Small Arms of WWI Primer 076: German Mauser 1871

in this total war of attrition we've seen a number of older black-powder rifles brought back into service Germany would be no exception [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this all barely fits in the frame this is a German infantry Gewehr 71 the Mauser 1871 the original Mauser we're going way back today so let's get this thing over in the white box weighing in just over 10 pounds and just under 53 inches in length it's a very large single shot that means no magazine 11 millimeter black powder rifle this thing is big now before we get started because this is a very large rifle I need to address something that's come up a few times in the comments a number of people have been very upset at me for grunting while lifting guns they suggest that I don't have the upper-body strength to handle these sort of things and that oh if is must be some weekend ville it or something the real truth is you guys at home don't always get a chance to handle this stuff and so when it's heavier or more awkward I tend to over enunciate it because it gives you a sense of the piece I'm sorry now if you'd like I can go further and maybe work in some other sensory experiences I mean we do a lot of that in this show we give you the point of view we give you all the stats on the gun maze the size of an original soldier so that the thing looks proportional because on me this doesn't look that bad right well I guess the only thing we're really missing is smell at this point and taste now I don't spend a lot of time licking these but mostly we all know what gunpowder tastes like we put it on our breakfast cereal like good Americans but for smell let's just try it out just this one time shall we I'm gonna say it's got a very strong smell of paper clips in the summer an almost smoky you know I can't speak to what kind of wood because it's so impregnated with oil which means that it just smells a bit of tar and aged wood almost almost like German Black Forest in August and then yep that's just me getting high on the fumes from all the ballast all all right with that fun aside let's talk to some real history because this gun like I said is the first of the mousers now we've already talked about the Mauser Gewehr 1898 now that excellent rifle would be the standard for the German army in World War one but we skipped a lot of development to get there and it was a very early episode for us so today let's set some of that right by doing some early biography work this is wilhelm mauser born May of 1834 he was the 11th child to one ondrea's mauser who worked at the royal rifle factory and Oberndorf of the kingdom of württemberg in June of 1838 Wilhelm would gain another brother named Peter Paul Mauser this was the thirteenth child growing up in a very modest home one where even the children worked so much so that a handmade lathe was set up in the living room along with other tooling to keep what paying work they could going through the house now in addition to Andres many of the other Mauser children who worked at the Royal rifle factory different points in time and with will Hema and Paul each as they turned to age 14 and got through primary school they would also go to that rifle factory to pick up work now the advantage to these two youngest's of the brothers well they managed to get tutoring in arithmetic and something akin to drafting a sort of geometrical drawing experience so they were both much better equipped with the you know bump in education when they entered that rifle factory to see what was essentially a number of wastages because at that time it was still the old trade system you made something almost all the way through and I don't know I don't need this just yet you made something all the way through by hand a lot of the tools were hand operated tools there's really only one central lathe to the whole facility it's not what we think of as a modern factory and so it was grueling long hard work a lot of it sort of needlessly repetitive a number of ways not you know swappable parts or anything like that this is old-style craftsmanship which can be beautiful but it's also very very inefficient and so the one advantage that the two youngest mousers had is that they saw new technology as a way to improve output and make money in the factory that was the future so despite working hard hours from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. each day and despite minimal pay that barely met their needs as they were they would skip meals and put in more hours just to do some tinkering on the side usually modifying existing tooling around them or improving what was on hand this was their first experience in 1859 Paul alone was recruited to the Arsenal in Ludwigsburg while the position was only six months or so because there he had access to their model room introducing him to a wider variety of arms returning home Paul and Wilhelm would get together and design a breech-loading cannon this is actually pretty cool but it's not what we're covering today and I don't have any images of a cool Mauser cannon for you but the net result of this was basically nil to negative because while they did get too short - some officials these guys are novices they don't know how to talk and how to negotiate they don't have a name behind them and even if it's a good idea and it was at the time it doesn't mean it's going anywhere not in you know aristocracy so it's a good first taste but ultimately it cost them more to produce it than any amount of money they made off of it so instead they decided to work their way down smaller something that they could really focus on get done much cheaper in terms of experimentation and then show it to more people easily that means that they started modifying the then-current device' needle rifle this paper cartridge black-powder bolt-action rifle had been a revolution but it was starting to be dated more on that at the moment most importantly - the mousers they felt that having to manually recalculation was a waste of a hand motion their first attempt on the gun was as simple as making it [ __ ] on clothes but they found problems with the needle fire system itself you see in a needle fire rifle a pull of the trigger drives a needle into the paper cartridge piercing down to the primer set near the middle to set off the shot that means a long easily damaged and rapidly worn needle is integral to the system it also means the breech must seal itself entirely this can be a very limiting factor to how much pressure you can have in the chamber and therefore the power of the cartridge but luckily metallic cartridge was on the way this system the metallic case has a primer in the base a duller shorter firing pin strikes at that point to set the whole thing off and as the powder burns it expands the brass case gas sealing the breech that means that the bolt is only really responsible for locking tight and firm not for sealing the whole system so the mousers switched their updated Taizo action to a metallic based cartridge with a cardboard shell it really did just look like a normal today's up but with a [ __ ] on close action they also modified the mainspring for the system now using a flat spring at the very rear of the bolt actually part of the bolt handle to drive the firing pin by 1867 they were beginning to show it around now at first it would be the German Kingdom so you know obviously they're in wuertenberg but then things like bavaria and prussia and they really didn't get any bites so believing in their own system they went ahead and pushed on over to austria-hungary where they want to show off their system there the only problem is they came into an already active trials process one that we've sort of talked about before that ultimately ended on the adoption of the vernal this single-shot tabernackle inspired rifle will hopefully feature in a later episode it's worth noting however that the rifle it beat out was the remington rolling block we've discussed both this rifle and its failure to be adopted in austria-hungary before but as part of that process it left a remington salesman in the empire about the time that the mauser rifle showed up so that means samuel norris was shown the mauser rifle by an austrian general who was impressed despite it being too late on the scene for the trials nor saw the obvious merits of the rifle and with his own personal money would invest in the mousers now this was good timing because well the mousers weren't really getting their jobs back you see they had wandered off to sell the rifle and you know orders for the visor back at home were getting down to dwindling levels so the factory is laying off workers so perfect opportunity to get to work on their own design and with Norris coming in he offered them an interesting deal he says look I'll buy you out of the patent and rights I need you to help me to keep developing this thing though so I'm gonna give you sixty thousand from and payments I get all the rights register all the patents I'll put your names on them secondarily and then I'll also kinda set you up with a little bit of a stipend to kind of keep it flowing but let's get this thing going I want to sell this thing I have some people in mind now it sounds like a really good deal in a way until we understand that this thing's for us to play more than 60,000 frog I mean millions of these are gonna get made so the mousers are in an interesting position we see this a lot in our series and other business business developments they have an idea they have no capital they have no flex either any contacts capital and a product in this day and age or that day and age so a lot of designers very famous designers end up almost poor by the time they're done because they do not have the leverage themselves and they start selling out their value in order to get leverage in this case the mousers sold out the patents the rights the whole gun just to get the start so you can see where this is gonna end in sort of dismal failure except for one thing the contract was set up in such a way that if Samuel Norris didn't want to finish paying them because the idea essentially went nowhere by the way this is for his sake not for theirs but basically he can say look if I stop payment you get their patent back and that's an easy way for him to make it look like he's backing them he's saying look you could still get the rights back if I fail to pay you so obviously I'm gonna pay you that's not ultimately what ends up happening we're instead we see that this also offers him a way to just sort of walk away from what doesn't look like it's going to be a lucrative rifle at a certain point it's kind of poetic justice in a way but anyway that's getting a little ahead of ourselves right now know that they have an out and know that Samuel Norris thinks he's gonna make buku bucks and the language is important there because he's going to take it to France you see they had not adopted a metallic cartridge system yet to replace the SHA spoke and he believed the Mauser system could be used to easily convert the existing rifles he was right but miscalculated on how slow the French could be and how French the French could be they would wait until 1874 and ultimately went with the Gras as we know from our earlier show now as part of the gear up for this process because again he doesn't know they're not it yet he sets the Mouser brothers up in liege okay this is a good spot for them because it gives them access to a lot of sort of outsourced scible resources so in other words they can show up and say we want to prototype a weapon and we don't have to do it alone we can grab this guy or this guy or borrow this tooling or license they're not licensed but rent this there's a lot of room as a creator in firearms technology in the edge to get what you need get it quickly and cheaply work with it overnight and go right back out the next day and get more of what you need it's a beautiful place to prototype so they get set up there and it gives them the stipend that I mentioned earlier but unfortunately it's not enough to feed their families they can't stay there it's too expensive and so it only lasts a few months and they go back home but it's still very important time because once again this is a good peek outside the sort of window remember these are small town you know more rural esque growing up I mean I shouldn't say open door if it's rural but it's not like it's not Liege you know and so the technology available them was know and then they slowly get more and more exposure the more we go through this story and there's a big cornerstone because they get a lot of exposure at once and they really see how things could be instead of the sort of journeyman system that they're still doing at home and again there's still a lot of handcrafting leage but it's a glimpse this is their way to see into the future anyway they're back home and they're still working and the French haven't said no yet so Norris is out filing patents as you can see it's a centerfire bolt action and cock-on closed once again that crazy leaf spring on the bolt handle I would so pinched my hand in there a separate bolt head is depicted here but in demonstration they would alternate between solid bolt bodies and removable bolt heads although at this point the separate bolt heads rotated with the bolt body that's important all right so with good examples in hands and fresh patents all inked up Norris reintroduces through proper channels the Mauser rifle in Germany and France and I shouldn't say Germany but the kingdoms of Germany in both cases we know like I said it didn't go so well the back system was preferred in Germany in the gras system was preferred in France but at the same time we actually get some interesting notes and all the countries had their opinions on the gun but I think but various sort of wrapped it up nicely and they have access to what they said so let's just sort of go through the complaints of the early Mauser rifle because that's really what defines the improvements that become this gun today they found out that the firing pin needed to be prevented from moving forward out of battery if the striker spring broke that pin could shoot out and hit the shooter in the face so maybe something to prevent that the extractor rotating with the bolts means that a groove must be cut for it all the way through that sweep this weakens the action over all the firing pin was too hard to replace because the striker spring was nasty to refit and you could only get it out the back all right so those changes are worked into a new system and that is very close to what we have here today because number one the flat spring gone it's a regular coil spring now no pinching my fingers for sure and no snapping that thing off and going into your eye the firing pin comes out the front of the bolt body now and it's doable thanks to the fact that you have a removable front bolt head that does not rotate now and that means that when that extractor goes forward we don't have to carve this whole shape into the sort of breech face we just have a little notch for it to fit into that's all okay well the other thing that happens around this time is cock-on open and we argue about compound open versus compound closed for various reasons but in this case it's not about feel it's about the fact that if you [ __ ] on open you retract the firing pin when you open the bolt and that means that it fits that bill of not having the firing pin protruding when you're bolting forward so you know there's no exposure whatsoever because it's all the way back on the stroke now that also matches the way these old needle fires would have worked because you would have fired the gun manually pulled back the cocking piece then open the breech in this case you are opening the breech and cocking the cocking piece at the same time you've compressed those two into one action that is probably where the evolution came from more so than being an opinion about where to have the torque in the motion like we tend to talk about it today now all this should put the rifle into very very good standing for competitions in Bavaria and this sort of system was shown to them before they made any decision but something went wrong you see they had the Umberger arsenal also modify the gun to fit in a few specifications in addition to the Mauser brothers running around doing their own modifications and as part of that something went wrong with a repair of a gun that was sent back for modification and there's some argument as to what it was but essentially there was an out-of-battery detonation a partially closed out-of-battery detonation which means that the sort of it's not really a lug in this case but the rear of the receiver that would have acted as the rest for the log it sheared off the bolt came apart the shooter was not seriously injured but it was enough to spook the Commission and so the mauser rifle before these repairs could be made or addressed or even why well it lost out to the verdure so you're starting to see that the mauser rifle is just losing trial after trial and this should be a lesson for us all get yourself up and try again because there was nothing terribly wrong with the gun especially now after this sort of Bavarian issues in this I mean they almost had this gun and we know this to be a good gun but it's not getting picked up and a big part of that is it was coming in very late to an active process this is the time when everybody's switching to metallic cartridge for the first time and they're being picky they're being choosy and they don't necessarily know what the next step is going to be so bolt-action rifles I actually don't stand out as a good idea and it's fair if you really think about it a bolt-action rifle has a chance of funneling gas straight back at the shooter has a chance to throw in the bolt straight back at the shooter all these sort of things these are not the risks that you see in save falling-block style rifles or rotating breech rifles and so let's look at what actually is getting adopted around the world just to give you an idea of what people are really favouring at this time well we've already said the verne goal and the verdict we also have the remington rolling block the martini-henry and hey over here we're doing this Springfield trapdoor rifle none of these are bolt actions because compared to a single one-sided locking these are much tougher actions with no threat of a bolt shooting back in your face and by their nature they don't easily spray gas from failed cases into the shooters face also recall nobody's really that worried about a magazine rifle this time other than the Swiss the Swiss are weird so when you survey a field like that and your man like Norris you're starting to realize that maybe you didn't pick a winner and in addition your employers found out that you're running around with some gun that they don't own when you're supposed to be selling rolling blocks what are you doing you idiot so Nora stops paying the Mouser Steve walks away from the deal and that means that they get their patents back and it's interesting because now they're going well we're sticking with it we're gonna sell this gun and we're gonna try our selves we've sat around watching Norris do this we've paid very close attention to him he thinks for bumpkins nuts to him we're learning and so they start trying to sell the Mauser rifle and the one advantage that they have over Norris at this point is that the weather outside is franco-prussian war we talked a lot about this in our rolling Blanc episode but basically the Germans steamrolled the French and when the dust settled there would finally be a proper German Empire thanks France now that's all well and good but Germany won on rail and artillery not on rifles there's basically the Dreiser versus a chapeau and despite both being paper cartridge needle guns the Transpo used a rubber obturator allowing for better gas seal and excellent ballistics for the time basically the chaste fo out ranged the dies a' to devastating effect on open ground overall the Germans were able to outmaneuver this issue but they still took heavy and unnecessary losses on occasion the new German Empire would need a new German rifle one capable of besting the shafts PO so coming out of the franco-prussian war the Germans are being a much more serious about this sort of Mauser rifle and so when trials kick up again well brush is really looking at it very closely as a matter of fact they favor it because think of it this way unlike all these other countries that have falling blocks and other designs they have the Geiser right now and their opponent had a bowl action the shafts PO and both were devastating in their own ways but the chasse boa specially had left an impression well if that thing without a metallic cartridge could do that much damage with a metallic cartridge which already is going to help obdurate the action on its own are we worried about both act like why are we so concerned about this bolt coming back on our face we're using them right now we're scared of bolt actions now know these things are slick they work exactly the way we've trained already we can adopt this system and change almost nothing about our training except for reducing the number of problems of having a paper cartridge and the extra handling that goes into that we just get to simplify nothing else of consequence okay yeah we're kind of liking this this should be the direction we're going and so you start to see the approval moving into the Mauser and it's sort of approved of / not really officially selected because there's two things that stand out in the wind that they really need to resolve before the final design number one it could stand to have a little gas mitigation in case of a failed cartridge and number two it could use a safety a manual safety well gas mitigation was dead simple they just cut a groove around the bolt head and one to match in the receiver body now if your case ruptured it would vent out that way for the most part instead of in the face of the shooter although we will see a flange at the rear of the cocking piece to also help with it from going down the raceway the safety that was a little trickier two designs would ultimately emerge the first was honestly brilliantly simple just a tipping block to keep the cocking piece to the rear it didn't lock up the action though the striker could still fall just not all the way so in the fact this could be a decocker that's not a safety it leaves the gun ready to rock and roll the second is what we know today a half rod attached to the cocking piece you turned the thumb pad at the rear and it rotates that Halfmoon into or out of a notch in the back of the bolt body preventing the cocking piece from going forward now all that is nice but you have to have something to shoot out of it it would be an 11 millimeter round nosed led bullet fitted at first into a two-piece brass case drawing technology would improve and by 1876 it was the standard one-piece brass case we recognized today the deep chamfer on the rim was supposed to reduce jamming from fouling although I'm unsure of how this helps long before World War one the cartridge had been improved to work in a tubular magazine with a flat tipped bullet in deeper primer pocket we'll cover this in a future episode now that will ultimately get us to this rifle today grunt so let's take a closer look just what goes into a mauser at 1871 so I'm gonna get this down here where you can see and hey it is very long we have a wonderful bayonet attachment point up here more on that in a moment we have a clearing rod here or we'll scroll on down long gun lots of bands and springs and then we get our rear sight more on that in a moment all the way back down to our action beautiful so if we look at this we have a [ __ ] on open action so let me double check there are no bullets so I'm going to softly and gently pinch myself to death while letting this down there we go so we would fire the gun Bango as we lift this up it's going to drive our cocking feets back thanks to the camming surfaces try to do this with leverage and where you guys can see I guess you're gonna have to just trust me on that one because it's hard to do this weird angle with no torque there you go cocked open right so we bolt back it's just a plate in here we throw a loose round in and then we fold forward and lock down so that means we have a snap over style extractor down on the left side patented and pokey right there again not a needle fire anymore we got an actual normal Center punch of brass case so drop it down this guy at the rear is our safety flag we rotate that over it needs a little bit more torque this is a much older gun there we go rotate that over and no Bango rotate it back and if I wanted to we could pop one off so well bring this back to look at the rear sight let me get that lined up for you guys now this is a very interesting looking rear sight it should be to my knowledge set before I believe 300 meters this little sight back here flips up that's 400 meters flip her back down pop this guy up and she's actually and I'm sorry this kind of so long it's gonna be very hard to sort of position this for you this guy is actually cut for what I believe is 500 and then we have some longer ranges set up I can't lean that far over and share this at the same time but these are sort of quick sites for volley and the rest of this thing is sealed up but you can't open her up and expose the internal ladder and actually start marking it off using this notch down here so it's a very curious system I imagine this was done in order to prevent the ladder from being easily damaged or bent it's certainly a novel solution it seems to work so you know what points to them I actually think it's pretty cool little complicated though now to get this gun apart oh and I should say by the way the barrel design is basically straight off the shafts poke the trigger system is basically straight out of the other Aiza so this is where all the Mauser II stuff is to get this apart well when we draw the bolt back the whole bolt assembly is held in with this screw and this washer right here is actually there just to act as the strike point for the stop here milled into this sort of almost looks like a clip guide but it is not that's where we stop our bolts so what we have to do is take this off now oh let me get to a screwdriver haha you know it's good to be a little bit better prepared than that but we'll get right back to work so just pop this guy off now on the earliest ones I can just do this later on we're gonna see that these guys are actually too staked in place so you don't lose the component so out of the way pull back pull trigger and she's clear oh let's go away we'll get into the bolt so if you look we just have our extract on the left side there is no ejector in the system and if we decock this we can go ahead and release the bolt it's just that simple so there's our separate non rotating bolt head with extractor again no ejector in the system they felt that you could just sort of tip the rifle over everything it popped out just fine and then here is our main bolt body with our cocking piece and firing pin mounted in there now normally I don't go further than this but being the first Mauser and with some other things coming up let's just go ahead and talk how you get further down into this guy because it's very interesting currently we'll see this change with a certain magazine Mouser currently this cocking piece is sort of resting or rather this nut is resting over the cocking piece and we fire this the mass of the cocking piece doesn't factor in as much as you would like towards striking down that limits the ability to really knock a hard primer with this particular gun alright so if we want to get this guy off we have to depress the firing pin carefully I actually have a soft wood under this so this is actually perfect there's all sorts of things in gangs on this table from doing things like this we've got to get her lifted enough to clear a notch that's here on the side let me show you actually right in there that little notch she's got to go all the way clear right I can't really do that on camera so you have to watch the launch shot for a moment let me just get her up get her out and we'll start twisting so very delicate operation in the sense that you want to be very sure of your hand because you do not want to break that firing pin and you don't want to let it go early if you haven't quite unthreaded this all the way because you might Mar the very ends of the threads even though it's a very aggressive thread pattern it's still a chance to sort of deform if you accidentally let it snap loose right on that last thread it could do some damage to the rear nuts so we're just going to be careful to get that all the way out and then I'll drop stuff okay sorry back in the here so cocking piece is free this is just staked in place on this early gun I know you guys are used to seeing other types of Mauser flying safety even though they're similar they actually work different when we get to the 98 this works by having that little pin down there rotate so flavors are nut and then out comes our firing pin there's something I want to show you in here too this firing pin has a wing right there just this nice big flat spot to guide it but also because you see this flat milled in here well it can only orient one way on the cocking piece so I can't this guy can't twist inside of this guy right they have to twist together now that's critical because this basically acts as the out-of-battery lock for the cocking piece you can't turn this cocking piece out of battery because of this blade and that flat the problem is that blade is a very large surface area in this particular gun it's going to cause problems with light strikes because if it gets gummed up and black powder gun it's gonna get slugged down so that's actually a little failing of this gun even though it's a very efficient out of battery lock for the cocking piece huh so everything covered their goodies Bulba and this is very simple but extremely simple gun especially for the time beautifully easy to manufacture okay so that's just an example of something that's very simple but there's still a lot of thought that goes into every little stage know and I should say zooming in one more time this see this sort of like reduction here that is for that gas mitigation there's a matching point or in the rifle let me see if you can see it right in there that notch down there so that would be to get most the gas of the way what still comes down the channel would be deflected by the tab on the side of this so that would line up at the rear okay there we go now while I get this back together and we can take a nice little look at all these parts once more with super x-ray vision and understand exactly how they interact you guys really don't need me to detail this gun for you no magazine no ejector no fuss just a [ __ ] on open camming surface setup but we can still watch the two-stage trigger at work and marvel at having to tip out spent cartridges [Music] [Music] I will point out the safety though which is the start of the Mauser flag that we are so used to in this case it turns a Halfmoon pin into the back of the bolt body preventing the cocking piece from going forward [Music] you also check out that left side extractor what a rare sight [Music] now some of that was just a little premature because really at this point they still had to pick the overall length what kind of be in it they were gonna use and they had to test whatever ammo they came up with to find the actual sight ranges I mean they knew they wanted this kind of sight but these they got actually mark them off and file and fit so those are the last three things that sort of start to get worked out at the end of this gun the length comes from two things the practice of firing in the line and also because with a good length rifle and a good bayonet you are basically a pike against cavalry charges just to note these are not Germans so the bayonet would be a mortise knife style with an 18 point five-inch blade length this was actually an adaptation of the earlier 1860 Foose of the year bayonet much like other German rifles there would be a variety of specially being this but this was by far the most common all right so I know I've said it was accepted this or approved of that or blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and it was let me tell you there's a bunch of paperwork's with stamps on it say yeah this is a good to go we just got to figure out this yeah this is good to go we just got to figure out that well the gun was in this formation and approved December 1871 but there would be some final trials some limited production that sort of thing the actual gold seal this pattern is done March 1872 so just barely in 1871 but we'll give it that because that's what the Germans called it the infantry Gewehr 71 in 1905 they would actually change the name over to the surveyor 71 so don't get confused if you see slightly different uses of the term now that means we're a sealed we're done and I can finally do what you guys want most I can put it in the hands of May [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] mmm did you guys hear that sound Oh like Rolling Thunder I love big for black powdered I know a lot of you keep yelling when you're gonna do World War two my heart is set on going any direction I want because I could go right back to the Civil War and all the way up into the 1940s I could have fun in either direction these things are great so Germany's first metallic cartridge rifle it's fairly impressive that it ran so well all right except for Bavaria who would actually take until 1876 to come around to the mauser versus the murder you win production would begin in late 1872 by the big three Prussian government Arsenal's Spandau Erfurt and Danzig soon after Amburg would join in initially producing for Prussian contracts but later for Bavaria proper additional contracts were let out to a sewell collective we've actually talked about something like this with the ed8 they were made up of Spungen Berg and sour vici Schilling and CG hey know a small number came from the Raisa Samara and national arms and ammunition of Birmingham over in Austria a lot of these rifles were cranked out by a AWG steyr now at first there's one obvious name missing Mauser of Oberndorf that's because it didn't exist yet you see the reward two Mauser brothers for the rifle was $12,000 not a huge sum actually good money but we'll see they need a lot more to grow curiously Samuel Norris who held no patents anymore was paid for his advisory role and for being a go-between by the government he received $40,000 all right so yeah the mousers didn't get paid as much as the go-between did that is awful but the one thing that they have that Norris tin it is ownership of the rights to this gun so it's been adopted by you know the Prussians and now trickling down into the other terming kingdoms this thing has a reputation that they can actually lean on that means international sales licensing that sort of thing this is gonna be a big moneymaker because certainly better than the rolling block in a number of ways this can start a whole Empire for them right mm not so much that's because Germany made them sign a gag order essentially I mean it was kept secret as part of its adoption process now later Germany would come around and say hey here's another twelve thousand marks just because you kept the secret but that's really not a lot to go on in terms of having such a big thing sitting in your closet ready to make you money and you're just being told then and then a German state secret now oh okay so if you're the mousers essentially your only way to make money on this gun now is to start producing parts for it and so that's what they would do they would go home to Orville Dorf and Paul's father-in-law had a big enough place that they could set up a little workshop in it and they just started making rear sights for this gun at first it was a contract for 3,000 but later there would be another 25,000 they're paid $20,000 which they immediately invested into more equipment and a rented space to house it in hiring up to 100 workers mostly from that Royal rifle Factory in Ovid or not speaking of the rifle factory they actually tried to buy it but the Finance Ministry said no no no no no no this is our rifle factory even if it's horribly underperforming and losing us money we're going to keep it thank you and so that meant that the mousers had to go look for another place to build and they want to stay an open door so they bought a plot of land and they started building a factory with what money they could get together then they took in another 100,000 rear sight peace order and that means that they needed to build the factory key here and faster so they had to take out loans in order to rush that now having big government contracts helps to get to the banks but they're still not like the wealthiest men they don't have all the connections it's very hard for them to get this money but they do and they start building it's still not quite enough I mean they really would prefer to get a hold of that rifle factory they tried again offering $100,000 but it was too the Ministry of Finance thought that it was worth $320,000 soon afterward however the Wharton Berg military administration asked the mousers to produce 100,000 rifles and carbines there at home on the condition that they take over the unprofitable rural rifle factory which would cost them two hundred thousand dollars so I guess a bit of negotiation there now that amount of money they did manage to raise although now they're leveraged to the hilt right well that puts mousers in the business in of October of 1873 now they had the factory plus a little gear up time puts them in the business of actually making their own rifle completely that's fantastic because now they can actually start to make some cash and as a matter of fact they're so good at making their own rifle they finished their contract six months early which means that they then still had to do something to make money for the factory and they got approval to actually produce I believe twenty six thousand of these for China at that time because they were a strategic partner oh I'm starting going by the way into so much detail on the Mauser Factory but not necessarily the government ones but in this case it really matters because we're going to talk about more mousers down the road and you guys need to see how this plays out because they expand and then they have to struggle to find contracts because of weird rules or dealings and so Oberndorf was you know it's a we all know it today but it was really a threat in the beginning I mean sort of same problem as FN where it's like it got found it was a great idea and it just couldn't keep contracts in it was sort of being sniped against by other manufacturers so government whatever other manufacturers this we're gonna see a lot of things interacting with open Dorf just keep in mind however for this episode where we're leaving off is that they've made some 71s for trying that and now at the end of this episode they're not really sure what they're doing next we'll find out the next episode and then we'll find out even bigger story in the episode after that I will however make mention of omberg for their exceptional rifle builds exceptionally poor you see they produced some 100,000 for crush' and then later another 110,000 or so for bavaria this gun is designed to be made with machine tooling like this is designed to make use of what was the latest and greatest in order to make it fast and efficiently and they were much more setup for that old style rifle factory system like we're talking about and so they kind of struggled to make this and keep the parts interchangeable and yet highly finished because essentially they had to bring everything into line with hand operations and that leaves a lot of extra burrs they also had a poorer bluing process that later would get fixed and just things like like sharp edges loose stocks probably improperly bedded stocks that kinda thing uhm Berg was the place where you got probably not the best quality 71 available in the market now they were all you know if they were approved of they were safe to fire it's not like you know you get on Berg and blows up in your face they're fine they're safe rifles they're just not the highly polished or finished ones that were being cranked out elsewhere in Germany and they would slowly improve they would get there in the end so later on Berg's are better than earlier on Berg it's just something that's interesting to stand out now just because I'm Berg is having a rough time with it doesn't mean that this gun is perfect everywhere else there's going to be a number of problems we'll see inherent to this design but more on that in a moment let's wrap up manufacturer real quick and it's impossible to say what the total number produced were down to the single unit but strong estimations go for 1.4 million total made with a price averaging to be about 63 marks a pop kind of dependent on who when where what contract like any other gun especially the first of its kind for country there were some issues with the Mauser so let's hit them fast the front sight was easily damaged so they hardened it the stocks were splitting at the rear of the receiver so at first they focused on a proper cross screen and later introduced they reinforced tank in new production in 1881 they noticed the rear sight was hard to read so they tried bronze filling the markings but these just rubbed off so they blacked the whole site and then polished the face so there would be nice black numbers in 1882 a couple more improvements a thickening of the trigger spring and two things that I do have to show remember this guy right here I said he'd be captive later that's true now this one is not captive it was not part of the update but let me just go ahead and emulate so let's pretend that I backed this out a certain amount and then I cannot back this anymore and by the way if you have a screw on these and it gets stuck about here don't force it what you're supposed to do is go ahead and pull her back lift the wah just so hard to do in the camera guys lift the washer up over this block there now it's on top of it right now you can pull your trigger and pull the guy out and then boom this would stay here like this if it were pinned that means you can't lose it in the field actually a very strong decision very easy to keep troops from losing things that are very necessary to have for the gun to function properly because without this the only thing that stops the rearward motion of the bolt is the seer and your batter that enough times and this thing's gonna be no good oh well this is a very big gun oh ok so let me put this back together now there are other issues in 1884 they actually deepened up the rifling but by then this gun was on the way out so not many have that feature and there were some inherent accuracy problems with this gun we're actually going to talk about them more when we get to the magazine version because they became really apparent but it had a tendency to shoot off to the right it would change its point of impact depending on heat heat of the gun and heat of the weather outside now some of this is a little ammo but a lot of it comes from well basically this thing not being better than the barrel properly up here at the front there's a hard connection between the barrel and the front barrel band that means when this barrel heats and it wants to naturally expand a little bit it pinches so that's gonna change your point of impact and we know that later on there would be Barrel jackets to prevent that but they get dinged up and so then they'll start doing stepped barrels with a little bit of extra wood recessed so that they have room to expand under heat those are very important things that are not on this gun and so therefore it suffers just a bit with wandering zero I guess you could say so there's one part of it the other problem is being that this is a gun that locks just on the root of the bolt handle I mean it's not all I'm gonna handle itself there is a lug and guide raised section I mean this whole thing is one big log and it works right at the rear there that's fine but it's one-sided and it's strong enough to hold black powder cartridge but it still is going to torsion one way so there's ever so much of a twist to the receiver that can again over time start to throw off your point of aim and it also just means that you're not really symmetrically bedded for that cartridge like symmetrical locking lungs are better we know that across the board so those are some standout issues with this gun that we will get into more with the next model also that safety catch was confusing for many soldiers and was regularly snapped off this was more of a training issue though now we talked about the drag on the firing pin that's an actual issue that was not corrected in this particular gun and there's no ejector which again I sort of mentioned earlier but I will tell you now it's a bit of a bother every once in a while there's a cartridge that just doesn't want to come it also makes it harder just slowly extract a cartridge and then pop it out everything snags up and then there's one other change this gun that's kind of interesting and you can't really see it but I'll still try to show it to you let's just get a closer look the bolts they were having problems in repair I guess because this spot here has to be very hard because that's the locking surface and it gets battered well they didn't necessarily wanna have to anneal the entire bolt body and harden the entire bolt body so what they did is they actually only get my padded plastic they actually drill the hole in here faced it off and shoved a pre hardened piece of metal and work-hardened it into place ground it off so there's actually a fuse to be the metal in here that is a hardened locking surface I believe you can see it in the animation but just know it's there alright so I mean there's oh there we go whoo that resolves everything with this gun in terms of what was fixed and what wasn't fixed a lot of the stuff were complaining about that was never really addressed was actually taking care of an entirely different rifle that was offered over to Serbia one that I do not have sadly today cuz they are very rare but very important to the evolution of this gun alright so let's talk service life where this place fought essentially nowhere not at first anyway so we get this gun you know mid-1870s it really rolls out and then germany actually remains fairly peaceful for quite a while after the franco-prussian war now there would be some chances to see some live fire in the colonies here and there nothing really major nothing it's gonna give us a real trial for this gun certainly not against a European army and in 1884 is we're gonna see this gun starts to go out the door as a new magazine rifle comes in so that means that it goes through its service life rather uneventful II and that's pretty interesting for being you know sir first you know metallic cartridge rifle a big rush to get into this thing and it turns out that it just sort of sat back so again it would be replaced in 1884 rather briefly and then a bit longer in 1888 and then finally a definite and worthy successor in 1898 and we've covered two out of three days rifles so far now granted the gun would get pushed further into the rear echelon or guards or whatever else as each of those guns came out but you sure those guns for this Germany they made them in the millions I mean there was millions of the 84 's and millions the 80s millions that I needed this thing is long gone from service there's no corner for this gun to exist in it is gone in dead from the German military arms system it's in the importers hands for the most part it's being sold in the secondary markets will actually see some interesting stories about it in just a moment but that means she's done for and we shouldn't really even be talking about her in the show if not for the fact of war were declared that's right despite being replaced some 30 years before the war end and being a black-powder large-bore single-shot rifle the 1871 was gonna make a comeback because this was all-out total war and attrition was the name of the game so and free rifle counted and at the very least this thing to start freeing up 1898 for the front line or 1888 for the secondary lines it's got to make its home somewhere now that means they had to have some on stock most of the kingdoms had already gotten rid of all of them for some odd reason precious still had just shy of 500,000 on hand so those were scooped up and put to use pretty quickly in addition they also would over the course of the war go to veteran associations and you have them ship out for receipt writing a receipt for each one rather all of the 70 ones they had on hand so they could then be put to different uses by the government now make no mistake this was not a front-line rifle they were mostly fielded for bayonet practice at first but soon attrition took its toll and they spread to things like prison guards garrison battalions border and finance guards and railway monitors now these guns would also form another odd strategic reserve you see when they were made Mauser wanted them to have iron ore work steel trigger guards they were fitted with brass though soft awful brass because German tradition why not right well that tend to be a weak point in the rifle but it might be a valuable one now that Germany was desperate for copper being that brass is an alloy of copper and zinc so this is a strategic reserve of raw material according to German government at a time in April of 1916 they had Spandau make up like a hundred thousand iron trigger guards for these guys so they could scalp the same number off of guns and then recycle it for the copper value so you may have an original brass or you may you have an iron trigger guard and if you do have an iron trigger guard on a long 71 not the later models then congratulations you contributed to the German war effort okay so not really any shots fired in anger from this guy and certainly not something you're going to need to defend yourself with it's more for show patrol you know a sense of power or authority to whoever's you know at whatever gatehouse that's fine no we need it we did a whole episode on the rolling block and that's all it wait the France was buying them new just to do that well Germany had at least minimum five hundred thousand these that they were able to pull up without any manufacturer time and make room for suitable rifles to go to the front so that's good this is a good utility and also interestingly we will see some shots fired in anger from not quite this rifle over in the colonies but that's something I'm gonna have to ask you to wait until our very next episode to address now there is one other interesting point of service life for this which is that it would serve in the hands of the Irish during World War one we've previously covered the Ulster Volunteers and their blonde liquor smuggling for a pro British rule to Ireland while the other side wasn't too happy and wanted to make a show of buying their own guns the oldsters had smuggled their rifles quietly in the night and broke them up into separate caches but the Irish Volunteers this was almost more of a recruiting tool than it was a weapon it was still a weapon and they had bought only 1500 of these out of Germany smuggling them by ship - how were they unloaded in broad daylight for the spectacle of the thing and so this would draw more attention now this by the way was in July of 1914 so before the war however we'll find the gun stick around for a little bit during back in half the authorities rushed the scene but were too late on their return to the barracks however they were accosted by unarmed civilians throwing rocks and insults so I guess sort of armed civilian the unfortunate result of this is what is known as the bachelors walk Massacre years later in April of 1916 some of the mousers that were unloaded the health would reappear during the Easter Rising six-day attempted overthrow of British rule in Ireland the one that Germany had hoped to arm better but their shipments were intercepted all right that is a lot of little pieces of history for such a big rifle important don't get me wrong but not necessarily frontline it's still a very interesting story to have told and it forms a big part of the picture for where we're going next because we here are going to work our way back through the Mauser series one family at a time so you're gonna get more this time next time so if you feel like we're missing something don't worry it's on the way for now though let's cut things a little short and get over to May and get her opinion on actually firing this big bad boy all right everyone once more a made room for me and this might be pretty close to scraping the ceiling now we're gonna have we talked about the 1871 in just a moment but if some of you are watching this later or if you're the kind that don't really tune in for anything other than the major episodes this should be our 76th episode which was at a rate of one every two weeks we have cleared 150 weeks nearly three years of production and we're just now getting to one of the earliest guns in the series okay you know what if I could have done this chronologically I would have and the episode have been a lot shorter for lack of re-explaining things so let's see if we can get some more Mauser history under our belts with may's opinion on the 1871 and just what it's like to shoot a black-powder full sized monster of a rifle in the context of the Great War so as usual I'm gonna have you walk us through the ergonomics let's start out with the length on this guy let's see if I can even yep just barely just barely if I put it on the ground I can just barely get it all into frame well at least you know traveling the entire frame goodness gracious this thing is long it is heavy yet actually surprisingly well-balanced I that one was a bit unexpected because of the length on it you would anticipate it to be a little bit barrel heavy no it's surprisingly not the balance is right where you want to rest your hand up front so not bad good job on that guys I guess they're just a lot of metal going on back here via a lot of length we narrow it's interesting on this one i weirdly kind of and i wanna i wanted to mention this at one point in in the later episode to I'll probably talk about it as well but I really do surprisingly understand the straight wrist on this guy I know it's the first time ever may is ever saying she understands the straight wrist but think about it this way when we have to say my pistol grips on the guns it's it's usually guns that I'm like holding on to my shoulder and yes I do bring them down for the shots to cycle the guns but when I'm just shooting normally on the range and just having fun I like that some a pistol grip just to hold into my shoulder it really feels like I have a positive grip on it whenever I'm pulling it back in I do need that and like that but with these single shots I can almost understand why you would want the straight wrist just because I feel like the semi pistol grip actually kind of hangs you up when it comes to manipulating the gun because you're having to load it individually every single time so I feel like not having that semi pistol grip down here it's not going to it's not going to cause me to slow down with my reloads any whereas when I when I normally do have it on this guy it really wouldn't make sense so i weirdly understand the straight wrist on this guy and that's one again the few times y'all are gonna hear me say that don't think I like them still I still enjoy my semi pistol grips but yeah the action it's it's surprisingly smooth I mean if if we're comparing this to is the Grob [Music] there we go this is probably might have been the last real single shot we talked about the French gras the gun that was supposed to compete against the Mauser 71 do you want me to swap for you or just real quick because I just want to think about it like it's really interesting the gras yeah it doesn't have as much weight to it it's definitely more maneuverable but the action on this one I don't know it doesn't feel quite as polished it's not as smooth and and I don't know about you but this kind also just feels narrower it just feels like this is a more refined gun when I compare the two I would definitely say that of the to the 71 feels more dense in a way that makes you feel secure about the action the overall diameter the bolt on that feels like it's bigger the parts feel much chunkier and less refined this feels this feels very German I don't know how to explain it better than that now there's also some trade off there's some parts differences and some you know I mean that gun doesn't even have a seat this gun does that's extra things to break like I said they did break the safety so whether it's good or bad I agree you feel like you're getting a much more for your money when you pick up the 71 then for the say the Gras yeah alright let me swap you back sounds good and then oh you've communicated the yes I I've only really barely got into the ergonomics here but I wanted to bring that guy in just as a good comparison yeah so uh you gave us the length you gave us the way you give us the balance you gave us the feel I guess you haven't really explained the safety yeah I mean this is just a standard flag safety like it's actually very easy to manipulate and it's interesting when you when you look at the gun from here to here just this one section that looks very modern it just looks like mausers of today like it mousers you know as they were going through the ages like a lot of this just looks so familiar so modern compared to everything else this barrel is ancient I mean it's seriously like it if I were to go in something like if I were to go in like 40 degree weather and fire this gun and then go in like a hundred degree weather and fire this gun my shots are gonna be in totally different spots like it's gonna be ridiculous but yeah ergonomics on this guy it certainly is interesting to look at it right here and just and just see that Mauser but just everywhere else it's it just feels old it feels like it's it's not quite in its right timeline yeah and don't forget what Mays referring to is if you watch the 88 episode the Germans had enough trouble with this wandering shot issue that they came up with the jacketed barrel miebs and then after that we have stepped barrels and it's all just designed to help with heat expansion of the barrel that was ruining precision this gun has none of that this gun has a barrel that was copied off of a needle fire system this pin right here I can't believe that's just set yeah no it's it's a hard set we're very used to floating these things and then dampening and all this other ideas that we've seen throughout the series no no no that's here this is very early sort of technology you're not seeing the performance out of previous paper cartridges that you get other metallic cartridges and so this stuff was just new problems to be discovered as you got over that horizon so you're right this is sort of an anachronism we have what is the sort of the look in the feel and the handling of a modern mauser but then again it is the first Mauser so basically they're setting the mold right like maybe they've casted where the future is gonna be for at least several features and then from here we're gonna see improvements like getting us back by the trigger and then improved barrels and sights and all sorts of stuff but this is the heart this sort of safety separate Bowl had these were things really matter all right with that all in mind I'm gonna give this back to you because now we got to talk about shooting this is a big bore black powder cartridge what is that like for you on the range first of all guys it is fun but yes seriously let's let's get into the details of this the nitty-gritty loading the rounds a single shot seriously it takes a significant amount of time I mean at least evil with two loaders I had multiple rounds available to me I want at you know a time and I could just cycle the rounds through you know having to bring this thing down to your hip to then pull around out of your pocket or patch or whatever and put it in there it's it is time-consuming and you can you do notice it after a while it tends to kind of wear on you like I said actions fairly smooth surprisingly smooth the sights so these sights are interesting I feel like there really is too much going on here I personally don't think that especially you you know for World War one you're not going to need anything more than like 100 200 300 meters like this guy is like it's over engineer there's just so much going on really honestly this little flip up they have here for the front back sight like that's just that's perfect that's really all you need however that being said these sites are also really far forward so honestly for me I feel like I'm having I'm losing a little bit here I feel like I'm having to strain a little bit to try to focus out on those sites and that that can wear on you over time the trigger on this one it's surprising I want to say it's two-stage it just it feels like it should be because technically it there is a definite difference between the first small section you pull through it's like barely anything maybe a pound and then you get this wall and then you notice like you can you kind of wonder when you hit that wall you're like oh this is gonna be like one of those guns where I barely pull through this one like really heavy section it's just gonna go bang no the trigger actually still travels a good bit during that section which was surprising and it's even it's heavy but it's even all the way through that second pool so that one is actually kind of pleasant the trigger is surprisingly nice on this one in that section I think you know be preferable be even all the way through but hey again I like single stages the recoil so it's got a large but there is a significant amount of recoil that goes with this guy as a result and it is definitely noticeable and it does definitely wear on you over time so bear that in mind and then of course smoke it's a significant amount of smoke in case you guys didn't notice so I can imagine that's not your your favorite thing to to shoot when you're fighting the enemy because hey look there's that puff of smoke over there someone just shot from right in that section I feel like it's just a giant flag that you're waving above your head every time you fire this gun so yeah shooting wise I actually really enjoyed it it was fun and I I just liked it in general but there's a lot to be improved here you know this is probably a good time to make a couple defenses of the single-shot rifle number one when you had black powder plumes like we saw on the footage here but they are so cool guys they really are and we haven't always done this because a lot of guns were adapted for smokeless cartridges even though they were coming from the black powder era in this case we know they did not successfully make a militant smokeless cartridge for this in as of 1912 I don't know if they managed to pull anything off later I know that they renewed production of cartridges for this during the war but I didn't get into what the loading was anyway this gun you need time to clear your field of view if a bunch of you are setting these things off so that loading time is pretty much what it takes to get it where you can see what you're shooting at again with all that big smoke going everywhere and then number two this is kind of interesting this is sort of behind the scenes stuff but every time we shoot a single shot as long as it function checks right away the first time we look at it we tend not to stress out on the range because 9 out of 10 problems we have filming on range come from magazine rifles now it's not always the magazines fault although it usually is yeah sometimes it's also ammo so like right now while we're filming this we were also looking at some crow pad checks and we had to be very careful with the construction of the ammunition because if it wasn't crimped and set deep enough or right enough we had to get the right oal because it's a tube lighter so that's important it's got to be overall length perfect but the depth of the bullet and the crimping force and other stuff also has to be perfect because we found that the magazine system was beating the cartridges to death and just blowing them open in the mag yeah I would just cycle the round it would just spray powder everywhere it was fantastic right so there's a lot less to think about in a single loader so if you're military and you know you're clouding up with smoke anyway and you know that you have potential problems with springs and things and it's early technology I'm just saying there's a reason why single orders lasted as long as they did that's all it's just no point in fouling up the gun and fouling up with smoke and not being able see what you're doing and adding to the general chaos instead of being able to have a nice controlled officer led rhythm alright with all that covered so you would take this into battle then I'm not going that far because that's our next big question which we always ask would you be comfortable in World War 1 with by the way its World War 1 not some conflict because that's the context of the whole show at the time in 1871 I think we would both agree this is a very good rifle right yeah it's not bad for that but there's very few things from 1871 that are better than this however World War one 1914 19:18 are you comfortable using something like this in battle so yeah what I take it into Beth no for real seriously guys by 1914 I've got some better options out there I mean great said this was like I said a heck of a fun single shot I really did enjoy myself on range shooting this gun and I love the smoke I'm all about the smoke but by that time smokeless is coming out even I've got a lot of options with the smokeless cartridges I've got a lot of options with improved barrels I've got a lot of options with improved everything at this point there's there's there's very little on this gun that I can't find an improvement of with other guns at that time so unfortunately I am gonna have to pass on it but you know as a personal like this this definitely is on my personal favorites I agree with me there's just no room for a single-shot rifle in that particular conflict I mean unless it was some sort of super good long-range something sniper yato you know it's like taking a single action revolver into the war it's just like it's is just really not a lot out there we've seen that we have seen that now I will say I would take this into battle with two changes just to okay know what really okay I want oh okay let me can I guess them okay okay I have not described this to her beforehand this is not a there's not a setup I'm gonna say smokeless cartridge being one and then the second one I'm gonna say barrel improvement neither because it would still be the heart his ass is gonna get nailed he's gonna be a white flag of smoke in the background hey you're not listening to my plan my plan is I want a magazine for it vertical stack man singles okay and I want to shorten the barrel I want shorten it real short all right those are my only two changes you see my plan here that way I get to have a slow-moving hard-hitting 11 millimeter cartridge there very impressive cartridge in some regards right this is actually kind of smart again I get to be the trench curbing guy right okay and then every shot just they go over like it's 45 ACP and I'm arguing with somebody in the gun store right because that is a nasty cartridge my rifle cartridge so I only got to pop one shot on my guy right yeah and bonus ninja smokescreen I just popped my shot and then I run to the next guy they don't know where I am I've disappeared in a cloud of smoke this is not a legitimate plan alright so this gun is probably not very good for World War one but it is a significant piece of firearms history being the first of the Mauser rifles and it's going to be our window into getting into more detail because a lot of us you want more story on the mousers and trust me there's plenty we got two more variants of this to go and then another model up and then eventually yes we're gonna break down the families for say the 89 93 and 98 dollars it is all coming and this is where it starts not in one big burst though we'll try to break it up for you with other interesting things I'm sorry I'm still picturing him as a ninja and yelling ninja star and then just throw in a map them no not a ninja star ninja smoke you're not paying attention to me when I speak why are you just have the ninja smoke you're a ninja you guys don't need engine starts just say goodbye to the people at home bye [Music] it's gonna be a brief update because although the QA did buy me some time I honestly started several other new side projects all of which are in states that I cannot make promises on or necessarily tell anybody anything publicly but we are very very involved and I have put in some long hours so instead I'm gonna point you over to patreon if you'd like to support the show or if you'd like to do sort of a one-time thing a lot of people have been asking about this a good place to do it is actually over at our print shop where you can get something to have at your home and on your wall to show your support for the show all right thank you very much and we'll see you next time

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 147,461

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

Id: GUoBWucly1s

Length: 71min 58sec (4318 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018