Small Arms of WWI Primer 063: U.S. Krag–Jørgensen Model 1898

despite years of fair warning the United States of America was still caught short on equipment when entering the war in 1917 and so would have to drag along old firearms with the new including its first smokeless repeating rifle [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this this is the US magazine rifle model 1898 the crag or Genson a gun that we did on whether or not we were going to cover because we still need to prove that it actually made it to the war obviously we have something to tell you by the end of this episode in the meantime let's go ahead and get this into the light box with an overall length of forty nine point one inch this is a big rifle and it weighs in at 9.2 pounds not exactly a light one either has a magazine capacity of five rounds fed through what is actually a capsule feed this is 3040 Krag more on that at the moment now every time we do a more popular well-recognized rifle or pistol or whatever we end up with new viewers people who have not necessarily come in from one of the earlier episodes in the series and so if you were just sort of fresh to what's going on I don't have a precursor episode specific to this gun but you're gonna have to catch up with the flow of things and as part of that we almost never talk about the guns and so couldn't Lord 1/4 the way in half way in because we need contextual history and for that we're gonna have to introduce ourselves to a couple of Norwegians this is Colonel ol a Herman johan's Craig and he was born in vaga Norway I can't pronounce anything Norwegian so I apologize in advanced unlike many families of gunsmiths Krag senior was actually a priest oleh would study at the Royal Institute of Art and Design where he learned drafting skills he also enrolled in the War College in 1854 graduating to join the infantry in 1857 as a second lieutenant by 1864 he had risen to first lieutenant and transferred to the artillery in 1868 he would become an inspection officer at Kongsberg Arms Factory in 1880 having risen to captain he would become the factory superintendent for the same now Craig had been the arms designer for a number of years although not always with success however his co.design crag peterson tubular feed rifle had been adopted by the norwegian navy in 1876 a very early adoption for a repeating design all right that's got us Craig what about the Jurgen Synanon and in a bit well that's another guys I actually have fewer details on Eric here but he was born in 1848 and after completing elementary school trained under the famous gunsmith Hans Larsen from 1865 to 1870 from there he was employed again by the Kongsberg Arms Factory likely as a trade intern and this is obviously where he would meet Oh a crag and they became friends in 1872 he passed his military Armorer's exam and would serve with the Smolensk battalion in Fredrikstad starting in 1875 there he would also open his own small workshop and patent a hunting rifle of his own design in 1878 in 1882 he returned to Kongsberg Arms Factory this time rising to the position of chief Armour alright we got our two stars Olli and Eric and they are now discussing basically the future of rifle technology I mean they're both involved in military arms and manufacture and design and the obvious question is time is sort of that toe into the repeating rifle world and in a lot of cases we're seeing tube-fed rifles no tubular magazines have problems they're easily damaged they throw off the balance of the rifle they throw off sort of the precise impact point as they come back it changes your barrel harmonics we've gone over all this especially and our just last episode with the 1895 water gun now the ideal is to centrally locate your magazine down the middle of the gun this man in fact let me grab a fairly early magazine repeater austro-hungarian and again we've covered this gun but we now have a magazine here sort of situated just in front of the trigger guard very central very balanced to the gun so that way if we add or subtract ammo it does not change the balance of the gun it does not change the harmonics of the barrel every shot first to last is going to hit at the same point the only problem is when we're dealing with these at this time especially with single stacks and large cartridges well they got to go somewhere and when we put them centrally we have to sort of extend this magazine downward later we'll see staggered flush but staggered flush also limits you because you still eventually run out of rounds or you have to go down down the action of the gun and would it be nice if we could get like ten rounds sticking out and then instead of having it press its way all the way you know down where you can't get prone it's all in your way it's horrible awkward banging you in the kidney when you're carrying it well if we took that action just made it malleable and just wrapped it around the gun so let's imagine the magazine started here on the side and stuck out and we took that and folded around like a Mesa taco shell and then boom that was our magazine just wrapped around the action well that's the idea that they had and so they developed the capsule magazine I should say this is a five-round or not a ten rounder and so this is a half capsule more on that in a moment realistically it would just continue that snail spiral around the gun now at this point these guys have only designed a magazine not a rifle so around the same time 1886 Denmark is looking for a new repeating magazine rifle and they're starting to fish around they've got open trials and these guys say well we'd like to show them our magazine so we're gonna need to put it on a gun and besides they need to test it so they fitted it to the then-current technology which was the Jarmon rifle so they take the Jarman with it's capsule magazine of their own design ten rounder at that time and they show it to the Danes and actually interestingly the Danish really liked the magazine system but they don't care much for the Darmon rifle and they also don't really care much for the hole size of this thing they're going we don't really need ten rounds so badly that we have to go through this whole weird construction it's very complicated it's very bulky let's cut in half do us a five router just up underneath and around okay and then for that we also need it to be attached to a more normal rifle we're not doing the German it's not advanced enough and as a matter of fact while these trials are going on we have the lapel and smokeless ammo show up so the you know Denmark's going to an eight millimeter and we're gonna do a whole separate history on that not for one row one guys they were a neutral power but we'll get beyond World War one one thing so anyway short story version is that Denmark said we want X Y & Z can you deliver it in a gun and instead of like licensing some other design Erich and Ola it actually got together and sort of did an amalgam they took a bunch of ideas like we saw with the German Commission 88 they took a brunch ideas and melded them into one unique action a rifle that was designed just to promote their magazine which is fantastic because since it was built to spec on what the the Danish wanted then the Danish just adopted they were like this is it we just had a tailor ordered gun and so that results in this the Danish 1889 rifle let's get it over lightbox we are not shooting it however now this is a long gun at fifty two point four inches and weighing in at nine point four pounds chambers the 8 by 58 millimeter rimmed cartridge and like I said five of them in that half capsule magazine now again we are not firing this rifle there's just not enough time this is going to be a very big episode as it is and besides it really deserves its own feature pleasant one at the funny ammo right now no we still have to take a look though because it's an evolutionary step towards our gun today so let me get this guy out of the way set her aside and then everything's secure not about to fall over on to me we'll go ahead and get closer look at the first military crag Jorgenson alright what we got is a bolt-action magazine-fed rifle now a couple things for you that are familiar with the Craig Ferguson you're gonna notice let me get my patented plastic pokey we've got the gate opening forward this is actually by special request I've been doing some reading they were probably planning on trying to use some sort of quick feed system and it never really materialized again we'll get a whole other episode on that now once we close that guy a follower is gonna wrap all the way around and up to here the ammo feeds from the side making a very smooth action you don't really feel yourself picking up each round the system is very good at feeding rimmed ammunition so no problems with binding there as we close this bolt unique to the Danish crown it's getting 90 degree angle throat so we're up and then we're down at 90 degree angle and we're sticking straight out on our bolt handle slightly swept back neat little system this is going to change as we'll see with the US now as for locking this is one of the sort of quoted weaknesses of the Krag action which is that they have a single locking lug here and as a matter of fact let's go ahead and just get this bolt out to do that I'm gonna pull it back lift up on the extractor and then twist and pull and we're clear very gentle process easy to do once you sort of got the unusual hang of it but placing that back just so we can see that's it that's our single front locking walk there's no others up there and then when we actually close up the action we're relying on the bolt handle as a safety log I'm not sure that was actually a machine to really carry a lot of weight but interestingly the guide rib again link at this you know I said get it out of the way this guide rib here that would be going through that opening at the top of the receiver that rib will turn down in front of receiver and act as a secondary lug so in a way the Danish Krag is multiple logs it's got one and two and a third safety but the interesting thing is your safety and your second lug are right in a line and they're only 90 degrees off from this one so that means that all the torque on this gun when fired is on the right and bottom side you're gonna get some sort of receiver twisting over time if you really start putting high loads in these and again it's just it's not the strongest possible system however I will say at that time this was perfectly acceptable for the pressure they were dealing with we're not talking about high-speed Spitzer's that we'll see in a moment this is good for its day it's certainly within a margin of safety and the guns ran for quite a long time it's not something any mocked it's built to the correct specifications for that time and a lot of it by the way is because Krag and your Genson thought well if we add all this extra locking surface we're wasting material and we're wasting machine time and we're adding weight to the gun this is efficiency it's planned you can laugh a bit about it when you understand ammo to come but for the time perfectly good alright that out of the way look back at the gun again wrap around magazines probably easier from diagrams to see them from this but also early to these guns a magazine cutoff right here this lever controls whether or not there's a block sitting right here at the rhythm magazine preventing the next round from actually getting far enough over to be picked up by the bolt on the feed so magazine cut off very important this time as people really didn't believe in those I don't really want to get into the extra features of this gun like sighting and yadda-yadda because realistically that's not the episode wrong today I just want to point out this safety here was added after the fact in 1910 it was not only original gun the original gun actually had a half cocked position safety and that was the military safety at this time for a Marshall Krag until as we're gonna see it was shown to other armies and they requested other features now again this is an amalgam rifle we've got the extractor and overhead general shape of the gun comes from the Jarmon the [ __ ] on open action and the sort of forward locking lug setup even though it's half is probably donated over from the Mauser it has its own unique magazine system all the features we talked about and then interestingly on the Danish Craig specifically it's got a barrel jacket from Armand amides we talked about that in our old Gewehr 88 episode so clear some room and there we go I can put this kind of way because we're not doing him we're going back for 1898 and it takes us a little while to get here because at the time that the beans were working with the Krag the US well we were still hauling around single-shot Springfield rifles yes who needs a repeating magazine small bore when you've got a beautiful single shot large bore black powder trapdoor rifle I think we might have been a little bit behind guys but that would start to change as seen by this 1887 report from the chief of ordnance the question of reduced caliber for small arms is now under consideration by the Department there is a movement in that direction both here and abroad and while the present caliber meets the demands of the service in a very satisfactory manner and was adopted 15 years ago after extended tests involving combinations of charge of powder weights of bullet numbering character of grooves and degree of twist it is thought that a further examination and report will be of great interest to the service now some of you might have caught that no mention of a repeating rifle just maybe we should get around to small bore in 1887 a year that the French are dropping smokeless powder repeaters and just everybody's going nuts so obviously the u.s. is a bit delayed to the party you can just considering single shot small board alright now this is interesting because commercially the US has a beautiful gun industry and is actually pretty far ahead of the curve but the military is just dragging and it's easy to mock that to sort of be like I can't believe we weren't ahead and of course we weren't Bhabha here's the thing the US government in military at that time are nothing like the ones that we see today in especially the sort of financially conservative penny-pinching why would we and they may not even be wrong the Springfield trapdoor was definitely outdated even by this point I'm not gonna argue that but the US wasn't really getting into a big conflict with a foreign power in their minds like they weren't planning on it they didn't know what was on the horizon so they thought of themselves as a frontier army that means you have to pack in every round you shoot now that's a pretty good argument for small-bore ammo because you get more ammo for less weight but it's not a good argument for a repeating rifle because the last thing they want to do is waste ammo I mean most conflicts in the American West really came down to your ability to sort of sustain siege that means you got to keep enough food on hand and therefore you don't want to waste food space with enough space and you got to keep that ammo on hand so you can withstand days of fighting you see where I'm going with this like you got a pack in every single bullet and you've got to take your time with every single shot and so the u.s. developed a marksmanship culture around one shot one kill that's the way we and a smaller force survives a larger one it's not an insane situation now second to that by accident of thriftiness the u.s. is also skipping a lot of headache because as we have seen in other episodes many countries went rushing to the repeating craze and then just got a repeater in time for smokeless to come out or just got a small-bore in time for repeaters to get popular or what everybody sort of made these stumble steps where they spend a lot of money and a lot of effort and a lot of reacquaint just to be outdated three years later so the one good thing is that the u.s. is coming very late to the party we are going to adopt a repeating small-bore smokeless rifle after everybody else has worked out the kinks and boy those are some kinks heck let's look at austria-hungary who had to like change cartridges four times in order to go from the 86 all the way to the 1895 constantly rearming a massive massive army that was a huge huge wasted effort again we have episodes on all this so when you get some time if you need to review go for it and even once the u.s. started looking around at the new cartridges just because smokeless was developed remember 1887 is when the sort of maybe we should go to small bore in the minute that's being said smokeless drops that's gonna make you go back in or what's coming up next wait we don't want to over commit and then reasonably smokeless is amazing there's no reason to not go smokeless powder except for the part where you can't get any like it's brand-new a couple of people make it it's inconsistent you don't have a steady supply nobody will give you the formula to make it at home that requires a fair amount of research and so the u.s. went in big toe first and then sort of tripped in and they went to the right source because they started by visiting Switzerland and looking at a seven point seven millimeter cartridge presented by one very intelligent man that we've heard of before Edouard Rubin that was a Swiss military engineer responsible for inventing the full-metal-jacket and methodically developing a testing small bore ammunition at a time when big bore was the ticket especially improving that ammunition after the French dropped smoke was powder into the game this guy is the father of what we consider to be the modern military cartridge and Springfield had decided that this is where they were get their information now as I said the guys from the Springfield Armory in the US I'd like to do the history of that armory but there's a lot of squeeze into this and there's some earlier guns we'll get to it post-war I'll see you guys know where Springfield is and actually recommend a visit if you get the chance but anyway Springfield works with the Swiss like I said they were curious about the 7.7 millimeter cartridge they had because reasonably to the US perspective it was just heavy enough just hard-hitting enough and you could still get going pretty fast that's probably where we're gonna call the line that the only problem is we're not really good at this fancy base 10 counting system can't you guys do something more sensitive where we got that divided by 12 so we're gonna call that point 3-inch and that's where the US starts with the 30 count now an experimental cartridge or two were handy with Springfield but they weren't refined yet because again the question of can we get reliable powder can we refine the process for producing these jacketed bullets all these little details well that wasn't their cup of tea they were trying to pick a rifle and cartridge system they needed to guarantee production of a cartridge so they turned over to the Frankfort Arsenal and said can you guys sort out what the heck we're doing with this ammo now Frankfurt's goal was to reach a muzzle velocity of 2,000 feet per second with a 220 to 230 grain projectile through a 30 inch barrel pressure was not to exceed 45 thousand psi and in order to do this they would go ahead and start experimenting with basically everything they could get their hands on in terms of powder bullet weights jacket technology things like that this would settle into a basic cartridge pretty quickly but there were still some tweaks in the works the biggest undecided factor was whether or not to go with rimless ammunition rimmed ammo is a lot simpler to set headspace on your rifle because it's just the thickness of the rim between the bolt face and the barrel to account for it's also generally easier on extraction rimless ammo had spaces off the shoulder of the cartridge meaning more care is needed in the manufacturer but it also generally feeds better in repeating mechanisms and later on we'll see that it's much better in Auto loaders that wasn't really a factor at this time though for the US now instead of making up their mind before trying the guns they realized that the rifle itself would have a lot to say about which is easier to use and so both types of ammo rimmed and rimless were used throughout the rifle trial process so with a pair of possible cartridges in hand it was time to actually do some experimenting and the US Army would convene a board for the selection of a new magazine arm in November of 1890 and to that effect they wanted to look at a lot of different guns there'd be over 50 designs submitted but I think we should kind of focus down on those designs that were already a military service somewhere else in the world proven designs remember the marksman centered US wanted an emphasis on singular loading the magazine was just for reserve just for emergencies to halt breakthroughs cavalry charges etc so the army board divided this group into two major categories based on how the magazines worked those that can only load single cartridges when the magazine is empty and those that can single load on the fly otherwise known as guns with magazine cut-offs so this eliminated quite a few off the bat goodbye mon liquors two very neat and Mosin I'll also go ahead and say the US wasn't super into tubular magazines as they affected balance so bye-bye Crowe Patrick and Morada now a lot of these guns and still some really wild designs from the US itself from the commercial sector I'd really like to talk about them all again time limits a lot of these made it all the way through the trials process and did well in their own right a lot of them were chambered for the new experimental cartridges both rimmed in done room but we're gonna see sort of narrowed down to one obviously now I should also mention that while this is all going on there was a control group in the form of some single-shot 30 caliber Springfield trapdoor rifles these converted guns would be like I said a control for testing they pitted the reliability and accuracy of the now repeaters against the known single-shot service arm the good thing is that these really let the board see that the repeaters were way better than these old guns and in many cases there was no real difference in reliability or between a trapdoor in the better trial gun and yes from the private sector they saw a fair number of lever-action designs as well for repeating rifles before anybody comments on that they didn't like they were over complicated hard to produce expensive to produce and realistically the bolt action just seemed to work best in most situations so that is the concept that they stayed with so let's Kindle what they were actually doing with these tests each gun was fired for rapidity with accuracy rapidity at will that means endurance fire from the hip they were tested against dust and fine sand defective cartridges this is purposely sabotaged amo that didn't want to be extracted excessively charged ammo ease of manipulation they were also tested for rust the the magazine being very new they want to make sure that there wouldn't be any chain detonations they would load it up and jam it around flap on it see if it would pop and they also want to see how easy it was to sort of disassemble them basically field strip for cleaning and maintenance now with the designs listed you can probably think of a couple you'd pick over the crag but the u.s. loves Craig they love the crag a lot and don't get me wrong it's smooth it's fast shooting it's rhymey n-- they're wonderful sporting style rifles and maybe that's part of why the u.s. liked them so much is because the u.s. really does love a sporting rifle definitely marksmen centered definitely accuracy accuracy centered and there's one thing though one thing especially when you're choosing a magazine system and that's what they were really thinking of they weren't thinking about the gun on the hole quite as much as they were fixated on the magazine I mean it counts but magazines at the front of your mind right well you're given a new gun and on this design above all others you have one distinct advantage that no the others had which is the ability to top up so let's take a look I have the gun I open it up I toss a loose round in and sadly these are lives so I can't use this but I toss a loose round in pretend it's still in there I'd bolt that forward now I've got one in the chamber the gun is ready to fire the safety is off everything's ready to go but I want to add more ammo for whatever reason well in most firearms you have to open up the action rendering it useless it's just a club until you can get another round in there this is not a dangerous thing except for maybe the bayonet on the end you're at risk so I could leave one chamber ready to go open this up and throw in a fresh round and boom magazine is topped back up now the strategic advantage of this divided out amongst a bunch of men in a unit it's pretty minimal but us still really thought of individual marksmen and the personal experience of a rifle they're very personal things in us arms development so they loved it they thought it was a brilliant idea and nothing could beat that there's no other gun where I can put on the chamber and then shove more rounds into the magazine so obviously this is the superior magazine decision plus we do quite like a bunch of the other features and it's been adopted by another military yada-yada they ultimately favor the Krag and in addition they're not just favoring the Danish Krag as we saw it they're actually looking at something pretty similar to this because in the time since the Danish adoption well Olli and Eric have provided some other examples that include things like flag safeties again taken from the Mauser and other little features that we're gonna see on these guns as we go forward that really sold it as a better overall well thought-out platform and I can't exactly argue with that so we did not adopt it in 1898 however what we did do is adopt this the model 1892 an exceptionally rare specimen I am happy to place in the light box officially recommended for adoption in August of 1892 the date would become the model name Us Magazine rifle model 1892 caliber 30 now this guy had an overall length of 49 point 1 inch and a weight of 9.3 pounds 5 rounds of that new 3040 Krag ammo well let the rifle came a European styled knife bayonet model after the one the swiss provided with their schmidt rubin also during the trials the board finally rested on that rimmed of rifle cartridge for being easier to headspace extract and handle loose rounds plus the Krag had zero prob feeding rimmed cartridges so why the heck would we even push for a rimless one if we don't need to this would be the first smokeless small bore cartridge for the u.s. originally thirty US or thirty army it would become to known as thirty forty for its forty grains of nitrocellulose powder despite being named the model 1892 these were not made in 1892 or really in 1893 because look right away we adopt the gun this is great we appropriate four hundred thousand dollars of US currency in order to start production and tool up and then by March of 1893 it's not going so well because we're basically getting slammed by lawsuits a lot of the US inventors are mad that some Scandinavians trumpet has strolled in here and taken the top spot in the US they start crying foul and corruption and other things like that which we see every time the US adopt anything and so they have to retest all the guns and well at least the top contenders and a lot of the complainers so the whole thing starts over again and I'm gonna save time by saying the Krag won again they actually did prefer the Krag they found it to be a better gun they're certainly better than a lot of the ones that were suing so this thing is resolved by you know May April of 1893 again but we're still dragging feet because there's tulip problems we're getting used to a very complicated manufacturing method and reasonably there's just little things to fix here and there we don't want to make a big mistake of it and in setting this up the man with the migraine would be one colonel Alfred Mordecai jr. son of the famous Palace Titian and ordnance officer who refused to pick aside in Civil War jr. however had graduated from West Point in 1861 and served with the Union where the commendation for his conduct at the Battle of Bull Run he would be appointed superintendent and commandant of the Springfield Armory from 1892 to 1895 as we'll see that's going to be one hectic period to be the boss now the good news is the US at that time really only had fifteen thousand active rifling carrying army personnel that needed to be outfitted right away so that's a very very very small number from what we've seen before I mean look at the austro-hungarian monitor situation we had a couple episodes on those it's they changed the rifle and the cartridge every year to the tune of hundreds of thousands of each over and over and over again so this can't be nearly as bad right what will get this sorted out by the end of 1895 should be pretty good to go everybody good with that okay we'll just put a pin on that never plan anything it's not gonna go the way you wanted early problems included constantly pierced primers these were actually blamed on the ammo at first but it turned out that it would be the fact that we just had straight-up flat firing pins instead of rounded heads take months to figure out also the new smokeless rounds were eroding barrels fairly fast so they would try waking in nickel content without much success suitable proofing charges were not really available so we didn't have any way to really proof these things and the stamping tools for the rear sight graduations were tied up and for good reason we didn't know what the stamp on them it is no small thing to figure out the trajectory of a new cartridge and to get it right and mark them across your service and your service arms with the correct average of you know variance for the ammo yeah it's a big deal and so with the delays from the lawsuits and all the other stuff and the last little tweaking of ammo and fixtures and setting up for tooling and but we finally have some life was coming off the line in a form just incomplete because we got to fix the sight center stuff and we finally have some amo coming in that's solved correct it's time to actually set trajectory and mark out these graduations big problem is it's now New England winter and it is wet windy and cold and cold by the way will change the trajectory of the ammo so you have to sort of go all right mathematically what is this really going to affect the ammo but you got to wait till spring to really test the difference oh well we'll wing it and keep sort of averaging and this just I mean it is delayed guys it just they can't get the numbers down they can't prove them down until all the way into the spring of 1894 that is a huge delay created parts are still getting worked on it's not like you're actually holding a ball at production but it's just another little problem that's dragging the rifle down regardless though by spring of 1894 we're starting to see a little bit of production maybe 200 made and then slowly we get into 40 rifles per day we're starting to really get things rolling and by the end of 1894 we're cruising right along so we've got our gun now before I get into too much of that though we do have a rare and wonderful model 1892 the original US Krag in my hands you should probably take a closer look so starting off it's pretty similar to the Danish model but there's some pretty big differences one the bolt handle is now turned down that drops this in right at our trigger beautiful spot to be it's just nice just good organized and it keeps it tucked up tighter to the gun keeps it out of the way of your kidneys no opening her up all the locking action is basically the same and then for the magazine we now open downwards this allows us to just sort of take a handful arounds dump them into the action works out very smoothly versus not having that but not nearly as fast as a stripper clip we'll get there in a moment so closing that up again follow wraps around and as I close this up we're gonna see that we have a new flag safety instead of that half cocked position this is much smarter and if I twist her around that's gonna pull back her cocking piece lock it open no bang yo interestingly on this early model 1892 I'm gonna decock this gently interestingly there's no provision for this to be turned when she's decock so this would be a damage point especially you can see this is even getting loose so the potential damage point that this can get torqued on either intentionally or unintentionally while you're in the decomposition now for the magazine cut off I guess we should probably take a look at that finally so I'm going to actually remove this bolt now this early extractor is not nearly as flexible as the later ones so in 1892 it takes a little extra effort to get this extractor out I'm gonna pull it into my lap and do some quick basically finger busting exercise here I'm just gonna pop that up twister there we go whoo a little leverage huh there we go so I just lift her again like I had done on the Danish it's just really stiff on these 92 s for some reason so actually a lot of that has to do with milling and relief cuts that they'll do later up under there so that out of my way I have ammo that I can now more safely place in this action so loose around 30 40 magazine cut off in the up position is the default at that time that means it's cut off so this section here is perfectly flush I can drag along it and you know she's not picking up if I flip her down at this time and let me make sure that she's got him I flipped her down she's popped the rim over I don't have the bolt so the patented plastic poke he's not perfect at this but you can see I now have the ability to sort of push it forward it would feed because it would be perfectly supported but again this is no bolt and I don't really want to mix live rounds and a bolt so up is off down at this point is on and that's the way the magazine runs and make sure to pull this guy right back out so I'll reset this bolt real quick and twist her down in and let it pop into place which goes very smoothly and we need to talk a few other features to this kind of moment but if we go to the front the very first version this gun this would have been a solid piece it's actually been cut out lightning easier West wastage yada yada so the very earliest ones this is a nice solid upper band you'll see that we have a cleaning rod it is a full-length cleaning rod that's going to change shortly and then on the muzzle and I'm sorry I don't have a lot of room to maneuver in here guys we're actually flat cut at the muzzle there's no crown or recess in there this is very easy to damage in the field and it's very unique that we have this feature stolen the gun if I get to the rear the new cartridge was softer on the shoulder so they didn't see the need for a curved fancy butt plate they just went ahead and did it nice and flat and you can see there a flat 90 degree almost but plate and flat actual metal plate itself so sharp toe early early features we're gonna see this all tend to go away before I get to this next part I want to make sure I say something we tend to treat the Krag model and the site model as separate especially for this episode because there's a lot of sort of interchange between the two there's basically some penas with these sites so that said let's take a closer look now ooh I almost forgot one thing guys real quick that ejector is just a tipping piece of metal it's teeter-tottering because of the bolts position on the Danish crag it had been a spring so neat little improvement and it'll get further refined as we go into this now here's our rear sight this is the 1892 rear sight so model 1892 rifle model 1892 rear sight that's a slightly tangental sight so we can get a little tangent adjustment up to 600 yards marked there and it's in steps so these are in hard limits it's not a slope the reason for that is because you'll basically pick your spot in a hurry and you're not accidentally walking up and down by a little bit you're also able to find it in low-light you can sort of feel where you've ended up you don't have to actually read the settings if you really can't get a look at the gun this is a more sort of rapid automatic system now after 600 we pop up our ladder and then this thing ranges up to 1,900 yards red red that way so overall not an unusual sight for the time certainly unusual for the US we weren't quite accustomed to these in a lot of ways we had previously used a different sight that I'll get to in just a second this push button here could often be a little weak and allow the thing to sort of slide up and down and the ladder itself they had to reinforce the spring repeatedly so that it wouldn't sort of pop and walk as you were making your shots this was this was an attempt by the US to get away from a windage site we really wanted to be able to sort of just have a dumber sight that was much tougher for military service and also easier to make well hear more about the sights later on in the episode but for now they're set up they're working ok we're certainly sworn off on the idea of these sort of fixed sights instead of windows adjustable and we're ready to roll right mmm turns out we're not hitting where we're aiming because the calculations for the cold weather ammo didn't pan out for the warm weather time do you recall all the sights and remarked on we graduate and put them right back on the guns and while we're doing that turns out that the barrels are rusting apparently the primers have corrosive compounds and we are not being religious enough about our cleaning so we've barely got a couple hundred guns done and they're already rusting out so we have to change our doctrine on how to handle cleaning their rifles and maybe look at cleaning up the ammo but finally we're settled into a gun we're getting in 1894 deeply we adopted this two years ago come on guys we're ready to rock and roll nope it would take until late 1894 for the bayonet to be ready this was mostly due to trouble setting up manufacture and delivery of suitable scabbards with all that finally resolved Springfield could get to work reoccurring the army and surprisingly the job was mostly done by June of 1895 the cavalry Howard lagged behind I'd actually like to get into these carbines in a separate episode they represent a lot of detail we can't fit into this story today and their impact on the Great War is practically null so this is not gonna be a right away thing just know however that they are regularly faked and so picking up an authoritative book like the ones listed below is an absolute must before looking at them alright the Corps Army's equipped the cavalry we'll get to them in a moment but we're on the way we still have rifle production tool up so let's go ahead and start getting these out to the militias and the reserves and why do they keep mailing them back to us and why are they all horribly broken or complaining about things that don't seem to be a problem what happens when you give a rifle like this to an army that had previously only had single-shot big bore guns let's take a look because number one like I said with this gun Dee [ __ ] that safety won't flip and so a lot of guys were cranking on this or just dropping it when these things were getting torn the messed up up so we're gonna do something about that number two just because it is a repeater and we're on a custom on those trapdoors there was actually some training to shoot with the middle finger at that time a lot of people were shooting with the middle finger and then that way they had their index finger ready for the operating of the gun and also switching over for loading if you're in the habit of bolting down and then using your middle finger here but not necessarily maintaining that grip on the bolt because you're not used to a bolt well what happens is in order to get that middle finger into the right position you'll bump up the bolt just a bit and what's going to happen is as we pull this trigger in this cocking piece false it's going to tug the bolt back into lock it's gonna drop it back down because all system is designed to keep us into walk but with that finger there it's going to basically slow or [ __ ] the fall the firing pin that means light strikes that are entirely caused by the user not by the gun in addition to that we're also going to have some trouble Oh with our butt plate the square but when wrapped on the ground nice and hard in the manual arms well if you come at this angle right here boom hard with that straight butt which here we are unaccustomed to in the u.s. you trip that toe right off you're gonna bend this guy chip this metal snap that toe off these things are chewed right up I'm very glad that this one's actually still here because drill really wiped these suckers out so that would have to be changed as well and a matter of fact I say all that there's actually very little crack there no last thing that was really a big complaint is this cleaning rod up front let me get that zoomed in sticking out like that remember the guns were linked together for stack arms with this swivel right here that's the thing where you make your little rifle teepee other problems well lots of little minor things but hey when we put on our shoulder I get a burn because there's just a little bit I've exposed receiver right here that's heating up and I am unaccustomed to repeating rifle temperatures so can we get that covered up Thanks great another problem by the way is that the early ammo was too thin walled so occasionally you get case heads separations the back comes ripping off the gas vents in the system this is not a well designed system for gas venting so oftentimes you'd have it all vent in the magazine the magazine would blow open maybe even get damaged extra cartridges fly out terrifying we need to fix that so they were thickened up the case walls but that meant by October of 1895 we're recalibrating the sights again because the case is that the cartridge has been changed just a little bit again and again we're not that accurate and this is still just the 1892 sight so there's lots of little problems chasing into the system just in terms of education but also in terms of actual mechanical difficulties and little refinements to manufacture where we're wasting a lot of time on little details in this gun that we don't need and the biggest problem really is that the u.s. didn't trial this gun properly we tested it and had trials and then we announced a winner and then we went with that we didn't make a thousand two thousand and put them into the field we just said well this is obviously it we tested a half-dozen of them now we'll make a couple thousand and hand them out no not a couple times tens of thousands and hand them out we don't see this in other system so I mean when we're in Europe we see you know we'll make fifteen hundred and hand them out for six months and see how many of them make it out so in a lot of ways the 1892 is sort of an extended trials gun that became an adopted gun it's very odd it's perfectly good for an extended trials gun should never been adopted as it was it should have been trial anyway the good news is while all this is going on we managed to get a little help from an old friend that's right Eric Jorgensen had been stopping in periodically to help he was paying especially close attention to the US needs and helping with setting up manufacture and improvements for two solid reasons number one he and all they got a dollar Commission per rifle so they wanted us to make a lot of them and number two he was showing the action to another country and wanted to make sure that he could roll over any improvements into his own designs that's right while the US was still fiddling with their extended trials gun and the Danes were just happy with that thing well Norwegians came out with this this is the Norwegian Krag model 1894 and again we're not firing it but let's go ahead and squeeze it into the light box with an overall length of forty nine point seven inches it's still as long as the others but it weighs in at eight point pounds again five round magazine this time firing 6.5 by 55 a wonderful little cartridge which was actually the result of a joint commission between sweden norway to adopt one common cartridge although they couldn't get together on a rifle the swedes went to the Mauser model 1894 in later model 1896 the Norwegians also agree with the US that loading wasn't that big of a priority and plus there's some hometown pride and having your own action adopted the swedes didn't adopt a swedish gun they adopted a german one so they went with the Krag and not entirely a bad decision at the time because we'll see not exactly future proof regardless these guns about 20,000 or so made it oh a WG at first until production of home was started they would serve all the way through World War two another story for another day now amel was sad to say that more features of this gun didn't get rolled in with the US production but let me make some rules because we got to take a look this thing would actually be influential for the US so what I'm not gonna go through everything however just some big key factors number one look at this tangent rear sight see how it works I flip it up I push this guy in and that's my setting that's gonna be critical scene in a moment now number two who op if we get back to this bolt we have an interesting feature which is that I can open the bolt up and then I can sorry it's kind of hard to get this at an angle but see how the bolt staying there it's not wandering around or anything that's because there's a notch in the receiver just there and a corresponding shape on the top of the extractor so that once we get to and I see here I can just you know but once we get back far enough click and we're sort of just ever so lightly plugged in just just like a half quarter pound eighth of pound of pressure and we're over it but the weight of the bolt isn't enough to get it rolling that is really handy especially if you're say like a cavalry man and you're trying to you know ride and load or if you're just somewhere where you want to keep the muzzle down and load this is a good little feature and it's inexpensive to sort of fit into the system so the US would be very happy to adopt that and some others and basically we see a series of changes working their way through the 1892 so this is our gun and look the stocks a little too thin it's breaking we talked about the flat there's all sorts of fittings that can be remanufactured in a way that's much faster and we keep doing it the u.s. doesn't just go whoa we should roll all these into a new model no the chain just keep being made just right away and so what happens is by the time the 1892 series is done there's very little parts interchangeability between an early 1892 and a late one and the US service starts to realize we got two different guns and let me tell you it's a lot of little changes I can't really speak to all of them right now but let's just get a quick scroll by cuz this is just crazy this list is pretty long so let's hit some highlights along the way the cut-offs flat Spring has become a coil the ejector pin was changed from an l-shape to a rod the bluing of the bayonet blade was halted cleaning rods went from brass headed to steel the upper barrel ban was opened up the muzzles were crowned and the stock wrists were thickened all of that was considered an 1892 Krag by early 1896 that was one gun that could have any of those changes in one way or the other feel Armorer's probably hated this rifle so bad and it really kind of came to a point where they went okay we get it we can't continue to call this the 1892 because it's basically it's a continuum it's not two models a gun being called one gun it's it's dozens of models of gun being called one gun we have to stop I've reset the clock incorporate all these changes plus some others that we have sitting off to the side take a breather wrap it into one and we will name that the new model 1896 magazine rifle this is also a very uncommon gun let's get a look at the life bus predictably 49.1 inches long and weighing in at 9.2 pounds you will be surprised to find out that this still chambers 3040 Krag in five rounds guys it's very similar just lots of little differences that's right one of these things is not quite like the other one of these things is from 1896 so by the way special thanks to John for learning us these they're very uncommon very rare very valuable and if you weren't freeloading them I might not have gone into this much detail I kind of hate you so let's pass for just a second and we'll see some of the changes so Oh down we go and yes it's another cracker Genson I don't know what you want from me at this point but what the US has done is incorporated a couple of good little features number one on that list just obvious off the bat to me clink we now have a rib with a pin set up over the extractor that's gonna set us up so that we now have that Norwegian system with keeping the bolt open there goes so no flopping around beautiful right simple easy and effective all right so second to that remember we had a big problem with the safety while decock we can now happily flip her over and not that I was gonna do anything anyway but at least it doesn't mess everything up so everybody's happy there and less damage to the gun a number of minor changes throughout the system but like you saw the list okay so Oh we'll get this further forward without making a huge mess our bud stock now has a slight turn to the toe no more cracking when we're doing our drill thicker wrist in stock pulling it back new site talk about that separately at the front you're gonna notice we've gotten rid of the cleaning rod entirely much easier to use the stacking swivel and where the cleaning rod ended up is all the way back here in a butt trap so if I can just and I'm sorry guys on to go off camera they use my thumbnail without bending backwards there we go three-piece segmented cleaning rod now in the butt so that is a lot easier and still plenty portable matter of fact we may even taken off a little weight from drilling that out and some slight changes in here just just a little bit of weight savings and a lot of manufacturing savings so this makes it pretty good improve mom now where does that leave us with the sights because as you saw they were a little changed minor update minor loss of an argument so zooming in all right so the big defender of the fixed site was actually Alfred Mordecai so he felt like we said that dumb is better well that push button they didn't like it as much it kept coming loose and they really did not like the stepped section for our tangent site they wanted to be able to finally adjust the range so that means doing a slight curve so that at any point we can go up another 50 yards or 25 yards we can just sort of adjust a little bit at a time and yes that gives us the ability to more finely adjust our site but we can't do this in the dark anymore we have to pay attention to what we're doing and trial and error shoot again the kinds of problems with this guy bouncing so they replace the push button with a twist knob so you had to turn this to lock it in its position turn it back to let it slide turn it to lock it back in its position so that's really basically the same site overall although we now are down to 18 hundred yards now still six hundred on the tangent so not a huge difference but we're walking slowly away from the vision of the dumb use it in the dark rock-and-roll site these are not all the changes to this gun as a matter of fact let's see another scrolling wall of text yep all this and some more over the life of this gun there would still be incremental changes but not nearly as many and not ones that completely ruin the interchangeability of parts oh to rifle here before we say goodbye to it I want to point something out those that were still sort of in inventory not issued would be updated to the 1896 modifications and then around 1900 these guns would be pulled from the field and updated to actually not even this we're gonna talk about another model obviously since we started with the 1898 but the point being is most of these were up converted to some form or another and on paper 6000 are so escaped add in military service through quite a bit and then surplus and chopping down for for guns while these are very rare so keep an eye out 1892 with original hardware no updates like this one fantastic to have it on hand thank you again for loaning it John so set that aside and we'll go back to our 1896 because this is actually the gun that we were using in the spanish-american war we briefly covered this conflict in our new army revolver episode but basically the US and Spain got into a tiff around Cuba a u.s. victory left Spain reeling and the Americans in control of Puerto Rico Guam and the Philippines plus Cuba was independent now overall the Cragg acquitted itself well in the conflict but they were being major complaints and most of them are less to do with the rifle itself and more to do with comparing it to the then cutting-edge Mauser 1893 just because you lost doesn't mean you had an inferior gun that Mauser in seven millimeter is a powerhouse of reliable accurate and fast stripper clip loading military rifle the u.s. took notice repeating fire was deadly and rapid reloading put you back in the fight sooner strangely despite the little metallic clips the Spanish still did their best to aim so the first complaint was that dump loading was a mess Theodore Roosevelt's own Rough Riders complained that they had spilled hundreds of perfectly good rounds trying to reload on the climb up San Juan ridge also that seven millimeter cartridge that thing was moving 25 percent faster than the Springfield's bolts so you know it's a good gun when you lose outright and the other guy goes man I wish I had that gun so the Krags days were kind of numbered even at this early assessment and it doesn't mean that it was kicked right out of service as a matter of fact the next model that dropped right after the war it wasn't going to incorporate any improvements based on the experience of the war because that gun had already been designed before we went into it it just sort of held up on production because we were in the middle of a war so what drove the next model after the 1896 if not the spanish-american war was mostly the cavalry they wanted the magazine cut off reversed currently the magazine was off with the lever up since in the u.s. single shot was default the lever was left up most of the time but when shoved into a scabbard like on a horse that meant tearing leather and bending metal because it was sticking up and with that request just to invert the way the cut off works that would introduce an entirely new model because that's a weirdly different mechanical change and also again little things that want to get done so if I reach back over and grab our 1898 I can boy there's a lot of room here I'm gonna set this guide down and I will actually set this back to my side sorry gentlemen and let's take a closer look so overall dang near identical I mean you're gonna have be hard-pressed to pick a difference between this and the 96 except for that site more on that in a moment but now if we open up our action as a matter of fact let me just go ahead and get that bolt free much easier by the time you get to the 96 by the way and now the 98 just blow it around alright well put this in the previous single shot position and close and immediately have a jam cuz I didn't put it all the way in there guys don't feeding is not perfect there we go now if I use my patented plastic pokey to give her a shove yep I'm actually hitting that rim now would feed if this were the bolt patna plastic poke he's not a good bolt so if I flip her down we are smoothing clear and magazine is off so that means that we can go around with our magazine off with this guy down now the funny thing about this is essentially we've inverted it from what modern doctrine would be which is to go around with the magazine ready so it's actually a bigger headache to go around with a ready magazine needs to go around with a single-shot magazine and this is being dropped as a feature after the spanish-american war just taught us that we would rather load faster and shoot faster beautiful guys waiting way to go just one of those things that once the ball gets rolling in the bureaucracy this is going to happen whether it makes any sense or not as a matter of fact retroactively leave the cutoff would be flipped for almost every other model going on down the Rhine as these things were converted up to the 1898 standard so the army wasn't confused by guns that flipped one way or the other now of course this gun requires a whole other set of changes in addition to that little changes so let's roll that big beautiful list most of these are fairly minor but again notice the conversion starting in 1902 the new magazine cutoff for the old guns making original magazine cut off guns like we have today very hard to find guys I know this is a very long episode at this point because I've been filming it for longer than you've been watching it so let's go ahead and finally get now that we have our model 1898 our topic for today let's get it over and look at the inside of this thing with magical x-ray computer vision courtesy of Bruno let's start things off by dumping five rounds into that magazine now take a look at the magazine cutoff flipping it down prevents the next cartridge from feeding so will single load now let's cycle that bolt see no new round if we want a feed from the magazine we're gonna have to flip that lever the other way there we go now otherwise this is a pretty straightforward rifle you I will point out the ejector it does not operate on the back of the case like we're used to instead it presses on the side this flag safety should be pretty familiar it will just can back the cocking piece preventing fire now the follower and arm may seem complicated but it's actually pretty similar to any of the vertical Mon liquor systems it's just laid out horizontally all right let's get back to that beautiful beard footage now normally we would kick straight over to make shooting this thing but unfortunately we are not there yet and if you feel like this is a long episode and a lot of lead-in before we get to shooting well you're right because the Krag was completely developed all the way before it made it into the war and that means we gotta get to the end of its development and there's a lot of little hiccups in the US development of the crack so what we're focused on now of the rear sights oK we've got the model the 1898 but then when this thing came out they had the 1896 rear sight and this ain't that so what happened well they needed to adopt a model 1898 rear sight because they were doing some ammo experiments more on that in a moment and when it was time to adopt that new rear sight well Mordecai was no longer around he had retired and so they could finally get around to adopting a windage sight something that they really wanted now as part of that they also considered changing the overall sight away from being a ladder slash tangent to just a tangent remember we saw that on the Norwegian crank what we ended up with was designed by TC Dixon and unfortunately I don't have a rifle with one of these sights fitted but I do have the sight so we can take a very close look on the other camera there we go you'll notice this is a straight up solid rod non-water style sight now if that confuses you let me just quickly grab the Norwegian who is a very similar system again we just have a slider that goes up and that sets our tangent so that raises our sight these do not pop up and I'm sorry we're so zoomed in but these do not pop up and stay up they get adjusted and put back down that's the way it rolls so oh saying that rifle aside and pulling sight back out this is what we ended up with thanks to mr. Dixon this is commonly called the Dixon sight and there's several variants of it and we're gonna see it all the way into the next rifle so on this gun because they did not like the push button so much they'd gone to the dial on the last one they kept the dial here so we twist the dial push her up set her back down and walk the dial that's how we adjust for a tangent for windage there's actually and you're gonna have to squint just a bit and I'll flip the pokey around this notches here notches the head and so we just adjust this little guy right there and that's gonna walk our windage one way or the other look at that beautiful camming action that is really the whole of the site it's not much more complicated in that so it's still very simple except one other little feature you may have noticed that has been semi erased from this particular model so let's zoom back over into here and you can see we have our central site notch and then what looks like two notches to the side this particular site was later adjusted to get rid of those notches because they found them confusing so instead I'm probably gonna have to pop you a photo in just a moment but what's going on is we have the central notch and then we had one and two notches on either side that you could have read in a heartbeat they were set for 20 miles per hour winds crosswise at 1800 meters I'm not sure why that was what we really needed to be shooting often enough to have two fixed sites and it caused problems because in the heat of the moment troops would grab the wrong rear sight notch so a lot of them were ground back down like this particular site to just the one site notch okay does all that track good that gets us up to the 1898 now that's by design not by an actual implementation because in order to do this site they had to take the 1896 sights machinery and rhe gear it for this and when they did that they were assembling guns without sites and they said well we got a bunch of 1892 sites laying around and we're waiting on this new ammo that I'm gonna talk about in a moment so we'll just put those on the guns for now and if we have to we'll go back to them so you can find 1898 rifles with 1892 sights and that's still correct so let's just wrap that up in a nice graphic real quick so that means we had the 1892 then the 1896 then we had the 1892 again while tooling up for the 1898 these are pretty neat but they would be short-lived that's gonna come down to the cartridge realistically so what the US did is after the spanish-american war they tried to push 3040 Krag to 2,200 feet per second just to make up some of that difference they get close to the 2500 feet per second up say seven millimeter they thought they could do this it looked like the action was taking the abuse and in theory the action could have taken the abuse if it was a Danish or Norwegian style crack but the US had messed something up in their path to the 1898 because like I said with the Danish in the Norwegian those guys actually have up to three locking lugs - and a safety that's the bullion the u.s. crag we sort of walked out the tolerances to make it easier to assemble and smooth it off right so only one locking water let's let's get a look real quick I'm going to go ahead and keep the tight zoom camera and get this kind of another lined up then we'll take a quick look so zooming way in and trying to get this as low as I can just ever so barely there we go planned attended plastic pokey turned around so we have a sharper edge remember the locking surface here is what we care about for auxiliary in at the rear of the bolt handle these are very tight you can see this is supported on the US Krag has like make room that's not a given so we've got a slight gap and I'm trying to do this off the monitor we got a slight gap there it's kind of dark trust me there there's a gap slight gap here that means that when we fire this gun that front lug over here that is bearing all the way all the rest are just reserves they're there for when the log invariably stretches fails breaks whatever and therefore you don't lose an eye but you're still losing the rifle it's not good to hammer 2200 feet per second out of an action with a single walking log right at the bottom of the action so the US however did not notice that right away that means that we went with a new cartridge 2200 feet per second for actually year and a half or so before realizing uh-uh that's not going to work which means we had to then abandon that cartridge in 1900 and it's time to go looking for another rear sight now by this time there's a change in the bureaucracy general Flagler who had overseen the ordinance to this point had passed away and was replaced by none other than general AR Buffington who had designed the famous Buffington rear sight for the Springfield 1884 rifles so the man who designed the previous sight on the last service rifle is now in charge of the Ordnance Department well I bet you guys can't guess what's gonna happen next that's right we end up with what is fitted to this gun the 1901 Buffington rear sight now this ain't gonna be the last of it as a matter of fact we are now looking at a showdown between the Buffington site and the Dixon site that will last all the way into our next episode if you want a hint so we're going to have to stop and take a look at what makes up a model 1901 rear sight I'm going to keep my deep zoom so we can see what's going on and look at this there's a lot going on now I'm going to have to get in with my Patton plastic and point out that we have a ladder again so that we do have a let's see you will rotate to unlock slide up rotate to lock push down there's very slow process I'm not going to watch now we're up on our tangent setting and I'm sorry that there we go get a more central tangent setting space gradual slide that thing is set up beautifully don't get me wrong but we've gone back to a ladder and ladders are not my biggest friend and they are extremely hard to get into frame when they have my advanced zoom on so you guys understand the latter principle at this point I don't need to explain it it's back and this is very delicate arrangement still very fine arrangement and by the way while by the way while I'm talking about the ladder let me get this up we also have a rear aperture site that needs fitted water this part okay a little nicer especially requested by our sort of marksmen and target guys these are arranged guys that want this for your aperture at this point it's not like what we think of as a rear mount to receive Ravager it's still very hard to see and eats up peripheral vision so sending this back down there's another feature that's very critical to this which is a rapid windage adjustment so let get that right where you can see it and you'll see if I lift that up we got a lever so if I take that lever and flip it over to the left and so we can now adjust this guy for windage the markings are here at the rear there's our four degree of angle and then lock it back in and that's how you would set your windage you would unlock adjust and relock so both of these segments of this gun are unlocked move lock instead of just being quick push buttons or turn dials that sort of walk it in for you it's the action is either tighten down or it's not alright I know that deep zoom is a little hard to see cuz this sort of overall frame but it lets you at least see what I'm pointing at sorry guys we're still trying that thing out but the good news is now that we are on the 1901 site we can finally get this rifle passed over to me [Music] [Music] [Music] I will not lie in many ways the crag is a very elegant rifle honestly the magazine's the only thing that's just so weird about it sticking out the side like that but really cosmetics were concerned about said we got to get back through a little bit more history because even though we got to the 1901 site that was not the final pattern for this gun oh and just remind you just like with that 1892 retrograde and the same problem tooling up for the new 1901 that's right we did the 1892 site then the 1896 then the 1892 again because we were tooling up for the 1898 and then while we were tooling up for the next one we went back to the 1896 before finally getting ready to produce the Buffington 1901 alright pride is satisfied everybody's got that they want in the marksman department the range guys are happy and it certainly works well enough in combat presumably we're all very happy and we can just finally leave this thing to rest and we're on the final pattern in this gun right seriously dude that's right General William Crozier would replace Buffington in November of 1901 and within the year he was fed up with those delicate target sights it's time to change the sights again okay so we're gonna ditch the 1900 ones and we're gonna go back actually to the Dixon site but we can't just use our original one because this is set up for cartridge that ultimately failed so we have to a whole new Dickson site I got one here these are gonna be cited for again 2,000 feet per second cartridge and we're gonna work in some minor changes like the fact that remember the three positions at the rear for the notches that was confusing we're gonna go to just one let's uh let's take a closer look so here's the new Dixon site we only have one notch and actually without showing you the back of this thing this is as adopted right away later on in order to appease some of that target shooting community they would go ahead and add a rear aperture rear peep that flips up let me tell you that is the hardest thing to look through on earth and I'm sure I'll get a bunch of comments on how to properly use one there's no way this thing was combat ready though this little guy right here that's just to appease the guys on the range so mostly you're still back to a single notch and again no sight ladder adjustable with the knob when did you adjust the bowl all the same stuff we saw before alright so Crozier signs off on this guy the model 1902 Dixon sites so 1898 Dixon's 1902 Dixon and in between is the 1901 Buffington which came from the 1880 for Buffington there's a lot going on I just jazz hands alright so let's review 1892 1896 1892 1898 1896 1901 which actually goes straight to 1902 no step back for once we're good all done everybody said not according to the cavalry okay what's the problem now well I'm gonna at the bar oh the Norwegian for this because I don't have a US with Faye Dixon site but cavalry you're upset because when they adjust their sight out for long range and then they try to shove it into their scabbards the scabbard again gentlemen this doesn't flatten out and so you either damage the scabbard or you damage the site they get bent up and let me tell you pent up site is no good fair point could you guys just put the dang things down before you shove in this cavern these are used plenty of other places they don't have this problem actually there's some other solutions we'll talk about this in another episode but instead they can't really go well whatever happened in the nineteen on one style site because with that little guy if we have it sighted out and we're not paying attention okay water up right and we whack it it just kind of goes down flat not enough to bend it and not enough to tear up the scabbard it's not perfect it's still wing in the handguard but you know it's a dumb move but it's not a dangerous move and also by the way one's defense in the cavalry if this thing gets stuck flipped over backwards and it's bent or whatever else you can still yank it back out of the scabbard the Dixons because that sharp edge of the rear sight and once it's in there you could get the gun stuck in this cabbage so I would give them that point okay so ninety to ninety six ninety to ninety eight ninety six o 1 o 2 O one ok so we're back to the 1901 and actually that decision would come down in 1905 after we've already worked up a different gun that I will talk about at a different time which means that the decision to go away from the Dixon to the Buffington well that affected two rifles not just this one and also you'll know we're really not messing with crags after 1905 like we got another gun to worry about that would be the last decision and that's why we're on the 1901 by the time we get to World War one but before we get into actual war service a couple of accessories I think you guys might want to be caught up on all right we have our standard poker and it would stay the same all the way up into World War one and that's the one we're gonna serve with but just for curiosity's sake it's look at some of the other things they try it out you see there was a time when we thought that we could get a little more out of a bayonet that it could be an entrenching and digging tool maybe even a machete so we end up with the model 1900 bowie bayonet 2000 were produced in trialed in cuba and mostly in the philippines and it was found to do a bit of everything poorly there's too light and awkward for machete too fragile for Spade and hard to remove from some dead guy after you poked him real good in the midst of battle so is abandoned then captain HD wise of the 9th infantry proposed his own design this was the bolo bayonet which had more mass and better curve for machete action and was very well-received in the Philippines while it wasn't better design only 56 were made making it one of the rarest and most faked out there that bolo might have actually been adopted but again we're getting to the end of the life span for the Krag and the new gun was using a rod bayonet which actually reached back to some experiments with a Springfield more on that later on so one last trip to the Philippines because while we're not covering carbines per se there was technically a shortened rifle that we just need to mention briefly these are actually made from surplus 1899 carbines and fitted for bayonets originally the pattern was requested by Girard College of Philadelphia 1900 but a request for a shortened rifle by the Philippine Constabulary and 1905 sealed the pattern and the name it's believed all of the ones in the Philippines were destroyed and only the college gun still remain also very rare all right do recall that the two big complaints about the Krag for the spanish-american war were the slow sort of more arced cartridge we tried fixing that with 2,200 feet per second and it did not work so we got back down off of that and fought about sights for a while the other problem was slow loading did we do anything to try to take on that well the answer is yes a number of experiments and inventions were developed the most successful of which was the Parkhurst honestly these things trialed again in the Philippines and Cuba did really well but they weren't really worth the effort because like I've said before we were on to a new rifle and a new cartridge to boot and on that note the Krag was done for a new service rifle meant this one was into storage and a lot were even starting to get surplus so let's review for just a second because we're going to see the replacement for this gun the our primary rifle for World War one but since we still have to feel this thing to some degree what are our hang-ups alright it's our first repeating smokeless rifle in the u.s. first smokeless first repeater yes there are some little examples of individual purchases more time on universal issue right wide issue number two it's a little complicated manufacturer kind of expensive and we took a long time to tool up to getting good at it and still finicky number three its weak it's only got a single locking log and the world is moving into faster harder hitting cartridges and while it's certainly suitable for the cartridge it takes and it's not gonna eat itself alive shooting 3040 Krag you can't get anything else out of it you're stuck at 2,000 feet per second at that time that means overall a mediocre rifle in the long run I understand that that's insulting to some people and certainly serve the us very well but let's be honest with ourselves by the time this was adopted in 1892 there were better options already available in the US sort of flubbed the handling upon this gun now that doesn't mean the inherent design is entirely flawed remember like I said that single locking lug was done on purpose to reduce weight and that they knew they could get away with more locking strength well take a look at this oleh in there it covered the problem with a patent featuring a dual log in 1893 the single log had been just fine for the original cartridge and by the time the US was willing to go to two logs there was no reason to because we were considering an entirely different action after the spanish-american war so the Krag could have been more it just wasn't there was time for different things easier to manufacture things above and beyond most of the other considerations but these are still beautifully smooth rifles and especially in the sporting community they would be very very popular as they slowly started to be surplus out of government stores following the adoption of the Springfield 1903 as a matter of fact most Krags you find our sport arrives people really love them for hunting rifles they're good for a North American game but you can't beat I'm sorry you cannot beat the Krag smoothness this is mine licorice in our territory this is excellent and if you're behaving within its limits there's no reason that it should be dangerous or wanting for anything again a bit ungainly with parts sticking out everywhere and weak sites and odd magazine doors and stuff this is odd for a military rifle I give it that so like I said it's retired the second line and has more or 1903 start to pile up more and more these start to leak out and they're first they're just being given away as gifts to foreign dignitaries or whatever or very slowly released to rifle clubs but that starts to turn from a trickle to a slight stream and it would have been the absolute end of the crag with a sort of one war one visit the China service life you know I mean all of realistically like 10 15 years service is worth for the fact that war were declared that's right April 1917 the u.s. is finally getting his hands dirty now with fair warning the army had swelled up remember the 1892 we were worried about getting out fifteen thousand of these rifles well by the start of World War one for the US we're looking at the army spelling up to two hundred thousand men that's nothing the American Expeditionary Force would eventually grow past two million so we're orders of magnitude off we're gonna need everything we can lay hands on including old guns sitting in reserve America would start sending troops and Fitz in spurts in the summer of 1917 these were often poorly trained and even more poorly or not at all equipped they were placed under French and British command usually in quieter sectors for field experience all the while a more appropriate and huge American force was being gathered trained and equipped now their next episode we're gonna see that there are some shortages of the standard u.s. rifle going into World War one so that means that we had to make use of 160,000 crags still in reserve from them that doesn't mean that they just went straight up to the front instead they were usually left at home we're talking about maybe some use in a punitive expedition down in Mexico if you really look at photos though it's almost all 1903 mostly factory guards home guard duties drill that sort of thing and a lot of training and maybe even some target practice but not a combat weapon for sure and that I was mostly gonna leave the Krag out of the series at least at the conception of it so the problem is there's a few oral histories that kept saying that engineers had the Krag engineers had the Krag but the problem is you could never pin down someone by name you know actually provable in service saying I had a Krag they would say those guys had the Krag I heard they had the Krag and it's in a lot of little oral histories that later got written down no it's convincing and I don't want to say wire or anything like that but people get confused about stuff all the time I needed documentation and luckily we would find it so now I can tell you this little story during the summer of 1917 a number of rail engineers were sent over well ahead of most American forces there they supported British and French railway systems near the front line in the rush to get these men out and because they were expected to be non-combat they were giving Krag gurgenson rifles and honestly we know a lot of soldiers made it to England with crags we see photos all the time but they were almost always swapped for either 1903 s or the same rifles as the French or British units that they were attached to well apparently not everybody was stripped of their crags in time because now know that at the very least the 6th 12th 14th 18th and maybe even a couple other engineers were given 80 rounds of 3040 Krag each and sent on their way and there is no hope of more ammo after that one man from the 18th quipped Craig Jorgensen rifles and horseshoe blanket rolls each with shelter half and poncho we could have turned back time to 1898 some goodbye dolly I must leave you and marched away to fight the war in Cuba now as fun as it is to track the Krag all the way up to basically the front line I mean sort of the back end of the front line I could not find a single claim of one being a fire at an angle anger so combat proving in World War one highly unlikely as a matter of fact these guys once artillery fell or gas dropped out of it and both did happen I mean these guys were under attack just not direct fire and even if they were under direct fire even if machine guns and rifle had come in chances are that weren't gonna fire a shot back because they were supported by infantry and their job was to move very vital rail equipment out of the way so when the artillery started falling they got the trains out of there they got the equipment out of there they weren't concerned with dropping other guys unless they were maybe boxed into a corner and at that point they might have had to go looking to find where they'd placed these rifles they weren't part of their regular routine so while she made it to the front like so many other little guns that we featured probably not a combat weapon with new men and equipment rolling in the cracks were replaced with you British equipment or French equipment or actual US service rifles 1903 s 1917 s that sort of thing so the Krag didn't last long and that is actually where we start to find out that it actually made it to the front because in addition to those photos that came from a camp in France although they could still be training photos I guess in addition we also thanks to our friend Andrew we have some more proof in the form of copies of cable grams that he was able to dig out of the National Archives this is one of two documents that would ultimately count for about two thousand crags though not enough to arm all the engineer units claiming their use so the true number and service on the continent is still unknown I've seen claimed up to seven thousand still a drop in the bucket I'm afraid compared to the total use of rifles in World War one I'd also really like to thank Andrew of archival research group his email is listed below in the descriptions if you need his help for any of this sort of deep dive stuff I highly recommend reaching out he's trying to make a go of this now interestingly the US Navy also used the crag in World War one these things were kept shipboard in order to keep the 1903 s flowing to the land forces it's fine there's there's no real reason to not use this if you're on a ship so as a matter of fact they use so many crags that they would have to roll in a contract for 25 million cartridges during World War one of 30 40 so that tells you that it had a roll and it freed up and like so many other rifles we've seen that freed up a lot of front-line guns excellent oh and by the way while we're talking about the Navy it's curious didn't even adopt this gun until 1900 because they had their own experiment going on all right this has been a marathon of an episode ladies and gentlemen but we are finally reaching in so if we just set this down and turn back to our original inventors we can wrap this thing out by 1895 oleh crag had made full colonel and was master general of ordnance he would hold this position until his retirement in 1902 following that he kept a hand in gun design but mostly oversaw railway developments and projects he would pass away in Paris in 1916 with his body returned home to Norway in 1917 sadly Eric Jorgensen did not long outlive the final adoption of his rifle in his home country he suffered a stroke in 1896 in this weakened state he would drown later that year with hundreds of thousands of guns made for three nations and a myriad of awards both men certainly made a mark on the world okay that is completed stories you're gonna get for now if you want anymore you're gonna have to crack a book let's go ahead and get Mays opinion though on shooting the crack all right once more we made room for me and just enough room to clear the ceiling for the crag thank you so unfamiliar this is the part where we get her opinion on actually firing the weapon yeah a little bit of a feel for how it did compared to other guns it takes a bit of the history out so with all that covered why don't you get into the ergonomics what does it feel like to be handed a crowd Jorgenson okay so before I get too far into all the little nitty gritties of this guy I just want to point out this gun is bizarre looking I mean this really doesn't look like anything else I have shot so far I mean I can't even think of what country I would pair this with with if I were just handed one of these and not told anything about it it doesn't look American don't look German it looks like some weird Scandinavian thing I don't even know like that it is absolutely alien looking to me compared to anything else which is really neat but as a soldier being handled this I could find that being a little bit difficult and unnerving at the very beginning but let's let's actually get into the nitty-gritty of it now so I ergonomics this thing is long it is got a good bit of heft to it all that being said though it's got a good balance to it and it actually does just feel nice like you feel a lot of heft here up on your left armor I want to say most of it centered all right here but it doesn't feel like at any point you're really like losing the balance on it it really feels like it's centered right there in your left hand like it is perfect for that so I do appreciate that on this gun it's very sleek it's very thin almost got a little elegance to it but if we didn't have all these bits and bobbles sticking out everywhere I say it was elegant a little more robust than that isn't it but it's still still very gorgeous gun sights are actually fairly tall I mean this letter sight here it is as though thyestes mentioned the episode I could see how maybe this little could get easily dinged up or whatever but I personally didn't have any problems with unarranged grants that I wasn't trying to ride a horse at the time but hey maybe that's for another episode in the future horses or motorcycles whatever anyway um but yeah tall blade sight was actually pretty decent manipulation that is one of the smoothest bolts I have handle today I mean it's not quite kosher on our territory but it's like in the same it's close to that you know it's actually just very very smooth it's nice it's elegant yeah there's the elegance right there in that bowl it is absolutely beautiful I love it and then as far as the gun like back here when I'm handling it with my right hand I'm really wishing this like we have the Norwegian Krag semi pistol grip because that's straight wrist I just I don't I don't know I personally just only straight wrists I just feel like I don't really have any specific place and supposed to put my hand whenever we have that semi pistol grip there's no question I mean don't get me wrong guys I'm not sitting here being like weird off with my hand on the gun no I know where to put my hand but it's just I love that extra little purchase that semi pistol grip gives you when pulling it back into your shoulder I just appreciate that the comb you know it's not a high comb but it puts your cheek weld right where it needs to be to line up with the sights evenly I didn't have any problems realigning them quickly with that so nice job all little details definitely mattered I didn't really have any problem with this but play honestly putting into my shoulder I tend to prefer a little bit of a concave curve to it but this one actually still wasn't bad it didn't feel like it was beating me up at any weird angles or anything like that last but not least two things the safety simplified safety guys no real big deal there the magazine cut off very easy to manipulate and use like that is I am barely putting any pressure behind that is surprisingly easy and they have some nice serrations here so I thought that that was going to be a pro honestly but no it just it naturally feels like it wants to flip no matter what the direction which was nice oh I forgot to mention so the bolt is turned on right here and honestly I've said it in previous episodes I'm not a huge fan of turndown bolts because I have had a turned on bolt one or twice decide that it's not gonna let me pull the case out the case is said it was gonna reason there just needed to be able to pop it out easily and I just don't have the I purchase on the turndown bolt in order to be able to just you know put enough force behind it to actually open the bolt this one however there is enough room like it is just I think at the right place like they they didn't go too far down too far up no it's perfect I feel like if I had a stuck case in there I wouldn't have any problems but saying that I would just up case on this gun that would be very strange this was one of the smoothest ones for shooting but I guess I'm getting a little too far ahead of myself we do need to do that in a separate segment that's a lot of data so let's review for one second long heavy smooth bizarre-looking and you're actually happy with the angle in this bolt and by the way a lot of what she's talking about is when you think of like a mauser round down bolt where they've even gone so far as to sort of cut the ball on the end of the ball a little bit of checkering under there yeah it's really nice even the Germans know to scoop that thing out so they can get the hand in there but at a certain point you can't start your hand away from the gun and Stroke through the bolt or smack it on something if you have a truly stock case you basically go to hook your finger underneath here to get it right right and so instead of having one finger yanking the gun you can get your whole palm into it that's why she prefers the straight bolt handles usually but this one is actually like I said it's at the perfect angle I think that this one will work just fine oh no I mean if you have a gun that you can take and smash against the rock if you get the angle right that rock I'm not gonna smack you right I mean the magazine would get a bit in the way but still so alright anyway all that it covered I think you've left off something a little bit obvious I was gonna get that into the shooting segment I know there's lately obvious I didn't talk about the magazine duh but I'm getting that into the shooting site because the loading is necessary part of the shooting segment yes that's true this guns built around single shot with that capsule magazine so I guess I'm gonna have to ask you to give us that opinion now what's it like shooting the Krag let's go ahead and skip the magazine part and not talk about it at all just to make this one cringe a little guys no but seriously I'm whatever let's get into it so loading and unloading this gun now this is absolutely bizarre I'm used to magazines protruding from the bottom I'm used to like magazines being internally like part of the actual like in the stock I this is the first time ever I've shot a gun where the magazine is just off to the side it is a bizarre concept to me but for this gun it works really really really well like I wasn't anticipating how elegant it was how smooth it was how like just wow it functioned it was nice so dump my rounds in load him up and chambering every single round we went through we went through probably about two dozen to three dozen Browns on range and it performed beautifully except for one time one time I decided I was going to load the mag and not pay attention to it and I managed to find the one exactly one angle that it can possibly snag in the mag like right up here I managed to get the tip of the bullet like right up here and that is exactly perfectly spot perfect spot that it will snag every single time he managed to wedge it up in there so good on me I managed to be that one soldier I guess that was just to him enough to do that but hey other than that me be doing a dumb it functioned beautifully in terms of like loading chambering rounds it was absolutely gorgeous and I love that it's just a dump feet I can just literally dump it in there not care except for that one time with that one round other than that it was fun um like I said sights are pretty tall they're nice actually pulling the trigger this is a two-stage trigger on this gun and I will say I actually personally prefer single stage triggers but for a two stage this was awesome like the take-up was smooth the break was clean like it was very very nice I thoroughly appreciated that trigger so you know what I to wind with you know to hell with the single stages the second stage on or the two stage trigger on this gun it's made me rethink that it was actually really nice and I felt like with every shot I took I was actually really able to pace myself very well like I was able to take my time with the shots just as well as I had with some single stages so yeah I think I'm think I'm gonna reopen that investigation in my book as far as the single stage being better than the two stage ones Rico on this guy 3040 Krag not as big of around as some of the previous ones we shot like eight no Mauser but you know I'm this kind of particular that made the recoil of course much less significant it's a heavier gun didn't have much kick to it totally great awesome five hundred yards away five hundred meters I think I'm gonna be able to shoot a guy and it's not gonna really make a difference between the cartridges further than that penetration might not be that great but you know that's neither here nor there what we were shooting at was like not that much of a difference and we were shooting at 70 yards so I'm pretty sure I was gonna penetrate that piece of paper really well with this cartridge but other than that shooting this gun it was a pleasure I performed well with it it performed well and honestly the only concern I would have as a shooter potentially with this guy would just be I guess just the action right here and it's something I've I was point out to me earlier too was that it's just really open right here I feel like it might be susceptible to some decent mud muck getting in there but I mean I did go through trials so assuming it might have done well enough to pass I just don't know how well it would do with some more significant mud and muck in there like just me crawling around with it but in terms of standing or you know crotch fire or whatever I think and do alright but yeah as a shooter this was actually pretty fun it is when you're on a calm and quiet range hard to ignore how fun it is to shoot a Craig I don't know that I completely trust dump loading no I find that if you can have Hazard Lee slap a few cartridges in there here's my problem its inconsistent the shape of your hand the curve the flow you can get it good don't get me wrong but five cartridges piled into that thing it always feels like gravity outruns the flow and then the last one or two wants to sort of roll out of your hand or up or down and they will try to snag up that magazine every once in a while it's not a rapid loading system by any means it's something that you want to do when you have all the time in the world it feels like yeah super casual and in that place I think it's fair to sort of remember that from the ground up when you shoot the Krag to me it feels like you're shooting a single-shot rifle that somebody's just stuck a magazine on the tray right at the bottom I mean if you mean that is true it is kind of like an awkward concept to know that I've got a round chambered and I'm just gonna dump another round in that just kind of feel a little bit weird if you took any other other guns that we've worked with and filled the magazines with cement no polishing or shaping just filled them with cement to disable the magazine they really wouldn't work like yeah you'd have this rough cement surface at the top and the cartridges would drag on it or whatever and they just run everywhere there's no shape to the inherent to the gun totally separate from the magazine for single loading except for this one well I mean also we have had some actual single and it goes yeah that's different yes for this and weirdly this loads better than some of the thing like the Remington rolling blocks now you can load this single shot faster than you can load a remington rolling block so yeah so it's a single shot rifle with the magazine and thankfully the magazine works very well but is not fast to reload and it's not it's definitely not what they considered to be a primary function of the rifle even though they were adopting a magazine rifle yeah I could see that opinion yeah that doesn't make sense yeah but anyway onto the openings just real quick I know a lot of you are probably onto the screen it's true if it looks obvious that mud can get in there it might also mean that mud can easily get back out so maybe it's actually not as Jim likely maybe to be fair we don't really do those kind of tests no technically the US government did either from what we were reading they looked for fine sand that was the big concern is find particulate getting in there because it would mix with the oil that was in the gun and jammed that thing up it's far worse than necessarily thick goopy mud which won't even necessarily permeate so I don't know and we don't have combat reports for crags in World War one so we're sort of left blind unless somebody wants to get their hands dirty so that takes us to our final question though if you're making a bet would you put your life on a craggy organ s'en in the trenches of World War one so in the trenches of World War one all right like I said I do have my concern with the blood muck true 3040 Krag not as strong a cartridge as I have shot previously very much true and I've got this little straight wrist over here going on maybe the sights are easy to damage whatever all that being said on range I did perform well with it the cartridge is strong enough in my opinion to see me through the war and I felt like the guns performance combined with all of that I would bet my life on it now if this were in a rack of guns and let's say Mauser 98 was sitting next to it I choose the Mauser 98 hands-down Krag would instantly be out of the window just because I would instantly bet my life more on that now functioning better than this one like that is just a better choice in my opinion but this one yes it is definitely gonna get a solid yes please don't anyone hate me for that last thing I said but I just I know that I actually do have better options than 98 so I would prefer to have the better options if I could but this one will just get us all in yes in my book so perhaps I should ask a more revealing question no only three we know we're not going to compare well to a mainline rifle all right but what about another gun that had one foot in and out of modern technology what about something like a labelled would you take the Krag over the lapel this is a trick question because I feel like yeah take the Krag over the little bell cuz LaBelle's too fed and that was annoying as how yeah I'm gonna go with the crack was this a trick question am I being tricked to be fair it's more of a chance to highlight that the primary French weapon at the time the things they used the most really wasn't measuring up to this ya know so before we last the crag completely off it wouldn't have been a bad choice oh god no like I'm saying like it just I know that like I would I would prefer a Mauser 98 over the Krag 98 like I just I know I would but like I just there are certainly worse options than this don't get me wrong this is like in the top of the pack I would argue yeah for a second there you like reserved guns that we just happen to have laying around it's not a bad thing to have laying around alright so I think that's got us covered and we can roll this episode out I know it's been a long one so thanks for staying through the end if you have any sanity left or patience after the credits there's gonna be our updates right have a good one bye everybody [Music] all right gang we put a lot of work into this long episode and there's another one coming up in two weeks I had to prep them both well ahead of time because there's a little travel in my future thanks to a machine gun shoot down in the even further south more on that later in the meantime you can support the channel by checking out this year's new poster and our campaign over it IndieGoGo thank you

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 488,913

Rating: 4.9017382 out of 5

Keywords: firearms, guns, WWI, History, greatwar, bf1, battlefield1, worldwar1

Id: oQAqNqaiQwY

Length: 106min 38sec (6398 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2017