Schwarzlose 1898 Semiauto Pistol

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm today we have an extremely rare opportunity to take a look at a really cool and very rare early automatic pistol this is a model 1898 Schwarz Llosa standard model between only between 500 and a thousand of these were manufactured they were first patented in 1896 by andreas Schwarz Llosa I'm gonna try and pronounce this correctly this time and production went into well they came on the market in 1898 and they were only being manufactured until about 1905 and like I said only 500 to a thousand ever got manufactured why so few I really don't know I've been trying to figure it out the only answer I can come up with so far is cost they must have been expensive to buy because in almost every way these are frankly close to competitive with modern pistols there are far better guns than say a broom-handle Mauser or a Borchardt or many of the other early prototype semi autos that existed before 1900 this is chambered in 7.62 millimeter Mauser which means we can still shoot it today because we can get this factory ammunition fairly easily it has very actually very well set up controls we have a safety lever on this side in the front up is safe if you're right-handed this drops right under your thumb easy to disengage and we have a manual bolt hold-open on the back which also acts as a slide that's a bolt drop so you can lock the bolt open unload the magazine reload it put a new magazine in drop the bolt stop the bolt drops nicely into place it's a short recoil gun which is empty it's a short recoil gun so when you fire the barrel and the bolt are locked together and reciprocate back about half an inch a little more than half an inch at that point the bolt unlocks and the bolt goes the rest of the way back ejecting the empty case and then coming forward under spring pressure to load a new case has four lug rotating bolt to lock which is a remarkably modern idea and one of the other really cool things about this design is that it only really has one significant spring which does about four different rolls the main spring back here acts as the main recoil spring it acts as the striker spring it acts as the trigger spring and it also acts as the ejector spring really a fantastically clever designed by Schwartz Llosa magazine holds seven rounds one thing I've read but I have not been able to confirm it all is that the German army didn't even look at these closely because they only held seven rounds and at the time the Germans had had doctrinally decided that they only wanted to look at pistols that held eight or more I can't confirm that but I've read that that might explain some of why this pistol didn't get a little more acceptance so the one potential flaw in the design is that there's a bolt on the back we'll see it when we take the gun apart in just a minute and that's what holds everything from coming off the back of the gun when you fire so if the pin holding this in place shears or if this piece cracks and breaks you do have the potential of the bolt coming out the back of the gun and hitting the shooter in the face now a lot of people are going to say obviously that's a huge significant flaw on the other hand consider that the first four or five models of Browning's what became the 1911 also had a very similar flaw to them so I have permission to shoot this one today with the understanding that I am of sound mind and body and that I have inspected this myself I'm confident that this one is in excellent working order and should it actually come back and hit me in the face you'll get some very interesting footage and I promise not to sue the owner so let's go ahead and load it up and take a couple of shots you you so what I really like about this gun a number of things aside from the modernity the the very simple and elegant design to it the controls work but the grip just fits my hand fantastically well and the sights come right up into alignment when I bring the gun up to eye level which is something that a lot of modern pistols don't pull off well but 1898 Shivaji Llosa had this down it's a remarkably mild pistol compared to a lot you know broom-handle Mauser 's for example have a very high bore axis and they tend to have a lot of muzzle flip to them this is a very comfortable gun to shoot I'm going to go ahead and reload the mag and put a couple more through it you'll notice I did have malfunction in there the occasional double feed in this particular one I should point out this particular gun is serial number one the original example most of these what's interesting apparently a small number were sold to the Boers in South Africa who are big fans of German automatic pistols by 1905 there is still a significant surplus of these pistols that had been manufactured but hadn't been sold to anybody and apparently what happened is they were actually sold in bulk basically wholesale to get rid of the stock to Russian revolutionaries in 1905 this isn't not the Communist revolution but folks who were active during the russo-japanese war well the shipment got to Russia and it got inspected at the border and customs decided that sending 500 or a thousand pistols to a bunch of political adversaries wasn't a fantastic idea so they confiscated the batch and apparently they all got issued to Russian police and border guards so the most common place you'll actually find these today is in Russia oddly let's put a couple more rounds through it you you you you you'll notice it locks open on an empty magazine just like a modern pistol it's a very controllable gun there's not much flip to it this is just a fantastic pistol I really wish I knew why these things didn't get more more purchase more sales more popularity when they were new I also kind of wish someone would manufacture reproductions of them today because I'd love to have one of these myself the Schwarz Louis is a reasonably simple pistol in construction it's a little bit complicated to disassemble though so let's go through exactly how we do this first off of course we're going to take out the magazine it's a really cool magazine actually it has this magazine actually has a totally round normal coil spring as magazine spring which is why it's got this big round area at the front it's just a regular cylindrical round spring in there anyway the charging handles on this thing are designed not to be grabbed but to use two fingers to hook over like this like this and pull back and then this rear lever is our manual hold open to me I have the bolt all the way back so I lock that up that locks the bolt open it does also lock open on an empty magazine and dropping that allows the bolt to close our front lever is our safety so when it's down it's ready to fire when it's up it's on safe you can see that the trigger doesn't operate this is also our disassembly lever so disassembly is the bit here that's a little bit tricky we need to make sure that the pistol is cocked which it is and then the manual actually shows this you hook one finger around the rear sight like this and you pull back about 15 millimeters and then we can and we get to the right position pop that loose we can rotate this there we go can rotate this lever around to the front and then guests said this is the kind of tricky part once it's in the right position drop out and the firing pin the striker snaps down so now that we have this little guy out we can go ahead and take the whole slide assembly it just slides right off the frame we'll get to that in a moment but first let's take a look at the frame itself here so we've got a nice set of rails that everything runs on this is actually our extract or our ejector so the bolt runs in this runs on top of this curved piece here when it goes back it pushes this guy up which acts to kick the case out of the ejection port this is also our magazine hold open this is also our magazine hold open so you'll see when I lift this lever up this gets lifted up that locks the bolt in place our trigger is very simple it's just a upward pushing cam there so that's pretty much it the frame is pretty simple there we can actually pull out the magazine release quite easily these two bits just come right out so that's our hold open and that is our ejector put these back in I just put this pin hole in the pin there and then these slide right in a little farther in guys there we go now one thing to be aware of is that one of the shortcomings of this design kind of like some of the early Colts in practical effect is that this loop is the only thing that holds the slide on when you fire so it's held in place by a cross pin here there it is on the other side if that pin shears or if this piece shears right there this can snap off and it'll send the slide flying back into the shooters face not a good idea that's really just about the only problem mechanically and technically speaking on this gun so let's take a look at the slide because that's where all the action is going on all right so here's our entire slide assembly going to pull the recoil spring out and we have a firing pin and extractor firing pin is pretty simple there's one solid piece it's got a track there which it acts as a key way in the back of the frame you can see there's that key there so the firing pin can only sit in it the proper way so this is our extractor the extractor claw itself is actually this little guy right up there and the way this works is that it's simply get the right side here drops through the firing pin like this and it's just mechanical pressure on the spring so the mainspring is actually also tensioning this extractor so pretty simple system and obviously extremely easy to replace we'll come back to that in a moment now our slide and bolt these come apart this is the front half this is a short recoil design so the first bit of firing contracts this big hefty spring and this goes back about half an inch that is what absorbs a lot of the energy while pressure is still high in the barrel and you'll notice we have a four lug rotating bolt system the front here so this is our actual bolt body it's got the locking lugs at the front it's got the locking lugs at the front there it's a track for having access to the firing pin grasping handles pretty simple it's hollow inside so here's a neat safety feature you can see there's this color on the firing pin which sets how far the pin protrudes from the bolt face but it also has this raised section right here what that does is prevent the gun from firing out of battery so you can see right there the firing pin is protruding forward so it's ready to fire if however the bolt is rotated so see we know because of this key way that the firing pin has to be facing this direction so if the bolt is not rotated into battery that little raised surface sits inside the bolt prevents the firing pin from surfacing which prevents it from firing out of battery it can only protrude and fire like this once the bolt has rotated enough that these locking lugs are fully locked so our lockup is simply like that and then the bolt rotates so there's our lockup and then the bolt rotates just slightly counterclockwise to unlock so the whole thing travels together for about half an inch then a cam in the frame opens this up the front half the barrel stops the bolt itself continues to go back under spring pressure ejects the cartridge then comes forward chambers new cartridge and when it's all the way forward it rotates into battery so you can see when I hold tension on the mainspring here our extractor is under spring pressure so normally when this is in the gun this surface is going to be pushed up against the inside of the chamber and that's going to hold nice solid tension on the extractor on the case head you alright guys I hope you enjoyed the video I am absolutely thrilled to have been able to actually try shooting one of these things it always looked like a really good pistol you know what it's every bit as good as it looks like hopefully maybe someone will decide to purchase to manufacture reproductions of these if not thank you very much to steve friend who let me shoot this very graciously and tune back into forgotten weapons comm for more early automatic pistols

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 645,914

Rating: 4.9164033 out of 5

Keywords: Schwarzlose, 1898, firing, shooting, disassembly, slow motion, high speed, rotating bolt, handgun, pistol, Germany, Russia, 7.63mm, Mauser, Schwarzlose Model 1898, Semi-automatic Pistol, automatic, self loading, export, military

Id: rYl0dQAJMh4

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Mon May 04 2015