Finnish Mosin Nagant Overview (M91/24, M27, M28, M28/30, M39)

[ Finnish Mosin Nagant Overview ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the rifles that they are going to be selling in their upcoming February of 2017 Regional Auction. And I discovered while looking through the catalogue for this auction that they have a lot of Finnish Mosin-Nagants. So we're going to take this opportunity today to do a grand overview of Finnish Mosin-Nagants. Now a lot of people are probably familiar with the Mosin, this was adopted first in 1891 by Russia, later to become the Soviet Union. It was their standard rifle in World War One, standard rifle in World War Two, they are ubiquitous on the US market today. But most of the ones that are here in the US are Russian or Soviet guns. The Finnish guns are rather less common and rather less appreciated by some, although I think that's changing rapidly. So, Finland obtained its independence from Russia in 1917 with the Russian Revolution. There was a brief civil war in Finland between the Whites and the Reds that ended in 1918 with the victory of the White Finnish non-communists. And they ended up with like 190,000 Russian Mosin-Nagant rifles that had been in Finland when the Finns got their independence. So that was the start of the Finnish arsenal. Now they had other guns, they in fact had a fairly wide variety of other guns, but the single most numerous thing that they had was the M91 Mosin-Nagant. So that's what the Finnish military formally adopted. Now it's important as we go through this story to recognise that there are two separate entities here. We have the Finnish Army, and we have the Finnish Civil Guard who's name in Finnish [Suojeluskunta] I'm not even going to try to pronounce. And kind of like in the US we have the Army and the National Guard, they were separate independent organisations and they actually did their own independent weapons procurement. So, the Army had army rifles and the Civil Guard had civil guard rifles, and they are not necessarily the same guns. Now to begin with they were pretty much all Mosin-Nagants, Russian M91s. But fairly quickly the Army decides that it really wants a better rifle, so the Army starts experimenting, and unfortunately they don't really have the money to develop or purchase anything brand new. And what they are left with are, well, these huge stockpiles of Mosin-Nagants. So in 1924 they ... adopt an upgraded version, they call it the M24. And it looks like an M91, it looks like a Russian Mosin-Nagant, but the Finns have made some improvements to them. They cleaned up the triggers. In a lot of these cases if the barrel wasn't really good they replaced the barrel. And that's how you'll normally identify these is the Russian barrel has gone, there's a Finnish barrel on the rifle with Finnish markings, Finnish date, Finnish serial number. They basically refurbished these guns and brought them up to Finnish accuracy standards. Or at least as much as they could with this pattern of rifle that they were starting with. Now they ... left the rear sight in place but they remarked it. So these early M91 Mosins, basically World War One and earlier era guns, had their rear sights marked in arshins, which was a Russian unit of measurement, roughly equivalent to one pace. So ... I believe the conversion is 3/4 of an [metre] equals 1 [arshin]. And as a unit of measurement for rifle shooting, a pace makes a lot of sense actually when your way of measuring is simply to walk out the distance to the target to see how far it is, instead of having a laser range finder. So, M24s are the first iteration of truly Finnish Mosin-Nagant. Now during this whole time the Finns never actually manufactured a single receiver. They had these 190,000 that they started with, and between the 1920s and through 1941 they bought another 173,000 Mosins from pretty much everybody around. They bought them from Bulgaria, Albania, Russia (at some points when they were on good relations with the Russians), a lot of the Baltic states, France. Basically a lot of people had ended up with Mosin-Nagants as a result of World War One, and most of those countries were standardising on other guns, like Mausers. And they were quite happy to sell off their surplus Mosin-Nagants, Finland was in the reverse situation, quite happy to buy them. Now from a collector's point of view this becomes really interesting, because all of a sudden you've got ... Finnish Mosins made with just this huge smorgasbord of receivers from other manufacturers and other dates. It's interesting to note that there are in particular a lot of Finnish Mosins made on American Mosin-Nagant receivers, Remington and Westinghouse receivers, so you'll find those fairly regularly. And typically all of the markings on a Russian Mosin are going to be on the barrel shank, and the Finns got rid of those. So with the Finnish receivers you actually have to pull the receiver out of the stock, you look at the underside of the tang, and that's where you'll typically find an arsenal mark and a date that will allow you to figure out where this receiver actually came from. But the salient point here is the Finns never manufactured a single Mosin-Nagant receiver. They didn't have the tooling to do it, nothing. And they didn't really manufacture a lot of other parts, they didn't manufacture bolts. What they made were ancillary things, they made stocks, barrels, sights, furniture. Alright, at this point let's go ahead and take a closer look at some of the little features, and markings and interesting details of this M91. And then we'll follow the lineage as it develops through the M27, 28, the 28/30, and ultimately the Finnish M39. I think I can argue without getting too much push-back from anyone that if it is truly possible to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, the Finns accomplished that by turning Russian World War One Mosin-Nagants into Finnish M39 rifles. Probably, almost certainly, the best pattern of Mosin-Nagant anyone ever made. The refurbishment program of Russian M91s took a couple of different forms in Finland. And really it was kind of a custom process. Each rifle was assessed individually and the arsenal or repair depot would determine what exact changes it needed. So things like relining the sight numbers were done to all the rifles, but if a rifle had a really good barrel it might not get a replacement at that point. Triggers would be tweaked, smoothed out and improved. Barrel shims were sometimes added to improve the accuracy of the guns. If the bore was good but the muzzle had been damaged, the barrel might be simply counter-bored. A lot of changes like these were made. So, new barrels, when they were necessary, were done in a couple of different ways in the early years of this process. So Tikkakoski, or as we know it today, Tikka, did make new barrels. They did also buy barrels from a couple of other sources, including foreign sources. And one of the other methods used, they actually tried the Italian Salerno method of re-lining bores. Those you'll find marked with a "P" on the barrel shank, a P-26 or a P-27. There was a lot of political skulduggery kind of involved in that re-boring process. There was a lot of controversy for a while about whether the process was safe. It looks like that was actually done as a political motive to discredit some of the people in the arms division. It's a mess, we're not going to get into that. And serious Finnish rifle collectors will know that there is a whole wide variety of specific types of re-manufactured or repaired or re-barrelled M91s. And that's a little bit beyond the scope of this. So the markings on this one are a little bit faint, but you can see that we have a VKT marking there. "D" indicates heavy ball, that was something that was done a little bit later in the war. When the Finns started to capture large amounts of Russian ammunition they changed their bore diameter specification in order to better fit the Russian ammunition. Now, you'll notice this rifle is dated 1941, I've been talking about these being done in the 1920s, and that's true. This process stopped in the late 1920s, but then it picked back up again in 1940. They restarted the process of redoing M91s because M39 production was still taking off. ... They needed the rifles during the Winter War, so ... they restarted the ... update process on these old M91s. And in fact it's probably more common to find these rifles with 1940s dates. Something else I want to point out, and we'll touch on this a little bit later I think, these sling swivels are a very distinctive Finnish retro-fit. There are probably about a half a dozen different styles of Finnish sling swivels, different things that they did at different times and for different reasons with the rifles, but this is one of them. The Russian set up actually had a slot through the stock, which required a loop, typically called a dog collar, a leather sling loop in the stock, and then you would attach your sling to that. Well that was easy to damage and ... didn't appeal to the Finnish sensibilities, so they replaced those slots with actual sling swivels. We have that here on the back as well. When you see this, ... at a glance you know that a rifle with that style of sling swivel has been modified by the Finns. So one other marking to get used to seeing if you're going to get interested in Finnish rifles is this "SA" in a rectangle. That is a Finnish Army property marking. Important to note that it is not related to the Civil Guard, and a rifle that has only been in Civil Guard service will not have that stamp. But most of these guns ended up at one point or other being used by the Finnish Army, and they will have that SA. Alright, and lastly the conversion to the rear sights. When these were made by the Russians they were marked 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12, and those are hundreds of arshins. And this bottom 4 step was a single step. This is a good example of one of those rifles where they really thought that battle was going to be taking place at very long ranges because the new small-bore smokeless-powder rifles allowed it. So a 400 arshin zero is like a 300 metre zero, which is really quite a long ways for the minimum zero distance on a rifle. Certainly too long to be practical for the Finns, the Finns cut an additional step at the bottom of the sight. They then remarked it with 2, that's a very faint 2 there. So the bottom step is now 200 metres, and then 3, 4, 5.5, because without re-cutting the stairs that particular one equates to 550 metres, 7, and lastly 8.5. So they made these adjustments to the rear sight because of course the Finns weren't conversant in arshins, because they use metres. So in the 1920s the Army really is getting kind of tired of Mosin-Nagants. They'd really like a newer, better rifle. The M91 or M24 is ... long, it's heavy, it's awkward. Honestly, they're not the greatest bolt action rifle design ever made. Not bad, but in the Russian variation there's a lot left to be desired. So unfortunately for the Finnish Army, Finland doesn't have the money to develop an entirely new and better rifle. They have a whole lot of Mosin-Nagants, and that's what they are going to have to work with. So the Army grudgingly ... agrees to work with an improved version of the Mosin-Nagant, and that's going to become the M27. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, the M27 is going to be an Army rifle, so this is distinct from the Civil Guard. We'll get to what the Civil Guard is going to do about the same question a little bit later. So what do they do to improve the Russian Mosin-Nagant? They are going to do a bunch of things. They are going to replace all the barrels. They are going to reduce the barrel length by 15.5cm. So the original M91 barrels are 80cm long, that's 31.5 inches. They're going to drop that down to 27 inches, or 68.5cm. So a nice reduction, that gets them down to like typical European short rifle length, which is definitely an improvement on the Mosin. They're going to add some nice big protective wings to the front sight, right up there. Another real improvement over the unprotected front sight of the M91. They're going to do a little bit to improve the sights, we'll take a look at those up close in a few moments. They're going to improve the nose cap. Now this is a late pattern one, we'll look at the early pattern. What they want is a nose cap that allows them to remove the rear handguard without ... having to remove the nose cap entirely from the rifle. So they're going to come up with a hinged design, and we'll take a look at that as well. Now, in total about 71,500 of these M27s were manufactured. And ... the first rifles were produced right at the end of 1927, they actually came into service in 1928. And ... large scale production would go on until 1935. Ultimately they would be produced through 1940. So let's take a look at a few of these details up close. Alright, let's start with a feature that I ... didn't actually mention yet, and that is a mechanical change to the bolt itself. They were concerned with potential mis-feeding because the bolt kind of wobbles around on these. And so they actually added a pair of little ribs to the very back of this bolt guide. So here's a standard Mosin-Nagant bolt, you can see there's nothing there, and there is this little guide here on the M27 bolt. At the same time they also cut a pair of slots in the back of the receiver to mate up with those two little ribs. And the idea was that this would stabilise the bolt at the end of its travel, and improve things. Now this was only done until 1933. They stopped cutting these slots in '33 because ... a couple of problems came up. One of them, probably the most significant problem, is that this becomes an easy spot for dirt or sand, or even snow or ice to get into. And if the front of this slot gets packed up with some debris, all of a sudden you can't close the bolt. Because you have to have some place for these ribs to actually go. And if they can't go all the way forward you're not going to be able to close the bolt, and the rifle's just not going to work, and that's a major problem. The other problem that this led to was that M27 bolts could no longer be used in M91 or M24 rifles. Because those earlier rifles didn't have the grooves cut, and if you tried to install one of these bolts in an older rifle, again, you couldn't close the bolt all the way and it wouldn't work. So in '33 they abandoned that. On top of these potential problems, they also I think realised that this really didn't actually improve anything. It wasn't necessary. Now the 27 would include two improvements to the rear sight. On the original M91s, this is your adjustment lever, right there. On the 27 they ... gave it these feet, which really do make it a more secure and better adjustment. Holds the rear sight much steadier. ... It's a small thing, but that's definitely an improvement to the rear sight. They also added this plate screwed onto the back of the rear sight which ... allows them to cut a more precise and a more careful V-notch. So you can see that's kind of been tacked ... into the back of the Russian rear sight. So, in general they are making these rifles a little more precise and a little more marksman friendly, because the Finns don't have the number of people that the Russians do, what they do have is marksmanship skill. So we can take a look at the markings here on the barrel. That triangle T indicates that the barrel was made by Tikka. (Who did the vast majority of the M27s by the way.) The D indicates D pattern bullets, which is a slightly different bullet profile than others. Kind of like the French re-chambered their guns for a couple of different bullet profiles, so did the Finns. Serial number here is 51,500 and this is a 1932 gun. Couple of features up here at the nose. We have these nice big protective wings, very sturdy. And there's a hole cut in them so that you can still get ... to the front sight with a punch, so that you can adjust your windage. And then we have a hinged nose cap. So we have a hinge pin on this side, this one is a screw right there. So if you want to take the handguard off, you can remove this screw and this just opens up on a pivot and you can ... get the handguard off. Now the problem with these [nose caps] is that they are attached only to this little skinny section right at the front of the stock by a single screw. And what was discovered by 1935 was that in training and in the field this was a fragile piece. In particular if you had a bayonet on the rifle and used it, it was very possible to twist the front of the rifle and crack the stock. One of the other things the Finns did with the 27 was they gave them a heavier profile barrel than the M91s, the Russian rifles, had. But they were still using refurbished M91 Russian stocks, so they had to hollow more out inside the stock than the Russians had done, and this left it a little more fragile, especially up here at the front. So the solution to this problem of the fragile nose cap was in 1935 to add these so-called "popsicle sticks", just strengthening ribs. And they allowed the nose cap to be attached back here, this makes the whole thing more rigid and stable. Now it's interesting to note that up here on our early rifle the stock actually has the cutouts for those reinforcing ribs. This is an early rifle that at some point had a damaged stock, and the stock was replaced with a later pattern stock with those cutouts. That's not a super common thing, but it is just one of these very many features where kind of anything can be possible on Finnish rifles, any combination of parts. So here's another example of that kind of variability. This (which is our later M27) has the improved slider on the rear sight, but it doesn't have that face plate and notch put on it. And there's no particular good explanation for that, just these kind of variations happen on Finnish rifles. One other interesting thing that we can note about this early M27 is that it originally had a stock disk. This would have been a brass disk attached to the stock that indicated the unit that the rifle was assigned to. And this was done basically as an inventory thing. However, all of these stock disks were removed after the Winter War when it was realised that they were actually providing valuable intelligence to the Soviets if and when rifles were captured. It was a good source of intel about what units were deployed where. So after the Winter War those were all removed and it is very rare to find one intact today. And in fact once they started removing them, they stopped cutting ... that depression in the sock for them. So you normally don't even see evidence that there ever would have been a disk. Also interesting to note on this one, you can see the original Russian slot in the stock for the sling has been filled, and it's had this sling swivel added to the bottom instead. This is yet another of the half a dozen or so different styles of sling swivels that were used by the Finns. We can also look up here on the stock and note that the stock has been spliced out of two pieces, this was done to increase its strength and rigidity. So while the Army was developing their own M27 rifle, the Civil Guard didn't want to get left behind, they wanted a better rifle as well. And what they ended up developing became known as the M28. Now they did get their hands on an Army M27 during its development and took a look at it and ultimately ended up going mostly the same things. But they thought there were some places where they could do things either better or more economically. There was a lot of inter-service rivalry between the Civil Guard and the Army, not surprisingly. So, in total about 35,000 M28s were manufactured. And these were manufactured from 1928 through 1932. Now the Army M27s would go on to be produced all the way until 1940. The Civil Guard would actually make some improvements ... around 1932 and that would ... be a follow up version, which we'll take a look at after we're done with this one. So let's take a look at the specific details of the M28. So the front sight has pretty much the same changes made to it. We have some nice big protective ears, got a big hole in the side so that you can access the front sight to adjust your windage, that's important. The Civil Guard didn't apparently see the need for this hinged quick removal front nose cap, so they didn't bother. They just went with a solid, normal, tradition style of nose cap. And honestly this is probably the biggest single difference between the 27 and the 28. Moving back to the rear sight, we are going to see this typical replacement Finnish numbering. This one actually does not have a 200 [metre] notch cut in it, nor does it have the improved adjustment slider. However it does have a rear plate that was added so that you can get a ... better rear sight picture. Now in a true display of nitpicking, the M28 Civil Guard rifles have that plate attached by two screws from the top, where the M27 Army rifles have it with two screws from the back. So just a little distinguishing feature you can see there. There are a lot fewer receiver marks on the M28s than the 27s, we just have a SY there for Civil Guard. We're going to have a serial number on the side. And you'll note that there is in fact an SA Army property mark, despite the fact that this is not an Army rifle, this was an M28 Civil Guard rifle. Well the reason for this is that during the Continuation War in the 1940s, the Army absorbed all of the Civil Guard's rifles. And so almost all of them ended up marked Army property. Now ... I've been mentioning some of the different sling adaptations to these rifles in general as we've been going through here. And this is one of the more desirable ones, this is one of the cooler ones. These are commonly referred to as "ski-trooper" rifles. In fact ... this was the rear sling set up on the first 6,000 M28s. And they were done this way so that you could accommodate a couple of different sling positions. Most significantly carrying the rifle across your chest, which is how you kind of want to carry it skiing. So that is why there is both an upper and a lower sling slot on those. Now after the first 6,000 I guess they decided it wasn't that important and it was a lot of work to add, so they stopped doing it. And most of the M28s you find will only have this bottom slot. In addition of course, when rifles were damaged and refurbished they wouldn't have added back that top slot if it were an earlier rifle that had it. So a somewhat scarce variety to find these days. It was realised that there was still room for some improvement in the M28, and the Civil Guard got to work ... making more modifications. And this would ultimately lead to the Model 28/30, which didn't actually go into production until 1933. Development took a couple of years, trials, etc. But what they got in the 28/30 was really a substantially better rifle. They finally got entirely away from this old Russian style of sight with a brand new, much more secure, and overall better rear sight. There were ... improvements made to the front sight, to barrel floating, a bunch of things. The 28/30 would actually acquire a substantial reputation for accuracy. In 1937 the World Rifle Championships were being held in Helsinki, and Finland actually had the overall winner, one of their shooters using a 28/30 rifle. Really this would set the stage for the M39 to be adopted by both the Army and the Civil Guard several years later. And the 28/30 would in fact be produced until 1940 when production switched over to the Model 39. In total 24,400 28/30s were manufactured. However there were about 40,000 that existed overall, the remainder being Model 28s that were updated with the new parts and to the new spec. The new rear sight was a complete departure from the old Russian sights and much better overall. We have a much smoother slider here. Markings from 200 out to 1,000 metres with intermediate notches, so we have a pair of spring-loaded catches here, and you can move this sight to 250, or like 275. A lot of variability and a lot of precision in this sight. Now this was still not a windage adjustable rear sight. It ... now had a U-shaped rear notch instead of a V, that was preferred. But ... I should say, there were a small numbers of M28s that had been made with an adjustable rear sight where they actually had three plates back here. And the middle one, sandwiched in between, you could loosen the attachment screws, slide this middle plate back and forth (with the rear sight notch) and adjust your windage. But that was kind of a haphazard system and so they replaced that in the 28/30 with a system where the front sight was the adjustable one for windage. Now it had always been possible to adjust the front sight windage on these rifles with a punch. Just ... tapping the sight blade itself from side to side. They made a major improvement on that with the 28/30 by now making it screw adjustable. So on the other side you actually have these little dots that give you reference points that you can index against. And all you have to do is take a screwdriver and adjust either one side or the other to move the front sight side to side. So that was a substantial improvement, that really allowed the rifles to be better and more quickly windage zeroed. There were some improvements made up at the nose cap, the stock is thicker up here. You can see this a slightly later improved variation where there is a reinforcing bolt going through the front of the stock. There is also an aluminium float tube installed in between the barrel and the stock and handguard. Having pulled the nose cap off here, we can loosen this up and you can see this aluminium float sleeve that was added in under the nose cap. So this is a very late production example. We have an S in a gear logo, that's indicating a Sako ... barrel. And then a relatively high serial number and 1940 production date here. So this would have been right at the end before they started putting the manufacturing facilities into the M39 rifles. Just an interesting side note because it's present on this rifle, this divot is where the Russian Eagle originally was, the Russian Imperial Eagle marking, on this receiver. Since ... every Finnish Mosin-Nagant is built on a Russian receiver, they would occasionally go in and actually remove or deface that Russian Eagle if they didn't like the idea of Russian markings on a weapon that they are currently using to ... fight the Russians. Now there were also some improvements made to the magazine and the trigger which I can't really show you here, this example actually doesn't have the improved ... magazine. What they did was basically change the pressing style up in the top half of the magazine just to reduce the possibility of rim lock. Which seems to have been a good idea, but not a hugely critical one. So finally all of these different rifle variations got to be a little bit too much, people were tired of dealing with it. And the M39 was developed to unify the Civil Guard and the Army armaments, and get rid of this hodgepodge of different rifles that had been slowly accumulating through the Finnish inventory system. So the M39 would be the final evolution of this design and, pretty much without argument, the best. So a couple of things they did. They took the rear sight from the 28/30, brought it over, but also added a 150 metre marking to it to make it a little bit more useful. They brought in the hinged nose cap from the M27. They got rid of these half a dozen different type of sling varieties by adding a universal set of sling attachments on the M39. And also, maybe most recognisably, added a semi-pistol grip to the design. So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at some of those features. We will start with the rear sight here, as you can see it's the same basic design as the 28/30. We now have that 1.5 marking, so that's going to give you a really nice short range zero when you want it. So that you don't have to try and aim low to make hits at close range. The front sight retains this screw adjustable, dot indexed system also from the 28/30. The nose cap, however, is going to be of the hinged variety ... developed from the M27, so that you can leave the base of the stock in place and take the handguard off. The barrel band is going to be given a spring latch, like say Mauser's, instead of having a cross bolt to hold it in place. So that's going to simplify its removal as well. What you would do is loosen this screw, that releases some of the tension, and then you can push the spring in and slide the barrel band off pretty easily. Now you'll notice here on the barrel band we have two sling swivels, one on the side and one on the bottom. Moving to the buttstock you'll see we have a sling swivel on the bottom, and a sling bar on the side. So between the side mounts and the bottom mounts this allows one standard configuration to accommodate every different style of sling attachment. So they finally get rid of all the variety in that. So one other set of ... standardisations that were made with the M39 relate to the bore itself. There had been a variety of different exact bore diameters, ... land and groove measurements, that had been used on the different previous iterations of Finnish Mosin-Nagant barrels. And they standardised all of that with the M39. They went to a .310 bore which was set up to give optimum accuracy with the Russian manufactured ammunition, which is what Finland had a lot of. And they changed from a 1 in 9.5 to a 1 in 10 inch twist to the rifling. Again these were all set up to address some of the accuracy issues that had been observed using a variety of ammunition in this variety of pre-existing rifles. The stock was generally improved on the M39 in a number of places. The pistol grip added here allows for better control of the rifle. And then the stock in general was thickened and strengthened pretty much everywhere. Thicker back here, thicker at the wrist, ... thicker up at the front. No longer susceptible to cracking and breaking under use with the bayonet. In general, they took all of the complaints that had existed about the pervious rifles, combined them with all of the best elements of each of those previous rifles, and put together the M39 which would be, as I've said, undoubtedly the best Mosin-Nagant version ever made. Now in total they made 96,800 of these rifles between 1940 and 1945. So, more of these than any of the previous versions. They did continue to manufacture a small number of them after the war. Interestingly, in the late 1960s and early '70s they still produced a few of them. Total overall production was 102,000. And these remained in Finnish reserve arsenals for a remarkably long time. The last ones weren't got rid of until actually the year 2000, believe it or not. One caveat I do need to make is of course I have skipped a lot of data. There are a lot of things about markings that I have skipped, a lot of stock variations, things like the splices in the stocks, and one piece versus two piece stocks, and who made the barrels during what time periods. I've skipped some of the very scarce varieties, like the sniper versions of each of these. The M27rv carbines which are ludicrously rare. This is ... long enough as it has been, this is a general overview of Finnish Mosin-Nagants. Every single one of these varieties certainly deserves its own video with even more in-depth information. Now there are some fantastic Finnish rifle (and Mosin-Nagant in general), resources out there. I've got some links in the description text below. So definitely if you are interested in learning more, there is lots more that can be learnt about these, and don't hesitate to check those out. Finnish Mosin-Nagants really, I think, are just a ... fantastic playground for collectors. Not only did they all start as something different, namely Russian Mosin-Nagant rifles, but then as the Winter War and the Continuation War both happened the Civil Guard rifles and the Army rifles got intermingled. Civil Guard rifles were repaired at Army depots. And almost all the parts became in some ways interchangeable and upgradeable. So you'll find older guns with every conceivable version of later hardware added to them. You'll find the pistol grip M39 stocks on any of these. When the original stock broke and it went to the depot and, "What do we have? Well, we have M39 stocks, so we'll put one of those on the rifle and send it back out into the field." In this way they are kind of like World War One French rifles, ... just a huge fantastic variety to choose from. And I think it helps you really get a taste for ... what happens during war time for arsenals like this. At any rate, we have the five here in front of me plus a couple of others that you saw earlier, and there are several others beyond those also in this auction at Rock Island. A whole bunch of M39s in particular, those are of course the most common ones of all of these to find. So, if you are interested in any of the ones we've looked at in the video, take a look at the description text below, I have links there to each particular auction lot. Now these are ... I think in all cases in batches of rifles. So it's not just one, it's four or five or six rifles together. So on Rock Island's catalogue you can take a look at the pictures and description and price estimates for all the guns in each lot. And place bids right there online if you are interested in them. And if you are interested, don't forget to search through the catalogue to find the other examples that they also have that didn't make it into the video. Thanks for watching.

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Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 804,895

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Keywords: mosin, finland, finn, rifle, bolt action, mosin nagant, winter war, continuation was, m91, 91/30, m24, 91/24, m27, m28, m28/30, m39, tikka, vkt, tikkakoski, civil guard, russian, russia, improved, sights, development, history, world war 2, ww2, forgotten, mccollum, inrange, inrangetv, kasarda

Id: 46ZP9XH8bZs

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Length: 36min 56sec (2216 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 22 2017