remington Model 10 and a Remington Model 51. And there's bunches more where that came from.

It looks like we'll have good picture-taking weather today, at least.

Magazine Fed Up.

Michael Z. Williamson has a pretty droll rant up about the Garand. I largely agree with him, too; I think the Garand is thought of a little overfondly. Sure, I'd rather have a Garand than a Mauser Kar.98k, but I'd rather have an FN-49 than either.

I only had one involuntary twitch while reading his post: Everybody always refers to the Short Magazine Lee Enfield as having a "detachable magazine", which I guess it technically does, in that there's a catch that can be operated to release the magazine from the gun, but that's not how the rifle was used. They were reloaded or topped up through the top with stripper clips, just like any other halfway-decent bolt action service rifle (which categorization, you'll note, neatly excludes the Lebel as well as any rifle using Ferdinand Mannlicher's annoying en bloc clip-loading system.)

As anybody who's wandered gun show aisles in despair for more than fifteen minutes knows, the British made 17,000,000 Enfield rifles of all patterns and 17,000,001 magazines for them, and that old guy wants too much for it, and the follower's all rusty, anyway.

As a matter of fact, since the relentlessly class-conscious British officer's corps was sure that the average Tommy couldn't be trusted with anything more complicated than a spoon lest he injure himself with it or lose it, SMLE magazines were actually chained to the rifle like a mitten on a string, at least until the urgency of wartime production caused such fripperies to be discontinued.

(The magazine situation isn't quite that bad, although I would caution against most aftermarket SMLE mags. I have a pair of extra mags, one for each of my Enfields, but they're more by way of spare parts than for reloads.)


(H/T to Bayou Renaissance Man.)

Scout pro, Scout con.

I like slim, light, handy bolt-action rifles in reasonably potent calibers. For instance, I have two South American Mauser carbines, one from Venezuela and one from Chile, chambered in the classic 7x57mm Mauser. Both are just about an inch over three feet long and weigh in at eight pounds or less, even with the full military stock. Autoloaders in these calibers tend to be bulkier and heavier, due to recoil mechanisms and gas tubes and so forth.

Jeff Cooper spilled barrels of ink over how much he liked light, handy bolt-action rifles in reasonably potent calibers, too. I don't think he liked slim ones, though, because the one that eventually sent him royalty checks got his blessing had all the svelte grace of a gray plastic railroad tie. It was light all right, but suffered from issues with hard military primers and soft flimsy integral bipod legs.

Now comes Ruger with a little carbine built on their very Mauseresque M77 action. With a classic-looking stock that eschews geegaws like a built-in bipod in favor of being actually shaped like a rifle, it has integral backup irons, a mount for an intermediate eye-relief scope, and takes detachable magazines. This is all good.

Now the bad: Of course Ruger wanted the marketing cachet of the "Gunsite Scout©®™" name on their offering, and Shiva only knows what the per-unit licensing fee is for putting a laser-etched chicken on each gun, but I'll bet it's not free. (And if it's not, then that cost gets passed along to the consumer.) Further, when they picked their choice of detachable mags, they went with Accuracy International magazines which, like everything else from AI, are made of compressed unicorn tears and priced like imported sin. A quick look around the 'net shows them running ~$80 for a ten-round stick, and good luck finding those at Billy Bob's House of Surplus.

Tempting, but I think I'll let someone else take the depreciation hit. Besides. given the pricing in this economy, the baffling choice of mags, and the lack of cachet that the Ruger name has among tactical buffs and rifle snobs, I'd say there's a one-in-three chance that these will be available from CDNN in a year or so.

Seasonal cheer?

In what seems to be a holiday tradition, the TeeWee was showing the Hallmark Production of that feel-good family classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, in which Corporal McHale shows Private John Boy the ropes in the middle of the epic three-way struggle between armies of German soldaten, French poilus, and corpse-eating rats. Then everybody winds up face-down dead in the mud. Bring the kids! (Although I will note that back when it was released, I was in the 4th grade, and Scholastic News, or whatever that propaganda they give to kids was called, contained a viewer's guide and synopsis. Myself, I just thought it was pretty neat that our teachers encouraged us to watch a war movie.)

The production values are very good, and it's a nice period piece. (Although for some reason the fact that the Jerry infantry Gewehr 98's were postwar Wiemar refurbs with tangent rear sights instead of the correct lange vizier "rollercoaster" rear sights bugged me inordinately on this viewing. If you are a normal person, this would probably not impact your viewing pleasure in the slightest.)

Fun Show Today.

I'm about to head out the door for the Indy 1500.

I'm getting the hankering for another Mauser carbine of some sort, and in the principle of keeping things balanced, I'll probably take my Portuguese Mauser-Vergueiro 1904/M39, just in case. Maybe I can turn it into an Argie carbine, and maybe I'll still have the Portugee at the end of the day. Either outcome is fine with me.

Also, I need to restock .45ACP ammo.

I wonder if RCBS makes reloading dies?

From Jim at The Travis McGee Reader:

I trancribe with exactitude from the auction bill:
"Mauser ModelK98K 709 mm rifle."

The USS New Jersey, by comparison, sports wimpy little 410mm naval rifles. I'll bet that Mauser needs a thick recoil pad...


(The Mauser is, of course, 7.9mm...)

8.08 state.

Went to the range with Shootin' Buddy at the crack of early this morning with the intention of getting carbines dialed in for the Awerbuck course later this month. Only except Wildcat Valley was hosting a multigun match and the gamers had claimed the benchrest bay.

There's still a 100 yd bench over down on the bay with the steel critters, which they weren't using, and so we hied ourselves over there, but the morning continued to be made of fail.

The AR sight adjustment tools that Shootin' Buddy bought at Knob Creek turned out to be air-soluble, having completely vanished between then and now. The Troy BUIS, while using an A1-style windage adjustment, did not want to be adjusted with the tip of an M193 cartridge. The punch on my Leatherman Juice came to the rescue for one carbine, but the detent on the other one wouldn't work with it. Result: Only one of two dialed in.

My carbine had a new-to-me Aimpoint Comp M2 on it that also needed dialing in. Of course, that's a lot easier at 25 yards than it is at a hundred. I tried to get a rough boresight by yanking the bolt carrier group and squinting through the barrel at the target while fiddling the adjustment screws, but gave it up for a bad idea. I'd planned on a trip to Coal Creek Armory before class anyway, so I reckon I'll drag the carbine along and see if I can't get it at least boresighted while I'm there.

At least we finished up okay: SB had just picked up a Yugo Czech Mauser from his 'smith, who'd fitted it with a scout scope and XS backup irons. I'm assuming he'd had something done to the trigger, too, or else that was the nicest stock military Mauser trigger I've felt. Even with the low-powered long eye-relief scope and no better point of aim than the rough center of a plain white IPSC target a hundred yards away, I easily put three rounds of factory Remington softpoint into a space covered by the palm of my hand. (Which, for an old military rifle, is not half bad. If it'll do that for a mediocre shot like me, then if someone who knew what they were doing loaded for the gun and then slung up and tried, it'd probably really shoot.)

The Zen of the Workbench...

Brian J. Noggle on the fields in which we toil:

If you’ve seen one cubicle, you’ve seen them all. Most of the customization from one job to another involves a different desktop wallpaper and set of applications installed upon a computer. A different set of binders on the bookshelf, if any. A different set of photographs or cutesy individual touches.

But workbenches, they have different tools and different things.

Shannon, a gunsmith at CCA and maybe the best all-'round 'smith I've ever known, has always been known for his chaotic bench and a sometimes casual attitude about discarded objects falling to the floor. One of the more Felix Unger-like employees was complaining about this, only to be cut off in mid sentence by Gunsmith Bob saying, in a mocking whine, "Michaelangelo! You're getting paint on the floor!"

Speaking of workbenches and gunsmiths, Will is still blogging his way through gunsmithing school and has been doing a series of posts documenting his transformation of a crudely sporterized Argentine Mauser into something a little nicer.

Well, I think they're cool.

The Firearm Blog is pining for a bolt-action rifle that eats out of STANAG mags, and so is Caleb, although Caleb reckons he'd settle for a CZ 527.

The CZ's are fine little carbines. I remember being a little startled the first time I fired one, since the only platforms from which I'd launched 7.62x39 before had been gas-operated eight-plus-pound autochuckers and so the stubby commie round had been mentally filed away with such chamberings as .22LR, .30 Carbine, and .223 under the category "recoilless". The only thing I didn't like about it was that the box magazine protruded right from the balance point of the carbine.

The Enfield that eats out of AK mags is intriguing; I saw one at a Gander Mountain recently; my shopping companion couldn't figure out what I was spazzing out so hard about. In comments at Caleb's post, CJR Multigun reacts simliarly, asking

I guess I don’t understand the attraction of bolt guns, especally bolt guns in Minor caliber.

Well, unlike at a multigun match, in real life most of us are going to spend a lot more time holding a rifle than shooting it. Outside of some zombie apocalypse scenario, where one may have to engage swarms of shamblers, the most likely targets are going to be shy ungulates that travel in twos and threes or stationary paper circles. These can be taken with a bolt action rifle rather handily, and a six-pound boltie with no protruding crap rests in the hands ever so much easier after several hours than a nine-pound slab with grips and magazines protruding at odd angles. Plus, an anvil might be more reliable than a Mauser '98, but that would depend on the make and model of the anvil.

I think the biggest attraction for the 7.62x39 or .223 or .308 carbines, though, is for people who already know and love EBR-style autoloaders; why not have a bambi gun that shares ammo? For instance, back when an HK-91 was my go-to rifle, I used my Spanish FR-8 to shoot up that nasty CAVIM 7.62x51 that cacked up the chamber flutes on my HK with bituminous coal.

So, yeah, I like my autoloading carbines a lot, but there's a place in my heart (and safe) for a manually-operated repeater, too.

Don't mess with Texas women...

...because they shoot back.

That looks like a nice little budget "scout" setup that JR brought to the range. Makes me want a scout-type rifle again, a concept I find myself falling in and out of lust with on a fairly regular basis.

As it is, I have a few nice, light, handy carbines, but they all are still in military stocks and have some flaw or another that annoys me. The Chilean Mauser carbine is the lightest, at seven and a half pounds, and is barely an inch over three feet long, but it could use better sights; the military-style tangent is okay, but it's not done any favors in the sight radius department by that short carbine barrel. The Venezuelan FN 24/30 carbine is the same length, but a pound heavier due to the large-ring action, and suffers from the same sight issues.

I also have an FR-8, which is probably the pick of the litter for sights, with a nice aperture setup, and is short and just under eight pounds in weight, but it could use a bent bolt handle. Oh well...

Now I want to shoot rifles this weekend.