History of WWI Primer 074: Russian Mosin-Nagant 1891 Documentary

today we're going to cover perhaps the most infamous rifle of the Great War a Russian original that despite constant criticism would serve for nearly a century [Music] hi I'm Matthias in this Oh this guy is the Russian three line rifle year of 1891 more popularly known as the Mosin Nagant I'm sure many of you are at least somewhat aware of it but let's go ahead and take it over to the light box weighing in at 9 and 1/2 pounds and with an overall length of 51 and 1/2 inch this is a very large and heavy rifle although not all that unusual for the time it was adopted it chambers the 7 62 by 54 millimeter rimmed cartridge and feeds five of those things from a stripper clip into it's single stack box magazine now I'm going to anger one of you right off the bat by saying I have a deep love for the Mosin Nagant I'm not sure that I have an appreciation for it though and I'm sure that many of you already have a strong notions about just what this gun represents in terms of shooting performance in history but we still need to know where it comes from and if you learn to appreciate how it came to be I think you start to understand why it is the way that it is and it can be a history lesson and a reminder of the past without necessarily being your favorite shooters so with that in mind let's go build up some contextual history this is the bird and - a ten point seven five millimeter bore black-powder single-shot rifle it was designed by us inventor and marksman Hiram Berdan to the Russians it was known as the 4.2 line rifle now a line is an old Imperial Russian unit of measurement it represents two point five four millimeters and while we're talking Imperial measurements they also use something known as the RF shin roughly like a meter although this comes out to 71 point 1/2 centimeters a pop those will be marked on the rear of sights of these guns now of course if we're back in the Berdan I don't need this guy for now instead let's talk a little bit about the 1870s because this is a period when the first really reliable repeating rifles are starting to appear I mean they're not anything near what we're gonna see him but they have magazines they feed from them you know Swiss are getting into it pretty good but for the most part a lot of nations are sort of holding back they're still kind of concerned about the idea of arming men with a magazine rifle because the thought process is they're gonna put it to their shoulder they're gonna see the enemy they're gonna get that panic in them and they're just going to start shooting and working the bolt and shooting or even if it's not a bolt it's a lever or whatever there's shoot and miss and shoot and miss and they're just gonna burn ammo and at this time siege warfare is still a thing and you've got a pack in everything manual either by person or by animal and so a lot of armies really kind of settle in and try to do as much damage as they can while running down the clock the clock on food the clock on ammunition the clock on water that's where you know it's like small-scale attrition this is where a lot of battles are won and lost so nobody wants to waste ammo they want one shot one kill that's gonna change for Russia about the time of the russo-turkish war now in particular we're talking yet again about the siege of Puebla in 1877 here the Ottomans used a combination of martini rifles and Winchester lever-action repeaters they would carefully aim and shoot the single loaders at long range and they would set their sights using pre designated markers this made for very accurate fire but once in a while the enemy would get too close and in order to drop them they drop their single-shot rifles and pick up the Winchester repeaters emptying the magazines as fast as they could this effectively prevented the Russians for making critical breakthroughs and while they would ultimately win the siege they suffered extreme casualties in the process and it took longer than they expected now you guys have heard me talk about pleven aplenty and that's because a lot of European powers took this example to push them in the direction of a universal repeating rifle for their troops now what they wanted was the ability to shoot at long-range just like with those martinis and still pump rounds in an emergency like the Winchesters so what they ultimately would do is a lot of them would adopt single-shot rifles with magazines with a cut-off so the idea is that you have a magazine in reserve and then your officer can call oh good god they're right there open the magazine dump the magazine halt the threat then we will go back to single shot and in this way you could waste ammo in those precious moments when it was acceptable to waste ammo but not all the time it's not a bad concept certainly but we know that it would start to fade over time I really don't have to go explaining single shot versus repeating we've done that in a million different episodes so instead let's talk about what the Russians did with this information because they're the ones that experienced pallava they're the most directly impacted so they took the shots from those Winchester appears they would naturally be right at the front line of adopting a repeating rifle right you guys don't know Russia instead it would just focus on trying to get their rate of fire up without actually having to reinvent the gun or add a magazine because that just sounds expensive instead they came up with different cartridge holders and bandoliers and like weird attachments to the rifle itself to see if putting cartridges on the rifle I mean you can give them to the chamber faster I'm not kidding this is like their approach to we just got laid out by Winchester repeating rifles is what if we just put the single cartridges as fast as we could like just you know hurry up obviously this did not really work but it did delay progress for several years until someone got fed up with it and actually started pushing them in the right direction that would be the chief artillery director Sophie ah no he got plenty fed up and took the helm he would in 1881 start pushing for the native development of a magazine system to fit to the existing Berdan rifles now the key word there is native that is a domestically not necessarily invented but adapted system so the Russians didn't expect that they were just going to invent their way out of this with a brand new whatever but if he nice if they did so they did have some people in country who had magazine ideas like everybody does but they also were willing to look outside the country for inspiration but the one thing is they weren't just going for a wholesale adoption of an outside idea they wanted to fit it custom to their Berdan rifle which no one else was really easy I mean people were buying them from Russia but no one else was producing their own burdens necessarily except for to sell them to Russia does that follow so they had to by default work on this in-house to some degree or at least make some custom decisions that is key because it's going to set up the Russians to have their own internal development for the first time for small arms and that is what ultimately leads to their ability to produce this gun today for better or worse but anyway this starts with surveying the field and looking at what magazine systems are actually out there so in a few years time you'd start to see things like the leak rope at Chuck and Winchester Hotchkiss come cruising through the Russian Arsenal system they were explored by the local Smith's and engineers who soon acquired a taste for their own ability to invent and refine existing designs this atmosphere again would prove critical to creating their own culture of arms development now at first this was all sort of you know hmm you know one thing at a time they just sort of were sampling there wasn't really a plan for how to turn this into a meal and so 1883 rolls around and the government's going we should take this kind of seriously so they want to put together a commission for the testing and acceptance of a new rifle now this thing is going to change name so often that I don't want to bother naming it like as I was going through the history it just seems like it would spin off another subcommittee that then just sort of became the committee and it's just it's not that interesting of a detail but the way I know it's the same committee every time is they kept putting the same guy in charge of the whole thing so there's really one name that sort of sticks to the controls and guides the way for this process of organizing all of these engineers inside and outside inventors that sort of thing that would be the venn Colonel and later lieutenant general nikolai ivanovich Shagun he was one of the few men in russian service to have experience as an arms designer and while I think he deserves a bigger bio we're gonna be running on limited time for this episode so I invite you to look him up yourselves what's important is that he would be the arbiter of Russia's rifle program often challenging his inventor Engineers to mix and match concepts of the day constantly questioning every design and making certain Russia would adopt a reliable rifle try not to judge him too harshly he was working within the Russian Imperial system overall I think his efforts were very well done considering what he was working with so this man with the formation of the new Commission sets out a two-stage set of goals not two goals but two stages stage 1 find the magazine system for the bird and 2 that allows for simple conversion of the existing rifles if that does not work then we default back to stage 2 now by the way the fact that you would have a fallback plan is very advanced for Imperial Russian adoption at that time now part 2 if it doesn't work out then you need to pick an overall new service rifle with magazine function now when you have a standing army as big as the Russians do and you're looking for a new rifle all sorts of people will come to bat and we've already listed some of the magazine systems that we saw but we're also gonna hear some names that are more familiar like Mon liquor and down to things like Vitali or Berthold o or mule Ivanovich or something like that like a lot of these guys came to play along with some names you've never heard from the Russian camp these are local guys that are just trying to put for their best idea then they're usually working within the Arsenal system already which is how we're gonna find our hero today but we're not ready for him just yet so the whole thing is very informal you would submit your rifle with magazine design presumably if you want to be on that stage one goal you would submit a burden conversion but you could also go for goal to hedging that there wasn't going to be an acceptable whenever for goal win go one so you submit your gun and they do a hundred round impression test now this is going to be that four point two line black powder cartridge and if that goes well then you get to kick up to like a three thousand round sort of endurance test to really give an impression of a gun and as the inventor you could be there you don't have to be there they'll give you a notes you can take those notes and redesign the gun and resubmit it all over again you can just keep resubmitting and making changes so that means this there's a lot of turn around very quickly which is a good thing but also means that there's not a lot of detail for me to give you because there's just a myriad of things going on in a brief one to two year period as people really start to try to adapt the bird an but ultimately by 1884 we're seeing a clear leader in this sort of category of Russia's first repeating rifle that would be the chef's Nevsky which by the way I still don't speak Russian this was a burden to bolt system paired with a crow Patrick ich tubular magazine it was affordable functional and on the straight path towards adoption when it exploded twice now as a man who has exploded two rifles before I can tell you that I'm not impressed by Italian vet Early's converted to 6.5 and I'm sure that the Russians weren't too happy with two of their demonstration rifles also exploding although these were done out of battery as a matter of fact we've talked about this possibility before and sort of dismissed it but in this one case it was actually true and I imagine it had a lot to do with the configuration of the ammo the type of primer and the shape and handling of the follower and to a lot of detail it goes in this sort of thing it was a tubular magazine chain detonation tip 2 primer shaking the gun around one bullet slammed into one primer and pop goes your magazine tube it actually happened it actually happened twice in a number of weeks and so with those two incidents well the committee was like no thanks we don't want to do anything with this we're done no more under barrel tubular magazines no more either line tubular magazines the chain detonation concept is just too worrisome for us now we know from other guns like crow Pat checks and bells are built on core Patrick's basically everything crap at check in terms of military bolt-action rifles that you can have a safe enough even with spitzer cartridges tube magazine you have to have hard primaries you have to have rims so that they don't go tip to primer and yeah you can still shake them up but it just it doesn't seem to happen except for apparently Russians were very good at it I suspect very sensitive French anyway true magazine off the docket goodbye now the good thing about that though is that it brought to light a lesser-known Russian design that had been submitted that is now despite not being nearly as good in terms of feed and fit and finish is actually looking nice because it doesn't have chain detonation risk written were all over it now this was designed by one Sergey Ivanovitch Mosin son of a retired second lieutenant from Russian peasantry his mother would actually pass away giving birth to his brother in 1852 he entered the Macau military academy at age 12 and in 1867 moved over to the Alexandrov Scoy military High School in Moscow in 1870 he was assigned to the artillery and entered the McAuliffe sky Academy he would graduate in 1875 and was sent over to the Tula Arsenal this posting allowed him to stay close to his ailing father and introduced him to a number of foreign military designs that came through for testing or modification he rose quickly through the ranks and by 1880 was already head of the tool shop his design was another 4.2 line black-powder rifle introduced in 1884 instead of an under barrel tubular magazine they used one set in the stock at an angle preventing chain detonations the stock styling actually comes from the burden and those holes in the stock well they were actually from the existing bird and Dragoon variant while serviceable in many ways it wasn't as favored because the bolt was new made that means no reusing the existing bird and rifles it locked on the bolt handle which was set further to the rear of the receiver than the burden but it was an attractively simple design with a separate bolt head and cock-on open action all right I'm gonna go off-script for one moment because normally I research everything I count on other researchers I don't like making claims I don't like theories without proof but there's something about the Mosin that has bugged me for a very long time and I can't unsee it I believe that Mosin took ideas primarily from these three u.s. rifles the Evans the Chaffee Rhys and especially the Winchester Hotchkiss now I could be absolutely wrong about this connection I have no hard research for it I just can't not see it and to be fair if I'm right it's not like this is a ripoff I mean the final Mo's and guns even these early motion guns are far enough away from the Winchester Hotchkiss just to be much different than say the Mauser in the Springfield 1903 Mo's uns making his own gun even if he's inspired by somebody else it'd just be nice to know if he really was inspired by the Winchester Hotchkiss all right so he has this model 1884 which I've already shown you and there's like four big problems that stand out with it but otherwise it's pretty impressive now those problems are technically the way his stock is set up you could still maybe get a chain detonation it's not super likely like it is with a tube but like a linear tube but this angle even with the rim it makes people nervous okay number two it how I explain this it feeds from the rear you load your first cartridge you go to extract it it needs to hit an injector of some sort but there's none in the gun instead it uses the rim of the next cartridge to act as the ejector the problem of this is you eventually have a last cartridge and when you try to eject that you have to reach down and thumb it out.people links are changing what they're doing just for one cartridge it makes things very weird alright number three the buttstock is weaker because you've put a hole in it all right that's just gonna be an inherent problem with having a buttstock feeding magazine and then last the cocking piece on the bolt itself because this is not the burden we have to judge the bolt the cocking piece doesn't have any sort of over top cover to prevent things from getting in between it and the bolt body which means you could potentially get something in there pull the trigger and then the cocking piece won't be able to fall all the way that's a big problem so Mosley would work up an improved model 1885 now we'll see a two-piece stock most significantly it had a two rail system for the stock to control the feed of the cartridge as the bolt was worked this two rail system greatly resembles the Chaffee reese the tube was left partially exposed and formed the bearing surface during recoil this configuration was definitely tried before in the Evans rifle this should have made a straw but it actually turned out to be a little bit weaker this way about 800 of these things were produced for extended testing nearly severe problems were out-of-battery detonation now that problem was actually really common because this is a double feed out of battery that they're afraid of we saw this with the Guevara 88 and basically any gun that doesn't have a controlled feed from the magazine to the chamber that means that the the cartridge doesn't lift the extractor the moment it comes out of the magazine instead it lifts the extractor after you've already chambered the round so that means that you could conceivably mostly chamber around bolt back having not lipped it with the extractor not notice you've left around in there feed another round tip de primer bang okay that's the sort of fear that we're having I also saw some illustrations that maybe there was an issue with sort of hanging extraction and then the rim of an extracted case being able to be accidentally rammed back into a primer I'm not sure of exactly what they were doing to cause these out of batteries I just know it had something to do with a double feat of either an empty case or another live case regardless moeslem would actually correct this issue in his 1887 gun which i am not even going to show you because that gun is irrelevant because basically arms technology just goes and changes that same year and we've talked about this before but let's just get a quick recap the 1880s were absolutely nuts for firearms development so let's see some examples here Germany had a centerfire black-powder large bore single-shot rifle in the Mauser 1871 that lasted over a decade but by 1884 they were going for this new repeater concept so you get the 70 180 for a large bore black-powder repeater now next up research revealed that smaller diameter bullets moving faster were a lot better and easier to truck around the problem is black powder made a mess in those tight bores let's borrow this design from neighboring Austria as an example this was actually adopted by the Portuguese the crow magic features a small bore black powder cartridge and tubular magazine but right at that same time austria-hungary avails another revolution in the Mon liqueur 1886 which is actually still large bore they haven't gone small-bore thing but it's magazine uses a 10-block clip allowing them to load an entire magazine and one quick go that's right they could just preload these things and just shove the whole thing in the gun boom rapid loading so that means that by 1886 the most advanced rifle you can have is a small bore compressed black powder repeating rifle that feeds off of an end block or a charger because the Vitaly system that we've seen before was already out there the Mauser stripper clip not quite but the charger is pretty close so anyway packet loading like all the mi wants small bore compressed black-powder repeater that is the ideal in 1886 and by that number I know a lot of you know where we're going but just hold on this for one moment because if the Russians had been fast adopters then they would have gotten sort of close with this and the best they had at that moment was well Moses 1885 now in order to get it to a small-bore they actually did some experiments they did make a 3.15 wine cartridge that comes out to 8 millimeter and they tried running it in two modes in 1885 and it failed it just couldn't take the pressure it was a little too heavy of a hitter they were you know trying to get that speed up in addition to getting the bore down and it was no good so they would start putting some effort into developing a rifle that could handle a small bore compress charge but they really didn't want to pair that with the magazine system it got spun off into its own little side thing and it wasn't a huge priority so that means that Russia wasn't that worried about fully loading the magazine they weren't that worried about compressed black powder and small bore they were still gonna stick to for point to line and if they've been any faster I mean this would have been their final gun that would mean spending a lot of money and tons of manufacturing time on this gun right here and instead well they delayed as usual penny pitching until the end and they kind of worked for them this time because the very next year guess what the French drop the Lebel 1886 with its smokeless 8 millimeter cartridge the world of firearms development changed overnight this cleaner burning faster shooting powder meant lightning fast small bore ammunition was finally possible without all that horrible after effect and it allowed for all sorts of previously impossible mechanisms to function without clogging full of black powder fouling so with that I don't need to cover Mo's ins 1887 rifle because it was already it was just a refinement of the previous one and now all that technology is out of date it's time to move to smokeless powder for certain now that means Russia's got to get moving they are two generations behind repeater and smokeless Mosin got back to work and it introduced an upgraded form of his rifle in 1888 this one now chambered that smaller bore 3.1 line cartridge and thankfully did not explode that's because he added rear symmetrically locking logs to the bolt which also now has a distinct French flair and if you take note he's included that cover for the cocking piece that's gonna prevent muck from getting in there and causing it to not go off when you want it to now this gun is pretty cool but it suffers one problem and a problem that's been with it the entire time almost which is that stock feed that feed from the rear you open the back of the gun shove em oh and there close it up this is cool on some old 22s this is not something that you want a military rifle because first of all in the beginning it wasn't a controlled feed chain detonation bla bla bla bla after that Mo's it improves it by having these two shaped rails I don't want to go into animating this but they alternate when you work the bolt in order to shove ammo forward and then hold it where it belongs so just shove an animal forth there's a problem with that though which is that if you partially load the magazine you're gonna you know it like I think I'm getting a little confusing with this let me get a visual aid so I'll just give this rifle out of the way I do not have a rear loading right for the controlled feed but I do have something equivalent enough to get the concept across I have these penguins so let's see if we can get a closer look alright so let me uh that should be pretty good now this is a highly technical device but I want you to imagine that this is the rear of the magazine you have all these positions in which ammo can fit under controlled feed and up here well I'm gonna knock the whole thing over guys up here barely beaut you know patented plastic pokey hand up here well that's really not showing up yes okay this is where the chamber is so we get out of our magazine up here and then it goes in the chamber now this is a bit cooler than a gun because it then comes back around and loads itself this is sort of the infinite shooter but just ignore the slide part I just think it's fun I have taken this thing apart by the way because I found out after we got this for the show that it plays a really annoying song at maximum volume no matter what you do so I cut the wires alright so we'll turn this on and now imagine I'm working the bolt alright I'm working the bolt the ammo starts feeding in if I load a partial mag like this obviously I don't have enough penguins for the entire rifle well I got to keep working the bolt until they all comes back around so if I set this up again what's this guy's lazy alright so I load three rounds okay so we'll get those in the gun one two three now imagine I manually loaded them I didn't work the bolt okay but I could have had however many rounds more I'm not really good at conversions of penguins two rounds that means I got to keep cranking the bolt until all my penguins are lined up just so with one penguin at the top there we go right there that's what we want we want red penguin then we're ready to put it on our back and go into war and if we mess that up when we go to work our bolts in a moment of crisis we're gonna go all right work the ball once yep nope nope there we go now I'm ready to fight I just like that part okay so I think you can see why this was not going to be a very popular system for the battlefield so yeah no more but loaders I want to point out I am showing you Mosin designs because we know this the direction we're going there's a lot of other things that are being tested lots and lots of different ideas are being passed around it's just that I've sort of gone backwards and with hindsight picked out the things we want to pay attention to list everything the Russians were playing with because it was all sort of ad-hoc unlike other trials programs where we tend to see whole rifles being submitted concepts are being explored so Russia's in a big hurry at this point it's 1888 there are two steps behind and they're really wigged out by the cartridge more so than the magazine they're still not convinced that repeating rifles are all that much faster than single shots they prefer to have one but they know they are drastically out ranged by eight millimeter labelled and any army that adopts a smokeless cartridge like that well what Russia could brute force their way through not having repeating rifles they have enough men that they could just feel double the men and double their fire rate they can't double their distance without actually getting a new cartridge does that follow so in order to speed this whole process up they may actually do something kind of smart they split it in half they start two programs one to select the rifle and the other to select a magazine to fit that rifle and that means you have to leave your rifle sort of generic but reasonably you can fit a lot of magazines to a lot of different actions and they really need to get around to ammunition barrel and bolt first so there's a second stage to this as well which is that if we get caught with our pants down and we don't have the magazine but we do have the action figured out we can at least start churning out single-shot smokeless powder rifles and defend ourselves with that it won't be ideal but it would be better than turning out a bunch of black powder single shots or black powder magazine rifles and in fairness that's actually quite smart so again everything split in half we go into development of single shots we go into development of magazines that can then be paired to those single shots that means that Moses last design gets stripped of its magazine and has otherwise reassembled for its merits as a single shot rifle also this thing's starting to look kind of familiar anyway around this time Russia would purchase a sample labelled in 3000 rounds of ammunition but it turns out the barrel was defective so they had to get another basically this waste six months of their effort once ready the commission would clone the barrel bolt and rear sights to speed things up in terms of their research of a cartridge this effort would be guided by captain a and the Sakharov who served as lead designer for a series of trials rifles the goal was an 8 millimeter cartridge similar to the Lebel although hopefully not as hurried it should ha couple it at about 2,000 feet per second with this in mind zakharov would get to work now mostly he would be an ideas man using engineers to get the final products through initially it was a single-shot rifle that cloned the labelled bolt and Barrel likely in a familiar stock they then merged in bird and bolt features and swapped the rifling from left to right hand realizing the 8 millimeter level cartridge was kind of bad dimensionally they smoothed it out in favor of their own 8 millimeter design again that is a 3.1 line caliber that had some problems with bullets striking the rear flat of the barrel at first they tried a tipping cartridge guide but this would give way to a feature from Mo's ins mind a bowl-shaped ring a head of the breech to guide the bullet into the hole it necessitated rounding the front locking lugs though they would also simplify the labelled bolt ditching the need for a screw driver to get that thing out of the action and this honestly just seems to come from the Mosin side of things again it included a spring-loaded left-side bolt stop the trigger was in the Prussian style much like the Mauser 1871 and the rear sight was taken from the Lebel but the notch and the front sight post were taken from the burden now as you saw emotions contributing to the overall ideas this is not necessarily a competition I mean yes you want the majority of your idea is to go through and you'd like that recognition but it doesn't mean that you the nobody's on the same team this is this is a community effort on the Russian part they're all Arsenal personnel and they all want Russia to get the best possible rifle now with that in mind Mosin still had his own unique ideas and he didn't necessarily appreciate everything that was going to the Commission rifle versus what he thought would be ideal and that means that he was pushing his own designs at the same time let's check in on what he was doing this looks a lot like his previous rifle again it has a clone lapel barold but he stitched the screw and the bolt stop for a unique snag hook this would be turned to release the bolt from the receiver big changes here on that bolt by the way the locking lugs are now on the bolt head much stronger also losen incorporated his own bowl thing you can tell this because the lugs are rounded off at the front on this gun also note that extension on the underside of the cocking piece someone is trying to prevent out of battery rotation now we kind of talked about that when we did the big arrow episode which is that if your cocking piece is back in certain rifle designs or well honestly very few rifles don't have this feature by the time we're getting into the 1880s 1890s but if the cocking piece is back there is a chance of turning it without some sort of preventative measure and partially decocking out of battery and then when you try to go forward it'll Jam scratch up the wood whatever in Moses case he just added a simple finger of metal that meant that if you tried twisting on the thing it wouldn't be able to spin very far because of the notch and the receiver that's all it is now on something like the Magaro they don't have an out-of-battery prevention but they also don't have any grasping grooves on the cocking piece you're not meant to manually recaulk the bolt on that gun on the Mosin designs well yeah they have a thing for you to grab so that if you light strike or something you can wreak och it and just try again in doing that you have a very high probability of rotating the cocking piece if you are able to so this is a good feature to add to the gun now honestly at this point Moses designs starting to look like a whole rifle - a magazine of course but we're still investigating the single-shot side of this experiment maybe things are kind of settling down maybe we're getting towards a final product for Russia now Shagun has another idea during the Commission's big meeting in the summer of 1889 he proposes a new change instead of the 8 millimeter or three-point line bullet let's go smaller down to three line flat or seven six two millimeters now this is not a horrible idea the smaller lighter bullet would reduce the stress on the locking system it would be easier to get moving faster add that 30 caliber splits the difference between all those 6.5 7 millimeter experimentals we're seeing out there in the bigger 8 millimeter lapel and it's not a bad compromise cartridge with some work this would become the 760 2 by 54 millimeter cartridge that we sort of know today albeit this one was round nosed as was vogue at a time Spitzer would come later in the same meaning a number of requirements would appear that's the three line cartridge along with symmetrical locking lugs mounted on the bolt head and those lugs were not to be used as a bolt stop you know I bet somebody wish they'd laid down that rule for Charles Ross there would also be many more requirements for the magazine but I'll get there when we get there also at this time the Russians knew that they were going to have three separate rifles the first being the 18 well what would be the 89 one a long infantry rifle and then the second and third gonna be very similar they're going to be a dragoon in a cavalry / Cossack those two guns were actually going to talk about in the next episode I have more than enough to talk about in this one now end of 1889 the Russians finally have their smokeless powder ready they're determined to go ahead and get this process moved right along in February of 1890 the Commission would reveal another single-shot rifle much like the last but now with a new three line cartridge and with a better proportion receiver and bolt set up plus the rear sight is dovetailed instead of just soldered on looking at the bolt we can also see that they've now borrowed Mo's ins out of battery extension again he was also part of the team working on this gun in addition to his own now before we go any further just a reminder again magazines are being developed at this exact same moment separately so they're having consecutive to this for now let's keep on the single shots Moses response to the Commission is this a very familiar of looking rifle by this point the magazine trials forced a single receiver pattern so Mosin adopted the use of the Commission's receiver he did however keep his old bolt but made some improvements first the guide rail was lengthened to cover the entire underside of the bolt this was done to prevent the locking log from snagging on the rim of the next cartridge because that gun is so close to our final product let me sort of talk about that so let's get a closer look okay so looking at the Mosin we have a split bridge receiver that means that when I with this guy up our bolt comes through here with a guide rail bolt handle and then we have our nice shroud for the cocking piece which actually now has another role as well talk about that in a moment and then while we're out of battery you can see that this rail here keeps us from being able to turn that cocking piece sorry this is all making sense whether or not you love it that's a different matter now the bowl is arranged in such a way as to be vertically logged all right so there's our log sticking up as we go forward that allows us to not really beef up the receiver so to get this bolt out by the way that rails serving another purpose it would snag on the backside of this year so if I pull the trigger and work this to the rear it releases you can see that mechanism in there see the release mechanism and that's gonna act on a notch in the underside of this rail that prevents us from violating the terms of the committee saying that they don't want anybody whacking on the backside of these logs again this is important we saw this with our Ross rifle episode if your bolt stop actually hits on your lugs you have a chance of deforming them I mean you could also just have really strong lugs but this is a good option to anyway the rail is really becoming a multi-purpose instrument I want you to understand why it's here because in a moment I'm talking about why I hate it but it keeps the cocking piece from rotating out of battery it keeps us from having to use one of the logs as a stopping point as a bolt stop it also acts as a guide for that lug so if we are trying to feed rimmed ammunition there's a chance that as the bolt comes back it's going to catch on the roll it would catch here on the log if it was exposed but since it's not exposed slides right over it there's just a little tiny gap for it to pop right over we're not gonna have any snags or problems and the reason we want to keep a vertical log arrangement by the way cuz you know mousers and stuff they don't have this they have horizontal logs that then turn up when they go in to walk well that's because it makes the back of the gun so much simpler to no out we just have to cut vertically into the receiver and drill a round hole we don't have to go in here in nibble out square shapes and beef up the rear receiver I mean if you look at the Mosin and I know a lot of you have seen this come but really look at it for a moment there's a very small rear receiver section it's not nearly as built up it's much more scalloped out than a lot of other guns that's because there's not a lot happening back here with the front locking lugs all the strength has to be up here you don't have to have a lot going on in the rear and that makes it easier to manufacture and consume less metal so it's not a bad concept it's just that you end up with some execution problems more of those in just a second because I want to sing Moses praises just a bit longer which is that if we put this bolt in walk or down all right we've got a front locking loggers we've got a support lug here although that's really not doing much it's just an emergency thing and at the rear on the burden rifles they had a half cocked position you just pull this cocking piece to a certain point it would lock in and then until you wreak acht it all the way out no go right well in this case that was a little annoying half [ __ ] were mostly abandoned by all armies but the Russians weren't big on attaching a whole other assembly just to act as a safety they almost wanted to go the French route of no safety at all but they wanted something and Mosin actually had a very good idea here we already are expected to be able to recog this anyway Wendy [ __ ] so what if we just [ __ ] it back a little bit further turn it so that rests on the receiver body itself where we've already milled away some metal to get the size down and boom you're done I mean what nothing right and then we just [ __ ] it back a bit and set it over and we're ready to go now I know a lot of you know how stiff this is and you may laugh at it a bit but realistically it's no different than like a Swiss bit Reuben series because they just pull out like not the Coggan B's in this case it's the actual striker and they turn it into a channel and let it back forward and it can't go all the way forward it's the same very simple concept very simply executed it's big savings for the Russian military it's a good idea overall all right back to this gun though so where's the actual problem and you can kind of see it even in this gun right so and by the way I know somebody already trying to read markings and stuff and you're big on this stuff plenty of resources for that that I'll link you out but this one looks to be D Imperial and Serbian marked its gonna serve just fine for what we're doing today though so you can see as I start to lift er this this sort of gumminess to it and I'm gonna tell you it feels almost rubbery and then I'm gonna get this guy back again we're just gonna pull that trigger release that bolt very simple mechanism and where is that coming from why do people hate the Mosin bolt so much and I think you can already sort of see there's just so much play in this thing that's because the Russians walk the tolerances out to ease manufacturer and also sort of prevent it from gumming down very easily and it's just down to cost savings but being a little out of spec isn't the real killer of the Mosin system as far as I understand it as I see it it's this rail plus all the extra play so the rail itself if you notice is sort of unsupported for most of its length it yes it interacts with the cocking piece but it's retaining the cocking piece so the cocking piece flexes against it okay and it's only really held here now I can take this gun apart further by just letting her forward that releases our bolt head at the front bolt head comes free our firing pin is actually fixed down to the cocking piece on the other end so if you want to go any further for this disassembly I can recog that to give you a better look we would have to undo this screw here so this is all sort of linked unless you actually start unscrewing stuff we don't need to go that far in let's look here so I'm gonna remove the bolt head and you can see this is the heart of a multi-purpose tool that I think ruins the Mosin bolt without it all right we would have let's see if I can even get her to partially reassemble without it there we go without it we would have a system like this we talked this and you guys see it won't retain without having been anyway so we'd end up with a system like this right and then when we turned our bolt handle we would have to have our cocking piece cocked by actually riding in the receiver it would remove the middleman all right I think that would make this bowl a much better I don't want to go through all the machine to actually try it but I'm gonna tell you lots of bolts look like this this is very close to what the Lebel is like and they'll bail doesn't feel terrible this rail doesn't actually let's really look at it for a second it's not actually attached to the bolt but it just rests with it and it gets turned by the fact that it's squared off with that firing pin as a matter fact I have to do a close to even get that back on there so it's the squared off hole so the squareness of this firing pin is what's keeping this rail sort of directed so it's a little oblong in there alright that's a problem because and I'm trying to explain this visually and not get my hands all in the way but the cocking piece has to have something to bear against in order to cam back so these horizontal surfaces here they the linear action of this comes from the fact that we spin it and we don't allow the other thing that spins so we spin the bolt and we don't allow the cocking piece to spin and that causes this guy to go back and that's very stiff but it's still pretty smooth at the moment as smooth as I can make it with my hands right so in retaining this from rotating we use this fork here and you can see those tines are kind of not super rigid I mean they're rigid but they're they can only be so right or they're very thin there's a lot of tolerance between this and the time so it can rattle around on there this there's a lot of looseness between the tines and the body of the receiver so that's two air gaps that we've already added to the system and even with those air gaps now all that sort of yo all that rotational force that you're resisting is transmitted all the way up here and it's not resisted by being attached hard to the bolt body because this just slides in and often is a little bit of play there and there's a little bit of play on the bolt head no there's also it going over that firing pin and again there's a little bit of play there so air gap to the tines air gap from the tines to the inside the receiver and then they can sort of yoke up against the receiver in the meantime nothing at the front is really preventing the tines from doing that so I mean the receiver wall ultimately your point of resistance it's not a very good one I mean I can take this thing independently put it in the gun and show you I've got plenty of rattle and so that is why the Mosin bolt feels so dang rubbery now all that said there's still an additional problem which is that this lug here has to be able to operate in that notch on the bolts and I highly recommend that you watch an in range video I will link it below I'll link it in the YouTube overlay or whatever platform you're watching on if it has the option go check that video out because Ian and Carl show very well that a little bit of luck in this gap done the rifle will not open you get one shot and good luck charlie you've got to find a way to toothpick that stuff out of there that is actually the real Achilles heel of this whole system so nobody say I didn't talk through a that the Mosin is kind of the worst bolt out there from the world one era and B why because you can complain all you want it's better to know why and I'm gonna tell you it is all in this part right here oh okay rant over let's get back to some history so while I put this back together I want to start walking you through some of the magazine development the separate half of this whole thing because look at all this that's sticking off the bottom this gun it's gotta come from somewhere right this is lay on the gun one half of the famous Nagant brothers will actually talk more about both of them in detail another day but for now just some basics in 1867 they had licensed the remington rolling block rifle and built an arms business that would extend into their excellent revolver line intent but now in the middle of the 1880s Leon had worked up a new military rifle this was in the golf model 1887 a rockin straight pool it was kind of like the Navy Lee in operation but not in execution the mechanism was actually fairly complex and a little fiddly and pretty vulnerable to dirt and fouling which is why it would fail in the Belgian rifle trials losing out to the Mauser 1889 again this is another that we have on our near future radar you know it didn't even take that long so here's something that I want you guys to be aware of going into this mess which is that the Russians say we lighten the Gauss Rifle ish we're really interested in the magazine let's do some business here we want you to send it over to us but we don't want to get caught with our pants down if we like it we want to pre negotiate what it's gonna pay out if we adopt this thing and that's gonna be slightly in our favor we're gonna negotiate that now because we don't want you coming up with a price after we already put a lot of effort in this so they say to the gun and by the way this might be why the Russians had to go with his design because I imagine some of the other inventors weren't so keen on this but when they tell the gun here's a contract and the contract says look we'll pay for the trials rifle preps here's what the price range is on that and then then this sub article 12 or whatever there's a line that says if you win this thing if we adopt your rifle you get two hundred thousand roubles okay I don't know how many money that is but it sounds impressive and so no one signs off on this thing and he says yeah okay if I win the thing if you adopt my gun I get two hundred thousand rubles you get the ability to produce my rifle exclusively so you get exclusive license I walk away from the whole thing with money we're done okay this sounds like a good idea except for the fact that the Russian process so far hasn't been the wholesale adoption of one particular design that's gonna complicate things but for the moment let's get back to that 1887 while overall interesting it just wasn't gonna cut it although I kind of suspected the Commission lit on this semi pistol grip stock because we're gonna see a finger rest appear on the street wrist Mosin and Commission designs after they look at this thing they wanted a turn bolt and this is not it they also wanted a clip loader and at the moment this is still not that either but that's an easy fix that means in late 1889 the gun would deliver this technically this was his second turn bolt to be sent over but the first was such a dud I'm not mentioning it the magazine is so simple it's sublime plus he added the ability to feed from a clip straight into it but the bolt was really just a version of the work the committee had already been doing and to be fair that's by design they told them make this kind of bolt but when they trialed it they realized he was already outdated compared to their own efforts now this is where I should start walking up a bunch of various nagamma versions but I'm gonna save some time and just hit the high notes now recall that list of requirements from before let's go ahead and expand out what they wanted from their magazine rifle a reliable feeding magazine no double feeds it should be positioned for good balance and handling it should allow for single or magazine fire although the Russian mindset for this wasn't that it should have a cut-off but rather once the magazine was empty you should be able to toss Lucy's in also if the magazine broke it should default to a single shot and finally it needs to be paired with a simple light cartridge clip of some form or another all right so like I already said Nagar is being told by the Commission make this kind of bolt and they're showing him examples of what they got I'm sure so he's sort of on a rail falling along for the action now he'll make adjustments to the receiver and safety and other mechanisms that he wants to push forward because they're not hard locked yet but he's he's going with the Mosin Zarkov stuff okay so at the same time this has been flipped around Mosin and the rest of the team now have access to ngons magazine and they get to play with it not just attach it but actually modify it and make their own improvements zakharov next commission rifle did receive a magazine but only 30 were produced and the rifle was abandoned so quickly I don't even have any data on it the Mosin design by now is considered superior Nagant would evolve his own design in stages taking on more and more modes and features notice the straight risk to better fit Russian stock making now fitted with a metal finger rest to give that same solid grip the sights barrel and even basic shape of the receiver are getting more Commission like the bolt is also very close to the Mosin pattern actually favoring one of his earlier attempts so essentially it was a step backwards as formosans rifle while we already saw the single-shot version but here fitted with a Ngong style magazine it's starting to really take shape the construction on the magazine was much simpler for the Russian Arsenal's and he actually added some pretty neat features so that gun is so much like this one I can just show you all over again again check the chamber pull the trigger pull the bolt out you got this down right so we're gonna look at the magazine zooming in I want you to ignore this button instead at this point there's actually a lever arm that you'd flick over and then boom you could open the magazine button comes later but today we have a button pop that out as I pull this down I want you to ignore that it's follower instead on the Mosin system at this point this spring would be kind of flipped the other way and much thicker that would act as the feed ramp for the cartridges kind of like how the original mcgann didn't even have this arm it just had like a single big spring and a sidearm you saw the picture all right so what Mosin did is the ability to this pinch and pull that is pretty dang cool I mean you guys may or may not love the Mosin that is pretty cool and in a lot of ways I think we're seeing over and over in this gun Mosin is a very clever man he's reducing parts he's making good decisions they're just not always the best decisions because he does not have a body of people around him that are pushing for absolute refinement he's kind of a poor man's Nambu without the backup all right so this was pure Mosin and then honestly it made even more sense at the time because this little crossbolt here in the earliest guns would have been a sling swivel so that part was already gonna need to be there and so that means that you're getting double utility all over again and you don't need any extra fanciness to get this apart just a quick lever and she's locked in by the back side of her own arm that already has to be there with a spring that already has to be there this is really reducing the number of parts it's really nice now the Russians wanted a rimmed cartridge so I happen to have some antique ammo laying around now these have been to the best of my ability deactivated but the bolts over there so you guys don't have to worry about anything on this one let's take a look at well we'll try to take a look at the interrupter slash ejector that he designed inside the gun so if you look carefully down in here there's a blade you see that as a matter of fact let me get my patented plastic I would go ahead and start you know taking the screws off of this thing and get the receiver out for you to see it even clearer but Bertha's got the animation it's gonna be really easy to see there so let's just do a light job of it here when we load our round into the magazine which oh it would help to have an actual follower and everything to help to make this not just fall straight through there we go when we load around in the magazine I can just pop that guy down so I trying to do it on camera alright you notice that he's held by this little blade of metal put in the right position so that the bolt will pick him up and feed him when I bring it back around the problem you face with these rim cartridges is rim walk just like we saw with the lead and field they've had to address it while the Russians have to so if you scrape these along each other you're gonna get the edge of this rim locked up against the edge another one it's gonna tie up your whole magazine so it's very important to be able to separate the next cartridge to feed from the second cartridge below it and in this case if I press down on this what you'll see is this guy goes in and then he stops and he's actually being held and you can probably just barely see it out there to the side imma flip my Pokey around so I can get it in there it's a little notch right there see you at the tip of the yellow that notch is still part of one form spring that is pressing in and holding that cartridge down when the bolt comes forward and then turns in to lock it has to turn in to lock it will depress this little notch right here which will allow that cartridge to pop up now it's important that the bolt has to be already all the way in the lock because remember moseyin was challenged to prevent double feeds so that means the next cartridge will not be picked up until this bolt goes all the way in turns all the way down at that point we know the extractor has had a chance to whip over the rim of the cartridge that's currently in the chamber so it doesn't have a controlled feed but it does have a method of preventing the next cartridge from rising until you've locked it in and then a lot of people and you know ownership circles have Africa been confused about that because they've sort of popped the bolt forward just to get the round loose taking it out and then they bring it back to get the next round and they're like Oh to putting down there that's because it's designed to not release the second cartridge until your bolted all the way firmly on the first cartridge it's a smart system to prevent double feed it's just hard to understand if you're not used to it and used to a more organic system so that means that that little spring in there and it's an odd shape and you'll see it in the animation but that thing is preventing the cartridges from flying out of the receiver it is keeping this next cartridge down so that there's no rim lock it's keeping the next cartridge down so that there's no chance of a double feed until you know the next the first cartridge is actually flipped over the extractor that is a lot of things for one little component to do and then you add into the fact that it's shaped to act as the ejector so when you extract the next cartridge it rides over that hits a heel that's shaped on there and pops it out again Mosley is combining a lot of functions into one part and again it's actually very intelligent the execution is just weird just alien that is the part of the whole Russian system so far I know it doesn't execute well and I keep saying that but you have to when you look at the history start to appreciate what they were going for it's smart it doesn't mean it's good okay so let's get back to the nitty gritty the big 1890s trials would involve 300 Mosin single shots 300 Mo's and magazine rifles and was supposed to see 300 and a gun but Leon could not keep up with production and so this number was reduced to I believe about 100 they were tested by a combination of infantry and guard regiments four in total the troops were given surveys and then they responded up to their officers and then they sort of coalesced things and we got you know basically a four point trial how did they fare overall well one in four regiments preferred single-shot rifles to magazine rifles outright I don't know what to do with this out of the magazine rifles that account was preferred it was noted as feeling more like a finished gun and suffered from fewer feeding problems they were offered three clips one by Mosin one by Maga and a holdover from zakharov no I want to point out by the way Moe's ins guns were designed for the zakharov clip this was dropped last minute and he forced his own clip in the design and they worked terribly because they weren't actually designed for his own clip that may have been why the Mosin was performing so badly regardless the Nenana clips were preferred but they were still a bit tricky to use without cutting yourself they were also asked whether or not they'd like a handguard in the new rifle it was universally agreed that they did in fact want a handguard so on the whole it seems like the Nagant one all right there's one problem with this well - in a way one I told you guys the clips were not really set up the way they should have been that can cause a lot of issues to Mosin already knew that his 1890 rifle wasn't gonna do as well in these trials because he had already solved the problems that they found in this particular set of trials he just solved it after the production of 300 started and there was no way to stop and restart that production which is almost a shame because while he was told he couldn't stop the 300 from going through Nagala got to not submit 300 if Mosin had had that extra time or that extra tension he could have switched and done his improved gun so there's a bit of back and forth on this but basically Mosin has a model 1890 plus and most of the centers around improvements the magazine that absolutely did prevent the feed problems that they saw in the trials so yeah now is when we see this final follower that sits on top of everything and boy does it work also the magazine latch was improved to what we see today in the modern Mosin in a series of special demonstrations in March of 1891 this system handled very well it was also very good at single loading so later that same month they took the 30 Mo's in 1890 pluses and the ngoz and they put them into another set of trials this time with basically 24 opinion-makers all right now those 24 which by them again and they would find in favor then I got 14 to 10 it's much closer but then the guy is still winning so at this point you're gonna start saying I don't understand why do we have the Mosin rifle if the Nakdong kept consistently winning because we are right on top of the gun we have today there's not really any differences between the 8090 plus and this final revision right here it's gonna come down to rubles you see the Mosin was made in Russia so cess threats already knew how to produce them and they were effectively pre tooled up so production could begin months earlier the Mosin also had a design built around looser tolerances so who really knew what would happen when the Russian Arsenal's tried to take up the precision manufacturing of the Ngong even Leon couldn't produce it fast enough plus both rifles were very complicated so why add the extra expense of learning the new complicated rifle when we've already got this complicated rifle sorted out and honestly that would be the deciding factor I mean being four points up was not enough to risk all the inherent problems of possibly producing that icon when they already knew they could produce the Mosin they got quite good at cranking them out already and they already had all the tooling research to hand out to the other Arsenal's it's a done deal and the only changes that would follow are twofold a slight modification to how the trigger retains that bolt and a slight modification and how that weird combo ejector slash interrupter is dovetail and then screwed into place that's it just cleaning up some loose ends and then boom you have the 1891 Mosin which would be adopted in May 11th under the name three line rifle year of 1891 Mosin and the gun neither one of them got billing on this particular gun and if you take a look it doesn't quite look like this just yet just to summarize we have a labelled barrel and sights on the gun magazine and clip a Berdan stock with slings and Mosin zone designed bolt system likely very distantly evolved from the Winchester Hotchkiss mix it all up and allow Moe's in a fleet of other Russian engineers to keep cracking at it and blammo this is your guy it's been a long road to the middle of show but we're there now I can finally let you take a look at the inside of this 1891 Russian rifle we'll start off by loading a rifle from a stripper clip and as we do so take a look at that interrupter this part does a number of things but right now it's being a feed one [Music] this component is both the trigger spring and seer in one simple part this little extension on the top of the trigger actually acts as the bolt stop [Music] and if I can't turn your attentions of safety it's as simple as can be it really keeps the gun from being able to drop the cocking piece [Music] alright here's that interrupter from a better angle notice is holding the next round in place until the bolt is a lot it'll also act as the ejector alright I think this guy's pretty well wrapped out so let's get it over to men [Music] [Music] no I know I left you guys hanging just a bit because where we ended on the development the gun didn't look anything like this well okay it looked a little like this but there are some pretty big differences no handguard funky thing down here on the wrist so what the heck happened to evolve that gun to this point that's something we're gonna talk about in just a moment but first I also left out the bayonet it was already decided by 1890 develop that assess the risk the Arsenal I cannot pronounce the Russians would stay with a simple spike and collar interestingly the bayonet was to be fixed at all times for combat this came from russian experiments revealing that the time it takes to fix a bayonet especially one as weird as this one would take up to five or six shots worth of time making fixing the bana in battle a bad idea unless you just had a bayonet that was easy to fix weird reasoning so the guns were cited with the bayonets fixed on the barrels now obviously we did not have the bayonet fixed I actually have an original but it's missing the collar it's not worth getting into and at under a hundred yards it's really not gonna be a big impact instead this is the sort of thing that affects you out multiple hundreds of yards and it does get very aggravating though if you don't know that the gun is cited for the bayonet to be fixed to the gun because my example Serbia would end up with a little over a hundred thousand of these guys during the Great War and they were not necessarily informed that the Russians were the kind of loons that go around with another extra foot and a half a bayonet hanging off everywhere they go so when they started trying to use 1891 s in various states of disrepair already they found that they weren't hitting what they were shooting at they had to take these weird angles and you know Kentucky windage to get the things sorted out and in their minds the guns were just improperly sighted or inaccurate but in reality it's the bayonet issue all right I'm getting a bit of head so let's walk back to talking about producing these bad boys the chef's Garson would be the first to see production it started kind of an 1891 but things didn't really get rolling until the next year Tula would also get going in 1892 and sestra it's the Arsenal I can't pronounce would get going in 1893 now they should have been the first one out you'd think because they were so deeply involved in development but they incurred delays helping the others tool up I am certain in order to more rapidly rearm their massive army Russia would also contract with manufacturer Nationale d'Armes the shot teller a role for over 500,000 rifle these were produced from 1892 to 1895 now rearmament would happen in two phases the russians favored frontline and active service troops ahead of everybody else that's pretty obvious and then they started kicking things down the line to reserves and specialty troops and all that stuff and when you're dealing with something as large as the russian land army this is a big deal it is a massive undertaking production was run hard up until 1903 to make it happen and by then they would have three million four hundred sixty eight thousand and seventy three Mosin rifles although this does include the Dragoon and Cossack models as well I'll get to those in the next episode like I said so let's check back in with the inventors because somebody needs to get paid for all their hard work nope not Mosin lay on he had received about 67,000 franck and payments to cover the actual production of the trials guns but now that his design the magazine had been adopted it was time for him to cash out big on the licensing his contract were as you recall had stipulated that if his gun was adopted he would get two hundred thousand roubles in exchange for those rights there's a problem here though his gun was not adopted alright so this gets tricky because the contract had no stipulation for whether he got paid for part of his rifle Russians really are thinking what do we owe him how much should this be blah you know and it's tricky because they still need the license to produce unless they just want to take it I mean they are their own government anyway through private conversation apparently with other officials the GAO would make it known that he would be happy with seventy five thousand rubles for the magazine system the Russians true to form like we've seen - this whole episode decided that they wanted to save money and so they sent a negotiator and they gave him a cap of no more than fifty thousand roubles this would have been fine if Ngong were up against just russian production and therefore do you really have a lot of negotiating space I mean arguably the Russians are building a case that Mosin did so much work on the magazine that they don't want to pay him at all and there's some signs of the magazine moving very far away from McGowan's vision and how much he could really patent so yeah okay this puts the gun on not very good standing except for one problem that we just mentioned a moment ago which is that they wanted the French to produce these guns so yeah because Maga has had the sense to patent in France they could get sued in France and that cost from shots and our role would be passed on to the Russians and it's gonna be a lot worse than the two hundred thousand rubles if it has to go through court add in the fact that they have to worry about well the actual production they want it fast and this could tie things up so they got to pay the man and instead of the seventy five thousand rubles that he had quietly made known by this point he's figured out this whole French production thing and the cards are in his hand he wants the whole thing two hundred thousand rubles were paid to Ngong for the use of his magazine alone payday this is why you invest in patents and this is why you keep your head on straight if you are an inventor the may have made out just fine for his efforts anyway what about Mosin the man who really worked on the rifle if a [ __ ] got two hundred thousand what is this man getting well obviously there would be plenty of rewards in the form of promotions and honors and medals but cash money well the Commission would actually push for a fifty thousand ruble payoff that's not two hundred thousand but it's pretty good for you know domestic pay and the bean counter is well they got that number down to thirty thousand before actually hit his hands still had impressive sum for those days in Russia but geez patents really pay anyway Mosin would eventually had the cest arrest arsenal and rise to the rank of major-general he would pass away in 1901 thanks to good old pneumonia alright now just because the inventor is dead it doesn't mean that the rifle doesn't keep evolving although some of it would happen before he passed away let's go ahead and work up how the Mosin gets from what we saw in that picture to this gun right here all right no handguard a finger rest acting as a semi pistol grip and a unique swivel configuration soon that finger rest would be dropped and a handguard finally added you may recall this was recommended in trials but they didn't follow up on it until about 1894 after this they would lengthen the cleaning rod making it a bit more usable and they removed that very far front swivel we're not done yet but we have to take a break because here comes the russo-japanese war this fight kicked up over Manchuria and Korea Japan's victory was complete and should have come quickly but the Tsar kept dragging the engagement out he was sure it would turn around for them and then he was just trying to avoid embarrassment this not only proved Japan's emergence as a world power but it also shone a light on how badly Russia was in need of military reform as part of all this Russia came up against Japan's first smokeless rifle the Auto socket type 30 we actually have a whole episode on this repeater particularly interesting because it would be a pretty common sight in Russia during the Great War now comparing the type 30 and the Mosin is actually pretty interesting because both guns are sort of commissioned designs their countries that were out of check and then they reached out to find out what they could and they pulled it in to get their gun now the Japanese obviously went with a sort of Mon liquor Mauser influence those are good choices that results in a fairly good rifle although we've seen it has its limitations for the Mosin they went after the Lebel which is not a bad idea for the barrel and cartridge but for everything else it's a bit tricky and then as we saw they were min the niccola magazine which is an odd duck and they worm din sort of a Winchester Hotchkiss II design but not really ultimately resulting in their own unique bolt that just sort of evolved organically I'd argue that the type 30 also has a fairly organic bolt in the number of parts and how it went together so this is a really good two rifles to sort of pit up against each other see who did the best at picking and choosing from the world stage so let's line them up now these are Russian opinions they found that the Mosin was heavier the bayonet was more difficult to attach and detach and plus it was awkward shooting and moving around with it always fixed the Japanese six point five millimeter cartridge was lighter and more convenient plus the recoil was much less severe and its clip was easier to use feeding more reliably the aisaka bolt was much smoother to operate in the flush box magazine was less awkward and fed well without all the extra parts the Mo's ins ejector was often lackluster by comparison its barrel bands would worked themselves loose after multiple shots and the handguard itself was easier than damage than the type 30s Mosin cleaning rods were threaded making them likely to strip or clogged up with debris the arty sokka's were push-button and simple Mosin sling positions were uncomfortable and awkward and the Japanese rear sight base seemed stronger although the latter was technically a bit weaker than the Moses that is a lot of negatives for the Russian rifle now here's the real kicker the Japanese also assess their own rifle after the war although not necessarily in comparison to the Mosin but rather they just looked for any and all vulnerabilities as we know from our other episode they would end up with the type 38 and omean is that one amazing military rifle born of a desire to improve when they had already been winning left and right this is kind of the attitude of the Springfield 1903 with the Russians losing so clearly I wonder what they would come up with when they had to come to terms with the reality of their rifle not being it should be now I hate to ruin the excitement but we already know this this is what they're gonna do it's the same gun with some other bits good job Russia Japan beat your butt and then turn around and made one of the most amazing military rifles other ever and then you decided yeah we'll just do some more fiddly bits well let's at least cover them for the folks at home all right here's where we left off and now after the war we're gonna change the sling swivels two holes in the stock and add a scooch ins around those that way we can use the leather collar and carry the rifle a bit easier these were already standard on the Mo's and Dragoon rifles but again that's for the next episode we'll also see a new site thanks to new ammunition this would be the Spitzer L cartridge in 1908 Russia would follow along with Germany in the world by introducing their own boat-tailed Spitzer bullet it provided significant performance gains but required updating that rear sight previously they had used a flat ladder like on the lapel but the new round needed new settings keeping the original sight base they would adopt a neat but vulnerable design from Armory worker konavle off now this thing was curved to allow the existing Arshin markings on the base to stay making a very simple swap now on the ladder you could mark all new sights and so that meant that they could pump up from the original 2700 arjun's to 3200 still that wasn't the only update necessary for the 1908 cartridge so as we'll see from 1909 to 1910 a number of minor changes appear to deal with the recoil of that new more powerful round you can't see it in this image but the interrupter was adjusted to help feed the new ammo and following the adoption of the new cartridge the barrel bands would have worked loose even faster and so they finally upgraded them to these rings also a reinforcing steel cross bolt was added to help support the stock with the more aggressive Spitzer cartridge existing rifles were sent in for updates but the process was cumbersome and slow many were not finished before the Great War a big lesson from the russo-japanese war would also be that Russia needed a reserve as short as the conflict was in what we consider the context of World War one and World War two at that time it was a significant conflict and they were running out of equipment despite the incredible size of their empire so they knew that for next time they would need to have backups of everything and they wanted a reserve of four million Mo's and rifles now this number would never be met although they did get kind of close ish but four million really doesn't seem like the biggest number ever in the context of how big the Russian army really could be this tells you what sort of conflict they were looking forward to so as we get into like the nineteen teens you know 1910 1911 now starting to get into teens the Arsenal's are idling down to like 7% of production there just barely staying on and then in 1913 with sort of everything rolling up to a boil they go you know it's getting a little conflict the out there we don't have our four million rifles in reserve let's dial up production to like twelve percent of capacity that'll really see us through that will have us ready for when war were declared [Applause] all right so that means that Russia goes into the Great War with about 3 million ish rifles 1890 once they were also managed to produce out of the carbines and dragoons and other stuff that we're gonna talk about in the next episode maybe another million more but those are specially this is not for raw infantry and besides this is all basically a drop in the bucket for the attrition that we are about to see their peacetime army was roughly 1.4 million soldiers so this doesn't sound too bad until you realize that over the course of the war some 15 million would serve as things grew worse and worse Russia would begin losing up to two hundred thousand rifles a month on top of everything else it was pretty dire and in fact they had no real plans for forward depots and expected the already overloaded Arsenal's to handle repairs it's getting really bad as we saw in our winchester 1895 episode the Russian Minister of War would declare rifles more precious than gold when he had realized that they had over 1 million men without arms no oh this is a long episode as it is so I'm going to leave out how the Russians try to relieve this problem it may be a hint though it's contracts with everybody's favorite or least favorite country now again you're gonna get a whole second episode on the nugget anyway how about opinions of the Russian soldiers how do they feel about this particular gun here's the problem your average Russian shoulder soldier didn't get to choose his gun he ain't get to try a different gun this is all he knew this was gun and with the Russian Civil War and everything else going on in the fact that this stayed in service with the Soviets a if people were writing down how they felt about it B they probably weren't being encouraged to share anything that was unpopular about what remained the service rifle for Russia for a very long time so I don't have a lot of personal opinions but I will say I've shot the gun I've shot plenty of versions of this gun I mean they're everywhere and I've shot a lot of other will firearms and I will agree with the general consensus that this is one of the worst handling bolt actions of the conflict and maybe they were it's gotta be the worst and we already talked about why I told you about the forces in play I told you about the air gaps and things like that the vulnerabilities that you and Carl likes explored it doesn't mean that the gun doesn't have some historical value it doesn't mean that you have to hate it it does kind of mean that you don't want to play with it every day but that's beside the point this is Russia's bid to do something like okay this is gonna piss people off comparable rifles to the Mosin Nagant are you ready the artist akka type 30 and partway into the 30 maybe like the 35 because there's some attempt to refine down in this gun and then to the lee-enfield and I know I make people mad every time I mention that gun but the lee-enfield came in as the lead Metford they had to make all these changes because there was an accurate basically if the russians did what they needed to do to this gun this would have evolved like the lee series of rifles did if you just if they british had just adopted the Metford and stuck with it with all its weird idiosyncrasies and the inaccuracies and other problems and they just said no we're going with this and we're never improving it you would laugh at that gun almost as much as you laugh at this one except for the fact that the core action was good they built off of the problem they took the problems off and put features on to a good core action and they're kind of lucky there was a good correction the rim cartridge plays a big role in having a reader locking bolt like that blah blah blah it's a hole their argument for the comments go nuts but the Mosin was built on an inherently flawed bolt and I believe that the entirety of the flaw was the inclusion of that underside rail as the solution for everything it seems like a tidy design it just doesn't work mentally great on paper great you know you show it to other designers and they go oh that's sublime but then you actually start working the bolt and it's rubber it's chewing gum that is the problem with the Mosin above and beyond anything else okay so with all that covered what actually go get mais opinion not on the development or the comparison of it to like everything else in terms of evolution or history but rather she puts it to her shoulder she works the bolts she pulls the trigger how good or bad is the gun really okay everyone we've made room for maith and we have just enough room for this long rifle I'll get that in your hands thank you now once more we're gonna have to ask you for your opinion on how you felt working and firing this firearm and I'm gonna have to ask you to be a little professional on this one because as we all know that every single American collector at this point has handled a Mosin to some degree and so I'm sure you've experienced this gun many times over before filming this episode so we're going to have to talk about in the context we've talked about all the others are you going to be able to do that yeah I got this guys I got this okay so we'll start like we always do with the ergonomics first impressions this gun is long it is heavy and it is not well balanced guys I mean you really got to want to stick your hand further out past where the where you normally fit it like it's just it feels bizarre I feel like I'm having to grip the barrel band up here for the right position with it so that's a little bit awkward it's thin recive which is nice but no semi pistol grip I mean I do know that on an earlier version they actually added the finger rest on there made of metal and I handle that up at the Springfield Museum hey guys and that was actually really nice I appreciated that it was in the right position just enough to forget back into your shoulder and it gave you a good position on the rifle I felt but without it and there's really nothing for me to grip down here so I miss that extra help the comb you know it's actually had a pretty decent height to pauses my cheek weld right where it needs to be right down the line of sight so that's pretty good the action you know I've handled a lot of Moses and this one's actually pretty decent it's in it's in good shape I mean it's not a finish Mosin which those tend to be the best in my opinion but it's still pretty good and even that being said it's still kind of rough I mean it feels like there's a lot going on there to it and I want to point out after firing around so let me just decock this for a second there we go dang you gotta treat it like it owes you money in order to open this guy up it is stiff so bear that in mind if firing this rapidly is not going to be easy and then also there's kind of a little bit of a bounce to it I feel like if there's any sort of mutter muck that gets in there it's gonna be a little bit difficult to pop this guy open pretty easily when it kind of wants to like bounce a little bit does it's not really firm so just keep that in mind you want to make sure you keep these guys really super clean last but not least the safety you know it's stiff but it's simple I mean I don't really use the safety that much except for you know when we're obviously doing this shoot and it takes but it's not the bad safety it's simple it's nice it does the job so hey I can't really complain so you're gonna mix wise it's a little bit awkward and rough around the edges but yeah I think that's just motions I'm going to agree with may actually may I borrow that sure Thank You May anyway the Mosin feels like it's ten years behind itself 1891 it should have had there's that safety by the way clicking right back in okay so maybe not the world's best safety for making sure it's ready to fire again anyway it feels a little outdated by the time it comes out it's over complicated a lot of ways but that straight wrist I can't get past it and the worst part is they knew they knew to put a finger rest there and then they went yeah it's costing us another nickel get it out of there and it just it would change the handling the gun so much because well not really but seriously I we both handle one up at Springfield that had the rest it felt great it is a totally different animal when you can actually get it into your shoulder and then it helps a lot with that muzzle heavy balance on this gun oh yeah anyway that aside for economics we had to really think about this gun before this episode more so than usual normally we sit down may and I have a quick conversation that covered me she what she wants to cover is that I make sure we hit the points this time around it was hard because we both grew up with Moses to some degree it was like well the first guns I ever shot so yeah and so we were trying to figure out how to get this where we could describe it and I think you know may cover this a little bit is how elastic that bolt feels it's probably the most remarkable thing that we were totally accustomed to but then had to stop and realize nothing else from World War one does that now every other gun if it's stuck on a case you start putting power down on that bolt and it either doesn't move or it moves and opens so if you're on a force it open once you get the bolt handle moving this thing's going somewhere this gun more for than any other I mean like several degrees of play where you hit it and it goes up and stops and bounces right back down just a big spring yeah you may as well if you get it stuck you may as well just get the mallet out and just expect to have a time there yeah and also just trying to keep firm consistent pressure because as we know and we're trying to plant a kami force into linear action that primary extraction we want a consistent firm like gear lever pull to get that case free and in this case we don't get it we get this mushy soft lots of sort of like I mean there's some physics guy out physics guys out there that could explain this better than me but it just is not conducive to getting bad ammo out of the action all right so let me get this back to you because speaking of ammo we need to talk about actually pulling the trigger on this gun what's it like shooting that full length Mo's in 1891 and I want to say full length 1891 because we have another episode coming up after this in a few weeks and there's some different models here we're not judging them all in one basket lining up my sights and you know they're not bad they're a little bit busy I feel like there's a little too much going on here on the sides they kind of stick up a little bit into your peripheral vision but overall in between it feels like I still have a decent line of sight it's a good V notch like I really feel like it's not too bad there I just I wish they could have maybe like taking a little bit of extra metal off right here at the top just to kind of open your view up just a little bit more the action we already covered loading rounds in there I really didn't have any problems fed all five just fine for me both times you just got to make sure you give it a good bit of force tip it up a little bit and push it on and with your thumb and then firing the trigger on this one is not the best I mean it's still this like I said it's a good decent Mosin this is in good condition but that single stage trigger it's mushy and it's a long pull through I don't know it's just I feel like they could have done a little differently there and it would have worked out better but you're you can actually just feel it all the way through like it just creaking and I don't know it wasn't my favorite the recoil so yeah I really wish again they'd had something down here to kind of help without pulling it into your shoulder because there is a decent amount of recoil on this gun I mean I like if I said before we've shot Moses are a good bit of our lives now at this point so I'm used to it but when you really try to critically think about it there is a significant amount of recoil with this gun and there is a good bit of weight to the gun so that does add to it but there's still a good there's still good oomph to it that you definitely notice and the concussive force especially Muslim shoots it next to you is insane and I'm smiling because I love it it's it's something I do enjoy on this gun but it is a bit much and for firing battle that couldn't that could wear on us for some time um yeah shooting wise it is a pleasure I do enjoy it but with that trigger yeah it's it kind of brings it down a little bit overall I'd count that as a good impression although I have one disagreement which is that ammo feeds well or not depending on the cartridge depending on the case depending on which Mosin you've got depending on the humidity in the air I don't know what it is but those stripper clips either work or don't for me like I either get them going or I don't it always feels like the last two rounds I always struggle to really set up to but I will say we've never between the two of us noticed rim lock on a Moses it seems like the interrupter system is working to prevent rim lock I have repeatedly noticed Moses just jam up on nothing yeah they'll jam for like no reason I mean you sneeze in the direction of it and it will jam but it won't be from room lock you later notice and just like oh there was a little bit of grit in there oh there's a little bit of rust in the chamber like everything else Under the Sun but not Renoir yeah and then especially on feed I've just found that that combination interrupter ejector feed lip that everything spring once in a blue moon I end up with a cartridge just jam straight into it and won't move and I have to smack it back down and yank it back and then click it down feed once and then feed again to get it out I don't know what it is but it's the it's I've seen it across multiple motions it's just something that doesn't sit quite right in that system I feel like when you've engineered a magazine to the enth degree like they have you're bound to start chasing down to so many standard deviations of problems and there's always going to be one more problem out there they ply should I wait to clean and gone with someone else but they didn't this is what they have all right so feeding wise weird and then we're talking about working the ball Yukie we're talking about recoils a little severe considering you know by the way we're talking about we've shot 30.6 we've shot other things it's I'd call it very comparable 30.6 by the way I mean yeah it's it's not that much different from it I'll give it that I don't know why maybe it's just cause I always the Mosin just always feels bigger than what it actually is maybe that's it to be fair organics can play a part of that too is they do have it here let that guy up for a second they do have I kind of a I mean it's a scalloped but plate but it's also pretty sharp at the edge it's very wide and square so maybe that plays into it but I do agree it does feel even though I should have roughly the same recoil impulse with an appropriately sized Mosin and maybe like a nineteen or three I don't know why the Mo's always feel so just a little bit more severe it has that thicker bass note but all of that rolled in together and we're disregarding the rim cartridge at the moment because this is not an automatic so the rim cartridge with a good interrupter system doesn't bother this gun do you feel like you would be content to take something like this into battle you know guys the Mosin is one of my favorite guns personally as a collector I own and I'm 91 so they're great I love them I don't know if I bet my life on them because realistically we've listed a whole slew of problems anymore our monthly gets in the action it'll jam up pretty easily and the weight balance on that isn't great trying to cycle this action when you're prone I can't imagine doing that when the like it's after firing every round I mean are you a hundred rounds of this I feel like would really wear on you throughout the day I just don't know if by the 99th round I'd feel comfortable defending myself with this gun so as a collector yeah I love them I want to keep them a life forever yeah as a for defense or offense I don't really think this is the guy for me I am going to have to agree with May when we take in the totality of this rifle may I borrow it the 1891 this Mosin not the 91/30 that's at your house don't take this personally let's add it up for just a second it's big heavy and a little unbalanced we have not as good risk control as we'd like yes we can get over it and there's plenty of street was that we did get along with just fine but add into the fact that you have like not the strongest handguard we haven't talked about this yet but these are actually pretty easy to beat up on they're clipped in a lot like the Remington Model 10 shotgun and we have a lot of problems getting that thing to stay together it's I mean this one's very tight but I've seen lots that weren't and you know you've seen a bunch of these broken so hanger is that all there the bayonet has to be fixed all the time if you factor that in we didn't even fix the beta no we didn't even try no we just took some Kentucky windage and still you ended up high we could just shot again with a six o'clock holder would have been fine but we kept it you know in a hurry trying to get other stuff filmed so yeah you can under 100 yards you can sort of just eyeball it in but I'm gonna tell you start reaching out to 200 300 or whatever you're gonna be way off your sight you're gonna be having to pick like you know what tree to shoot at to hit the bush to the other side so I don't know that I'm a big fan of a gun that's designed around having that gigantic bayonet because again already but no bayonet right here already muzzle heavy add the bayonet on top of it it's just we're taking a better case than what was actually issued so even ignoring the bayonet issue in treating it like it was sited without it muzzle heavy worst bolt so far I mean I want to be I always like sort of playing devil's advocate with these guns but most people will claim Damona has the worst bolt and out of World War one it probably has the worst bolt like it just I mean there's there's bolts that are from like single-shot black powders that are conversion guns that don't hold up as well but actually most of those even hold up better than this like it just it's not there it's too loose it's too soggy it's too rubbery and so I think it all comes down to I would definitely take a Mosin if I got the hands to like my mother you give me rack of 50 let me get a few rounds out of them pick the one I like I would actually trust that because that would mean that I'd found one that was manufactured a little tighter than the other ones and the cartridge is powerful the gun is really cool most of us this is like our first full powered cartridge here in the u.s. collectors market so a lot of us have fond memories of that first thumping beat coming out of this thing but ultimately if you're issuing them if somebody's rolling up in a truck and they're just like here this is yours you're gonna defend yourself with it I'm not feeling so good about that I much rather pick it myself so I'm gonna have to agree with a soft no to maybe even a firm one depending on which one you gave me but at least that wraps up our show is there anything else that you have to add to this no not really I'm sad that it didn't get a yes for a defense or offense but at least it's a yes and my personal collector book alright well stay after the credits for updates and thank you for tuning in we will get through the rest of these guys on the next episode bye guys [Music] that guy right there see him he wants to stop right there blue guys sucks that's one update I mean he's not as fast as the red one but he's trying his best anyway I also on one of our videos we finally hit a million views left by Lewis gun cool I wish it was one of our actual episodes but they like so much further behind and they're really easy clicked baby stuff so I'm just proud of us we did a good job we're almost like a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube that's kind of cool yeah I'm wonderful hit it before we get walked off the platform apparently I know there's a lot of drama about that by the way so far I haven't seen anything that says that we're going under but I've also seen a lot of comments about networks dropping gun shows so honestly guys I don't know I'm backing up the show to multiple places you can always check with us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and baseball yeah we have a Facebook yeah okay I said Facebook oh okay anyway you can find us in social media you can go see an arsenal calm you can always find the show I was always having somewhere I've got a bit shoot that I'm slowly uploading to it's just that already I got one episode out of order and that's there's no way to rearrange them so it's just a complete yeah my OCD is kicking in so I'm trying to move episodes up I can't Rijo stit every possible site you want me to because there's just a limit to how much bandwidth I can burn through before they start capping me I mean it is ridiculous down here so the show will go on everything's fine and that's because we have always relied on our patrons so if you liked the show if you're worried about the show if you want to take a little bit of pressure off of me and you like what we're doing head on over to patreon kick in a buck I mean we have about 22 to 24 thousand regular viewers we have almost hundred thousand subscribers but you know the people who turn in for every episode a little over 20,000 people a dollar from all of them and I would not have to sweat anything I can hire an editor I can hire all this stuff I could get everything in we have custom dies being worked here like I could do all this stuff instead of like right now where I rely rely on a lot of kindness from strangers because this show is very top-heavy and then on that regard going to hopefully find an easier topic for the next episode after the Moe's ins because I kind of overdid I think I've been pulling over a hundred hours easy for the past four weeks trying to get the BA R and the Mo's ins together now of course by the time you're seeing this will have another Moe's ins episode out for you in two weeks so four weeks from now you might have a lighter duty episode that's more like twenty to thirty minutes long if I can find something that fits that time scale wish me luck because I need just a day off please alright with all that I appreciate all this report appreciate that you guys are worried maybe not asking me the question of where we're going individually an email over and over again because I that's a lot but I appreciate the concern and it will always be available we're not going to be wiped off of all social media at once that would be ridiculous alright thank you for tuning in and thank you for all of your help thanks guys yeah hey

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 1,406,957

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

Id: nqmkRZOIlfY

Length: 102min 20sec (6140 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018