Mauser C96 “Broomhandle”

uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] chaser [Music] [Music] so if you've ever loved an old gun just because it felt right to you go ahead and hit that subscribe button guys like and comment comment with what your favorite old firearm is mine is of course the mauser c96 guys if you are looking to support the channel the biggest support of the channel right now is big and daddy unlimited big daddy limits like the costco the gun world 99 cents for the first month after that price goes up is it worth it well are you worth it of course we have some other sponsors of this particular video we have the dude bag big shout out to them a subscription service for those friends of yours where you don't know what to get them of course we have the sonoran desert institute if you want to learn how to be a gunsmith kind of get into the gun industry if you want to do that as a living that is a good start for sure ladies and gentlemen my often forgotten but most certainly not by me luger pistols welcome to the channel today we're going to be talking about a very cool pistol and that is going to be the mouser c96 broom handle uh quite a famous handgun instantly recognizable um what's not to love about it now my particular model is an m30 and we'll talk more to that but before we do as we always do full disclosure what is my relationship with mouser nothing um you know the company doesn't make this anymore so i really have no inclination to give this a good or a bad rating rather we're just going to talk a little bit about it because this for a long time has just been a firearm that i've always wanted to have so i've had about two years of shooting this and messing with it to finally kind of get this review done so before we kind of get further into it i want to talk a little bit about thank yous a big thank you to pnw northwest for allowing us to film with using their their reenactors as extras and of course allowing us to use their trench system they're totally awesome if you want to go check them out we'll have the link right below on their instagram they are good people in any case getting into it what is the mouser the mouser is a short recoil operated semi automatic 10 round internal magazine chambered in either typically 7.63 by 25 mauser or 9 millimeter there of course were other calibers that the mousers were made in but those were the primary ones now what's enough really interesting about the mauser is that the mauser is one of the very early semi-automatic handguns to have ever been fielded um it's for that reason that you have a lot of kind of design features that aren't so much used uh anymore but still given that they didn't know what the [ __ ] they were doing it's very interesting what they came up with and the design that we have unwieldy by today's standards absolutely but back then this was certainly a force multiplier for whomever owned it so this pistol was designed in 1896 not to get too far into it because i am not forgotten weapons but that being said um you have to imagine for the time of revolvers and other early firearms at the time that a semi-automatic design was quite forward thinking especially at a time when rifles were bolt action primarily or lever action that a semi-automatic weapon was a huge full force multiplier to have and in fact many people ended up purchasing these privately of course they were used by some militaries but by and far you had officers and other people purchasing these and using them on their own accord because of course most famously we had winston churchill lawrence of arabia all using the c96 mauser this was used on all sides of the conflict during world war one of course it is most famously associated with the german government at a time when they were just trying to get their hands on any pistols but in any case we're not going to get too far into that because i mostly want to focus on what is it like to shoot what is the operating mechanism how does it even work uh and just talk a little bit about that and how odd it is of a handgun now to start off with we're going to do what we always do we're gonna go tip to butt so to start off with the very front of the muzzle here guys of the mauser c96 you'll notice that there isn't any bluing on that and the reason for that is the bluing process from what i understand did not allow that very end of the muzzle to be blue because of that you'll have a typically in the white muzzle kind of a little interesting fact there now if you're the end of your muscle is blue either you have some type of patina or more typically you have a re-blood mouser not that there's any problem with that now we get to make an entire video on all of the different variations of the mauser pistol that were designed and you know that's kind of not exactly what we're going for here so we're not going to get too far into it other than to say that there are tons and tons of different variations of this handgun now my particular version is an m30 seems to be a very early one it can be difficult at times to specifically identify what type of mauser you have and the reason for that is there was so much variation and in addition to that many of the records at the mauser factory were destroyed during world war ii so because of that it can be very difficult to find out other than to say that it is incredibly likely that this particular model which was made in germany found its way into china and the reason for that is the side of the barrel does have chinese stampings it was not made for china but it seems to be that it was imported through there and then via china ended up in the united states at some point now another very interesting point about the mauser is that they came in typically two calibers that we talked about 7.63 by 25 and of course nine millimeter which we all know now this particular handgun started its life as a 7.63 by 25 mauser and i want to talk a little bit about that cartridge because it is actually fairly interesting it itself borrowed from another cartridge design but that cartridge eventually became the very famous talker of ammo that is used by many soviet military weapons such as the ppsh-41 and the tt-33 so there are definitely countries that saw merit in the design of that particular cartridge but suffice to say that the 7.63 by 25 mauser was actually a pretty hot round it had a lot of umph a lot of energy behind it and was actually pretty ballistically good as far as even today's standards go so you can see that having a handgun like this with a again 10 round magazine and a fairly powerful cartridge made for a fairly potent weapon because again at a time when most rifles held five rounds of course of full powered rifle ammunition this was very easily maneuverable and easy to use in close quarters and it's for that reason that it proved immensely popular when it was first released now of course by the time world war one rolled around especially world war ii there were clearly handguns that were better than this particular weapon um there are a lot of very interesting design features of this weapon that are kind of not necessarily not used in current production models of handguns that kind of led to some reliability problems and that's not to say that the broom handled mauser is a unreliable weapon but rather to say that further pistols such as the luger and the 1911 and the browning high power proved to be superior designs to this and that's not in any way disparaging the design but rather to say that firearm technology of course progressed now on my particular version you do see the hand the grips that say red nine the cindy reproduction uh this weapon at some point was rebored to nine millimeter and it does work fine the one thing i did do on this particular weapon was to replace the springs now if you look through different types of mauser forms and talk to people who really love these weapons and i had the very wonderful opportunity to talk to many of these people that these weapons are very robust and i hate to say it but the term they don't make them like they used to kind of does apply very good steel was used very good manufacturing techniques um it is a very solid pistol that brings us into the weight it is two pounds and eight ounces so that is a very thick boy so you should definitely weigh something but that definitely helps control because although you know we don't have massive cartridges being pushed out of here like 50 action express or 44 magnum the action sits very high over your hand and as you can see right here we have the bolt let's see here which is moving over your hand every time you're firing that weapon because of that kind of where your axis of recoil is is high above your hand because of that this weapon does have a tendency you want to push up a little bit but due to the very odd balance with the weight by being primarily forward especially when you have a the internal magazine filled with rounds um it's really not that hard to control it does have a fairly pleasant recoil there are a lot of things that go into it but the mauser is a very interesting gun so let's get into it here um as far as the barrel is concerned again i can't speak too much to the accuracy of the original weapons as this one has been counterbored other than to say that many people have noted how accurate they are now on mine which is counterbored it is phenomenally accurate i was easily surprisingly able to make shots well out to 80 and 100 meters with this particular handgun of course adding a shoulder sock makes this a much more capable weapon and that is one very interesting point about this weapon is that in many ways it seemed to have been designed to have been a kind of pistol caliber carbine first in a pistol second the shoulder sock fits right into there i unfortunately do not have one but it makes it for a very interesting very compelling design but in any case this is a fairly accurate weapon from what i've seen and i've been very happy with the accuracy um there are a couple things that play into making this a not very shootable weapon but as far as strict accuracy is concerned it does pretty well now moving from the barrel we do have the sights right here so the sights are very they're not great to be honest so we have a fixed front sight post and then we have a tangent rear sight so we can go anywhere from 50 meters on our ranging all the way out to a very optimistic 1000. if you can imagine shooting a thousand meters with a 7.62 by 23 mauser you're a hell of a shot right there but it is certainly on there and uh it it's just an interesting little piece of history right there but in any case um the red nines were from went out to 500 as opposed to a thousand the more potent powerful 7.63 by 25 mauser so that's kind of an interesting little footnote here and another problem that kind of comes into the shootability of the mauser are the sights themselves by modern standards this weapon's pretty f pretty horrible it's pretty bad and the reason for that is that the rear notch is so microscopically thin that it obscures literally everything when you're aiming it now the good thing about that is when you're lined up on your target and when you finally do manage to line up that front post with that rear notch you're pretty much dead on the money so once you have your good shot in place you're going to make a good shot but actually lining up those sights is not great um and it's for that reason that kind of slows you down trying to shoot this at speed i find myself just kind of more point shooting with it when i was shooting with it which is of course fun but the sites still work and again they are very accurate it's just they're not very user friendly by any standards and that is very true with pretty much any old firearm out there now another interesting note here and this is mostly for the mauser guys out there as far as identification of uh kind of late mausers is you can see the stepped barrel where you can see it's not smooth all the way to the end rather it steps down onto that so there's another indication of a kind of later production mauser there but we don't get too much into that you know what surprised me most about the mauser when i first picked it up the first time was i was sure that i had in some way fake or reproduction parts on my gun because i was not familiar with mauser designs as they kind of look new this is a fairly good kind of um it's in good shape right so i hadn't really seen a lot of mausers that were in good shape and the first thing i noticed was on the extractor and on the rear sight leaf and on the bolt stop right here that they had a very uh i would call like an electric kind of heat treated blue like almost like turquoise a very vibrant blue and this also included the trigger as well where the the trigger is of course a little bit dulled given time and usage and that type of thing but it also had that very kind of electric blue color and i was kind of surprised i was like well clearly um you know somebody [ __ ] up here because these don't seem to be uh you know the normal pieces and that also includes the safety as well but i was very surprised by reading up on the history of mauser that actually these parts were in the white and were heat treated which gave him that kind of electric blue color and it was actually left on as kind of a little bit of flare so even back in the late 1800s our boys are still pimping back then i think that's a really cool on a cool little piece of history something that might have been forgotten had i not uh not forgotten but something that i personally would not have known had i had not gotten a pistol in such good a shape so that is a very kind of cool little piece of it now moving back here of course we have our bolt and everything up going on here we have our entire upper now what's interesting is the bolt's not going to travel travel rearward until the entirety of the upper actually pushes back a little bit and unlocks and allows it to push back it's a very complicated design if uh if you ever take a mauser apart i'd highly recommend looking at ian from forgotten weapons or cnr arsenal or one of those guys to kind of take a look at that but when you take these apart um they're just they're they're held together by magic german forces they're i don't exactly know how they work it's like a compression you know pressure fit together it's a very odd very brilliant design but nonetheless very odd but in any case once this kind of goes back that unlocks the bolt and allows it to cycle and then you have your shot and you eject the cartridge and you load your next one the internal box magazine holds 10 there were of course mousers that had detox detachable magazines there were ones that had 20 round internal magazines six round internal magazines there are lots of different models of mauser but the 10 is kind of the more common one now to release the bolt there's no really good way to do that other than to get possibly mouse or finger by putting your finger into that follower depressing it and allowing that bolt to drop now that brings us down until reloading to reload this what you're going to do is you're going to use a stripper clip you're going to push it in i have a couple videos right here me doing it it's kind of hard to say how easy or or difficult it would have been because quite frankly the guns hold the stripper clips are old and it's hard to say with any certainty how smooth they were when they were in new production certainly with these older guns they can feed okay or they can feed very poorly i'm sure on newer productions and people with really good examples could probably speak a little bit better to the to it other than to say that if you're going to be reloading this weapon in the heat of battle you certainly require um quite a bit of skills and time on this weapon to ensure that you're not going to [ __ ] it up as far as topping it off that'd be pretty difficult you can do it by holding the bolt to the rear and feeding one rounded at a time it is difficult again this came down to how much you practice with this particular weapon all right moving back from there we do have some controls right here so we have our safety and we have our hammer right here so we do have a new safety on this which what that means is to engage the safety i pull back on the hammer and then i can push that safety forward to engage it at that point the weapon cannot discharge if i need to then put that weapon on fire push that safety down and my weapon is ready to fire so again a little bit different than some of the earlier ones again there were many changes made to that design throughout time and same with the hammer as well a very interesting thing to me about the mauser is that the grip is very very small so you know trying to grip this gun as a modern man i guess um i i find my fingers very crowded very crunched into there i can't quite get my finger all the way up into there it's very uncomfortable i imagine there were smaller people back then it's just the way kind of the human race has been going been getting bigger and bigger but you can certainly feel that when gripping the weapon as well the these little tabs at the back right there are quite uncomfortable and kind of pinch your hand when you when you kind of grip it so it's not a particularly uh ergonomic weapon to to to hold but that being said the grip itself is actually a fairly good angle i do find the weapon to be very pointable it very naturally points in the direction that you wanted to which can't be said of every weapon like modern glocks for example and you know we've kind of avoided it for long enough so we are going to ghost that trigger as we always do but that being said um these weapons are old um dry firing isn't that great for them even with snap caps so i'm going to be very gentle on this i am going to kind of block the hammer there as i release it so we'll kind of do our best to talk to the trigger a little bit as we can without letting it kind of fall as it naturally should so kind of bear with me as i kind of work through that because i know it's not kind of the most uh you know aesthetically pleasing way to fire this weapon but we do want to treat these things with respect and care because there are future generations that will want to be able to have the get their hands on these in working condition so we do need to treat them well i say that as i shoot a [ __ ] ton around through it but in any case let's go ahead and go set trigger together so feeling into it you do have quite a bit of play like a solid i wanna say probably five millimeters of play before we hit our first wall it's kind of it's smooth and tough about about seven pounds before we have our let off right there you could see the light off as it kind of blocked trigger there let's fill that one more time so cocking the hammer back once more yeah so that's about a feels to be let's say about an eight pound pole or so it actually does feel pretty good um strictly speaking i really have no problem with it now as far as feeling that reset it's a bit of a [ __ ] to do it on this particular weapon but i'll do anything for you guys so feeling that reset right now right there least that's pretty short actually overall the trigger is okay it's not phenomenal compared to something like a luger or especially in 1911 or those early times those were certainly better designs but that being said i find the trigger on the mauser c96 to be better than many modern firearms in many many ways so you get there's a lot of good things to be said about it and that kind of brings us to the end of the bowser you know overall the recoil is kind of odd it's a very odd impulse because it is higher but again due to the weight of the weapon and how that weight is forward it is fairly controllable um the cycling is a little bit terrifying due to how many pieces have to kind of come together to make this thing fully kind of work together and i could see how it kind of jammed up in the mud of the trenches and the dust of saudi arabia and those types of areas but i mean overall what we have here is a very interesting very cool piece of history that kind of details the evolution of semi-automatic weapons and we have a lot to owe to these and many other designs out there and it's for that reason that i have a great fondness for the c96 both due to the aesthetics and the looks i don't think any pistol looks as good nowadays as these older weapons did but they're just very interesting designs if there's anything i could say i understand that they are expensive but if you're able to get your hands on a weapon like this and and own one as a very cool piece of history for your family i would highly recommend it so guys get out there and train with these here's the thing if you guys don't get trained you're still gonna suck with these if anybody takes a mouse or broom handle to a travis haley class i will pay for your class promise but they are cool little designs but the fact the matter is is what matters most is training get out there get training do good things hailey strategic cog works bear solutions tons of great guys out there check them out make yourself the weapon ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for watching i've got nothing else for you all right last thing for you guys um i always do these off the cuff but generally what i want to say is to once again look at your time and be very careful with it because to reiterate time is the most important resource that you have please be careful with it spend it wisely because you'll never get it back ladies and gentlemen you know if you have made it this far survival dispatch survival dispatch is a repository of survival information get in there check them out big thank you to them of course a big thank you to my patreons you guys rock i love you i've got nothing else for you guys so you

Channel: Garand Thumb

Views: 310,892

Rating: 4.9765935 out of 5

Keywords: garand, thumb, garand thumb, C96, WW1, BROOMHANDLE, MAUSER, battlefield 1, battlefield v, mauser c96 review, mauser review, battlefield v mauser, flannel daddy, garand thumb ww1 movie, garand thumb world war 1 movie, world war movie, war movie, army, navy, veteran, marines, air force, military, pew, pewtube, youtube, videos, entertainment, entertrainment, battlefield, war, content creator, review, the dude bag, dude bag, leviathan, leviathan group, onward, onward research, big daddy unlimited

Id: WMdjYkuF1TA

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/hannan4728_khan]

Does anyone know the music in the video? At the start when the camera pans to the gun and mouser comes on screen.

[u/fast_hand84]

The production value is incredible.

Also, GT looks hilarious in that hat.

[u/revolution-time]

Fun fact, I’m in this video.