Small Arms of WWI Primer 093: Ottoman Mauser 1893

previously we've covered the history of the Mauser up until the Belgian adoption of 1889 and the Ottomans while they upgraded to the same the next year but Mathers best customers would not stop there they kept going [Music] hi I'm Matthias then this this is the Ottoman Mauser 1893 rare and beautiful I'm happy to say let's get it over the light box with an overall length of 48 in just over 1/2 inch and weighing in at 8 point 8 pounds this is a fairly large gun but not unwieldy it has a 5 round double stack magazine that carries the 7.65 by 53 millimeter Mauser cartridge and does indeed sport a magazine cut off oh boy oh boy another Mauser episode but to cover this gun we're gonna have to take a step back as is usual for this particular show just to review we've covered the German 1871 grazed the Serbian 1880 those are rare shot the German 71 to 84 we introduced the Ottomans with the model 1887 and then saw the first smokeless Mauser in the belgian 1889 which the ottomans upgraded to with the 1890 meet this next bit however will be a little awkward lots of you wanted dust to cover the Argentine model 1891 which is really just like the Ottoman 1890 and it wasn't used in the war the Argentine's weren't there so we kind of had to skip it for now and developmentally he really didn't lose a lot beyond a wired handguard our gun today however well this guy is supposedly based off the Spanish 1893 and yeah they two did not get involved in World War one so we're gonna have to do some developmental history on a gun that we're technically not shooting for the show because the Spanish were the ones that sort of moved the button on this particular thing although we'll see we don't actually need the Spanish 1893 because it came probably after this one Mauser had been trying to lure Spain into buying one of his designs since 1887 and by 1891 he finally had a Abell they would order 1200 to the latest model in that old 765 millimeter cartridge so these first guns were largely the same as our Ottoman 1890 or Argentine 1890 ones they were meant for extended trip trials and were not yet the sealed official rifle Spain was keeping things sort of loose on what they were going to adopt 640 additional guns would be sold to the Spanish Navy same pattern now I say largely the same but there were some differences Mauser had trouble with double feeding and if we bust out our good old Ottoman 1890 or we can honestly see why I'm just gonna have to zoom on in okay I want to make sure this is a clearly defined issue this by the way is a nerded cartridge I know it looks good than the original that's because it was made out of a real cartridge and it will eventually be a live cartridge again waste not want not but for now it is not dangerous so I'm going to put this in here and I'm going to put in another one again inert so that I can show you the problem with double feeds so if I bolt forward on this particular style of Mauser I'm gonna feed into that chamber this one does and then let's say for whatever reason I'm distracted I don't both all the way home I've put her pretty far in there though right then I back her out well there's no visual indication that there's one in the chamber right the bolt is open so we're not in danger even if it was live but if I'm a soldier and I've lost track of what I'm doing and I go to bolt forward again well now I'm driving a cartridge into another cartridge let me get the bolt out of the way and you can see it very clearly what has happened there I've got a cartridge attempted patented in plastic and punky attempting to strike another cartridge and if I'm really unlucky and I'm moving real fast I might even end up with tip 2 primer I might end up with an out-of-battery discharge now obviously this could be a problem and even represents a mess right now but let's get that out of the way and set her back down I'll clean this up later now obviously felt this was a serious issue as it was proven to be dangerous on Germany's then-current Gewehr 1888 commissioned rifles leading to out of battery donations like I said one of the early examples of his attempt to correct it came from the magazine feed in this system the next round would only be released once the bolt was locked this obviously just proved confusing for the sort of person who would have been prone to this kind of double feed anyway so instead he goes simpler undercutting the bolt face so that the cartridge slid up under the extractor more quickly but that extractor was still at the top of the bolt so it didn't get all the way up there well then it would slide right back down remaining loose and causing a tie-up if bolted back and forth so yeah it's not quite as dangerous as a double feed into the chamber but it's still not great could still lock up the action so Mauser would do the usual German thing and over-engineer a further solution that covers all eventualities he put a detent in the right lug low where it could force the cartridge over center much sooner popping it up into contact with the extractor right away this was the model used with the Spanish 1891 and no I do not have such a rare gun here today there would also be a carbine confusingly made much later but that's a story for another time and with much more hands-on research for now Spain still wasn't satisfied so Paul Mauser kept working and 1892 would be a banner year for him as patents came one after another with lots of seemingly small but very important improvements a lot of those would manifest in a very very rare Spanish model 1892 this gun sports an integral single-stack magazine improved trigger and sear designed to prevent out of battery fire and a better striker attachment method some of this was actually from the Swedish involvement in these trials someday when we get to the neutrals will cover this Swedish model 94 and work all that out for you but for now you just need to know that the Swedish requests were affecting some of these choices noticeably in the striker which had formerly been cocking piece but now uses an interrupted vlog patterns this design could only be assembled to one depth the correct depth unlike the threaded system which can be set to too deep or too shallow by a confused soldier okay solid improvements but there is more the seer mechanism now needs room at the front in order to allow the trigger to pull so Mauser just added a notch in the bolt body that only aligns when the system is in battery basically that Titor cannot totter unless the gun is locked so no more out of lock fire perhaps most importantly this gun also sported the latest Mauser extractor this design solved the controlled feed issue by putting a large right-side extractor over the locking lug so from the moment of cartridge left the magazine it was under the lip of the extractor preventing an accidental partial feed this oversized spring extractor would also prove to be very strong and provided smoother operation thanks to being non rotating therefore not dragging across the circumference of that case the extractor was paired with a square bottom bolt face meant to maximize engagement with the next case in the magazine this would actually be dropped in favour of the traditional round bolt face fairly quickly but it was still present on the early 1893 s are you still with us alright let's keep digging at this radical model 1892 as seen in Spain now obviously the magazine wasn't going to last but for the time it was plenty modern just a bit complicated and unnecessarily large and distended the 92 also sports a guide groove in the center of its left raceway it was meant to keep the bolt feeding firmly you know evenly but that doesn't show up well in drawing so I'll show it to you later Spain liked the 1892 and officially adopted it in November they paired it with a brand new cartridge 7 by 57 millimeter which was Paul mousers answer to the experiments with 6.5 s popularly in the market he just couldn't get the performance he wanted out of the smaller diameter and so he created a fast flat shooting 7 millimeter this cartridge would prove to be among the best smokeless rounds very modern and it's compromise between power speed and recoil to the shooter now like we've seen before adoption can sometimes be deceptive because full production of the model 1892 likely never got underway with only maybe 400 known to have been assembled and shipped that makes it a very hard-to-find gun although again that carbine that followed appears to have been much more common with up to 10,000 manufactured interestingly this pattern competed with what would be the u.s. model 1892 Krag Jorgensen that latter one ultimately won on the merit of topping up the magazine plus some other issues like feeding rimmed ammo better ultimately the 1892 Mauser would be a transitional model because in 1893 Paul Mauser kept up his feverish improvements while there were many minor changes several big ones really do stand out from this period first of all he overhauled the safety the old one had used a spring and plunger which rode in a groove set into the cocking shroud the new one saved parts and still snapped to position basically Mauser took the wedge action that locked the cocking piece and embossed it slightly so that the same cocking piece under pressure from the firing pin spring kept pressure on the safety causing it to snap to position it also aided in takedown now but I'll show you that in a moment further improvements included changes to the bolt stop a rising follower that interrupts the path of the bolt that way flustered soldiers don't just keep cycling and dry firing their guns without realizing that it's unloaded the loading Clips themselves by the way were also improved they were formed with some ridges on the sides these added strength and gave a lower surface area projection into the contact with the receiver which by the way that receiver section was now tapered so the harder you try to shove down on the car crews more firmly they bite into place that's a really good improvement that really aided in loading this is why that projection on the earlier bolt stop vanishes no need to use you know the bolt stop overhang to stay the lies the clips when they now sort of hold themselves in place now I think some of you know that I'm holding out on something pretty important at this point that's right a new and much improved magazine dead-simple flush-mount five-round double stack magazine ergonomic strong and robust it uses a specially shaped follower and a long very simple W shaped flat spring for power it also sports a removable floor plate using a bullet tip as a tool to get it loose these features all rolled into the model 1893 which was adopted by Spain in December of 1893 this would become one of the most recognized firearms in history with massive worldwide adoption and amazing export sales development did not stop there by the way minor modifications resulted in the models 1894 the Swedish Mauser in the 1895 another very popular export pattern from here there are a myriad of minor changes depending on who's adopting and what cartridge they use and service lengths and things like that and what fears are ever Asian and what fears or reservations they may have for certain bits of the action one day we will do all of this will back it up and talk about what the Spanish were thinking and more about their version of the 1883 action but since they were not in the war it's not our focus today instead we're here to talk about well the Ottomans right when we last left them they had previously adopted the Mauser 1887 then upgraded their contract to the most modern model 1890 at that time Paul Mauser had tried to stall them as he knew the 1893 or the vague idea of it was already on the way but they didn't stall very well and so finished up their initial contract with while that 1890 I just shown you not a terrible gun by any means and certainly an improvement over the black-powder 87 on April 30th of 1893 Paul Mauser would visit Istanbul and showed his still at that point very much in progress rifle to his old friend Sultan Abdul Hamid the second it was barely very interested in the upgrade and would order two hundred thousand one hundred rifles from Oberndorf although it took some months to secure funding they did not however change ammunition again they opted to keep their 765 Mauser cartridge which was still plenty modern and reliable they also did not opt for the upgraded stripper clips likely to avoid supply differences so this is where things get kind of interesting because we always think of the Spanish 1893 as the original 1893 and after their adoption the Ottomans scrambled to get the same rifle but the dates and other evidence to my eye so far it doesn't bear that out I have an adoption date in Spain of December 7th 1893 the Spanish contract was fulfilled by Ludwig lava because Mauser was already too busy with Ottoman orders but the Ottoman 1890 order seems to have been wrapped up in December 5th of 1893 and I have notes that say that they immediately switched to the model 1893 production that means Ottoman production was gearing up when Spain has just decided to adopt their gun that makes this the original Mauser model 1893 so let's get a closer look alright let's start from a back and just say we have a straight wrist pretty high combed shallow trigger guard here's all of our action we'll get there in a moment key feature here is the hand guard which goes to the midpoint of the gun so barrel band to metal clip that sits in from the receiver this is actually pretty good tech this feels very secure compared to some of the previous ones there are probably problems with that 1891 that really came out here in terms of the face well keep down the barrel simple bayonet logged clearing cleaning rod adjustable front sight obviously not on the fly though let me get this back to the rear sight now this is actually probably a later pattern from observing known examples the original was a single button design with of course the flip up ladder and they also had a rear flip up kind of like on the old guevara 88 that was probably set for 400 meters I've only seen a couple photos of those that same feature actually had been on let me show you that have been on this guy the 1890s so let me screw them over it's not the same site obviously but what I'm talking about is this little sight blade here originally the 1893 seems to have had that feature on top of this with a single locking button now that single locking button as we'll see when we talking about Serbian rifles proved to be a bit of a weakness and so they went over to a two button setup in this case might might maybe have been done about the time they updated these four Spitzer's but I don't have any evidence of that for sure it could also just have been very easily worn part and that these were just replaced it seems like whenever I see them this is predominantly the site that we see on the 1893 s despite evidence of an earlier one button sight anyway no real way to confirm but let's keep hacking at this rifle yeah well we're talking about mysteries we got to talk about this guy the magazine cut off this is pretty wild so the way this thing works is I'm not sure you can see down in there too easily I'm gonna just flip it and it's gonna drop that follower a bit see that it's a little bit of wedge in there let me do it again back the other way and so watch the follower down a bit up a bit that it's literally just a like diagonal ledge that's just shoving down on the follower or if there were rounds in here would be shoving down on the rounds what it does is it lowers them out of the path of the bolt so as a matter of fact I could probably turn this guy on and oboes to go the right way and it's still by the way tall enough to stop me from feeding this is a safety feature in terms of battle to prevent you from accidentally try firing a rifle a bunch of times instead of actually shooting at the enemy but the idea is that's supposed to lower the cartridges below the path of the bolt and then that way you can use this as a single loader and then just pop or forward now problem is I haven't been able to find any documentation as to why this is on this gun the Ottomans did not have a magazine cutoff on the 1890 they did have the option on the 1887 so it could be possible they saw the chance to get it back I kind of doubt that because then this doesn't appear on their next rifle either or it could be that a lot of the Mauser patents around this time really focus on trying to integrate a magazine cut off somebody was asking for it it could have been the Ottomans but definitely Palmer House rooms cranked it through a bunch of designs for magazine cut-offs that were implemented on like none of the guns and so it may just be that because they were an early adopter of 1893 before the Spanish even in terms of settling on what model they wanted it could just be that he happen to show them one that had the magazine cut off and they went yeah we'll just take take all that and so again that's a detail that's kind of been lost to time but if anybody sees any documentation I'd be really curious about it this really is the only modern Mauser with a magazine cut off you don't see it on anything else which makes it pretty damn cool all right let's get back into it all right so the floor plate because of this has to be lower so unlike a regular 18 regular 1893 who has a flush floor plate this has just ever so slightly of an embossing here and see it's sticking up that's just to allow room for the cartridges and followers to just drop enough for the cut off to work all right so if I get this let me actually do it this way I'm going to take this bolt out and show you overtop they have retained the old style of stripper clip loading so there's no notch in here specifically for those little extensions on the stripper clip let me see if I can find a later gun just by way of example this is a Chilean 1895 which is a very close kissing cousin if we look at it we have no extension here to keep pressure on the side the clip and we have these two notches to allow for the embossing x' on the side of the clip to set down in there and within these notches those are going to be tapered they're going to be in a slight V formation so that the harder you push the clip down in there the more secure it's held that is truly new on the 1893 s and then of course carried over to later mousers and yet not adopted by the Ottomans though this could be a sign that they got to the gun too soon and again sealed the pattern or it could be that they just wanted to keep what they had already going and didn't want to add to different types of stripper clip in their inventory both explanations are pretty reasonable now let me get this gun back together just some basic stuff this is mm heavy this is a [ __ ] on close so you can see cocking piece is now shrouded away and then as I close the action so hard to get my own hand another way there you go cocking piece appears that's because it's just snagging on this year so it's a caught on close Mauser this is not like the 98 that [ __ ] on open in addition we have the full extractor there's all the way down like this bolt this is not however yet set up for that horizontal diagonal plain double grippy thing if you're not sure what I'm talking about watch our 98 episode and we'll actually talk about that again another day but basically this extractor stays like it is goes over with the feed form underneath it has no provision for snap over it has no real provision for tightening like will see on later mousers if we look at this bolt it is a very early 1893 style bolt in that it has the square bottom bolt face this was meant to try to make sure that we have maximum engagement with the cartridges proved to be unnecessary it also has a cut in the left side log and it's actually a flush cut more on that when we talk about 98 but that allows for both the ejector which is set on the inside of this little flap here you'll see it better in the animation but also allow us to use this little rib I don't know if you guys can make that out it's just a rib all the way down the left log Raceway that stabilizes the bolts so that once I'm eating here despite the fact that there is some looseness and tolerance I can't just sort of rattle this back and forth like crazy that prevents you from binding and pressing on this too much when you're using it although you may see with Mae she still manages on occasion to get these guns to bear down at the rear because we've now lost that rib but generally it keeps this a much tighter action than say that loose sloppy Carcano that we saw before all right so let me get her back forward let's talk about this safety it's three position now so right here we'd be able to fire the action I'm not going to dry fire though we'll flip this guy over to safe and nothing we have a third position which allows us to disassemble the bolt more easily so if I leave it in the third position and take this guy out of the action it's got a side for a moment pick up my bolt and you may recall from our 1889 1890 episodes I had a Dickens of a time taking these guys apart well now because all that rear tension is being held like if we basically walked up the cocking piece to the cocking shroud everything's being held to the rear by this little piece of metal and believe me if I flick it over it'll let go but I'm not gonna flick it over I'm gonna use it to just unthread this bolt and have her come right out you may see that this is really the same overall firing pin setup otherwise except if we continue to disassemble the gun because before and I know kind of there's a really good place to do this in frame for you guys if I push down on this guy instead of having to sit here and unthread it I just turn it 90 degrees and if I just turn it 90 degrees I'm already a part so that is much much faster and much easier than our previous episodes that we saw with the 1889 1890s and so what that gives us let me make sure I have the right part is that this guy just goes on he stops at the correct depth we turn him 90 degrees and boom we are set there's no accidentally setting this too shallow or too deeply there's no way to mess up your firing pin depth and if you start to have a warrant firing a pin or something you get a replacement firing pin that's set for the correct depth you don't play this game of threading it in and out in the gun as you go this is more on armors tasks anyway so makes this a very easy gun to sort of service in the field don't mind the dirt this thing needed of cleaning anyway so while I take care of that will borrow a Burroughs x-ray specs and get a closer look at how this gun really does work well first load the rifle from the five rounds paper clip then engage that magazine cutoff which depresses the cartridge is low enough that the bolt won't pick them up now we have a single loader [Music] flipper back and we can feed from the magazine again note this here with safety extension at the front it rises into a notch in the bolt body and so can only tip when the action is locked our double stack magazine is powered by a very simple flat spring making it a very efficient design the improved safety is new when turned a projection simply cans the cocking piece slightly rearward preventing fire alright let's wrap this up and get it over to Mei [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh we are finally in the era of the modern Mauser now just to review Spain in Sweden paid close attention to Paul Mouse's developments from 1891 to 1893 they trialed in fits and spurts and gave a lot of feedback which drove the development of a gun which Paul Mauser showed to the Sultan and he adopted it first buying two hundred thousand and and another hundred sometime before December 1893 with production beginning on the fifth Oberndorf would finish up in March of 1896 these were priced at 365 kut'rs a pop in August in order for eighteen hundred more would begin work now priced 325 kut'rs the guns were marked with the Sultan's taubira over the chamber the left receiver wall tells us the gun was made by Mauser Oberndorf ahead of this is found either thirteen twelve or thirteen thirteen the date of manufacture in the Rumi calendar I started to stored out the exact dates for the show three hours later I still didn't know and I needed a therapist if you'd like to really see a neat history lesson try looking into the constant and horrifying changes to the Ottomans official state calendar turning back to the gun for once the Ottoman Empire is actually cutting edge in small arms technology they tried to be up to date with the black-powder 1887 but during funding and adoption the French had messed that up with the 1886 Lebel and its whole superior small bore of smokeless cartridge thing the 1890 had been very up-to-date but they were not quite the first ones to adopt and it quickly fell off the leader board thanks to a gun like this the 1893 which was the top of the heat for just about five years it was arguably still in the top of the general pack by 1914 this is good news because as we've sort of seen in our contextual history pieces the Ottoman Empire was in a slow decline for the past century or so with various states fighting for independence the Sultan's choice to take on rather extreme debt to overall the army was probably actually a good decision and he was as we've covered before backed by German interests again this came in the form of military advisement from one gulfs Pasha a German officer now heading military education in the Sultan's Empire his position not only greatly increased the strength and tactics of the previously very dated army but also secured very profitable contracts for German arms giants like Mauser and Crump with all this expanse and aid you would think that the mousers 1890 and 1893 at this point well more advanced than what was available in the Balkans would be on the Ottoman front lines but the Sultan was having none of that his number-one fear was not the slow decline at the edges of his empire but rather a rapid coup from within he did not trust his own army and the modern rifles were kept very close to home the paranoia was actually probably deserved the Empire was crumbling due to military defeats and rising nationalistic sentiments common among non Islamic residents like the Serbs Greeks or Armenians the latter became a particular lightning rod and having sent a delegation to the 1878 Congress of Berlin that followed the russo-turkish war while that really irked the Sultan and a series of massacres would eventually follow in the mid 1890s sparked by a policy of pan-islamism that targeted the would be independent people's will see an even more destructive version of this without the Sultan even in 1915 for now however you can see the Sultan sits on an unstable foundation in addition his own officers had a habit of requisitioning supplies in excess of their actual troop numbers these surpluses would be sold for personal profit and honestly some of the necessities would also be sold for personal profit leaving field armies poorly equipped so yeah he was pretty careful about where you put his expensive new guns most stayed in storage for years but in fits in spurts the 1893 would be issued by 1897 nearly half were actually out there somewhere from records 89,000 the largest number went to the second army this was of course headquartered in Istanbul ten thousand went to the second division not sure where they were in nearly five thousand to the first division in 1899 fifty one thousand two hundred went to the Hasan army which was a modernized Imperial Guard so yeah the 1883 s were overwhelmingly staying close to home and not found in the conflicts at the perimeter so they were practically non-existent in the 1897 greco-turkish war which interestingly was a great victory for the Ottomans only hedged by Russian intervention despite this care Abdullah mids paranoia would prove perhaps self-fulfilling as he would face the Young Turks revolution in 1908 in the simplest terms the Young Turks represented Galt's era military officers fed up with the Sultan's weak leadership and suppression of the 1876 Constitution they restored the Parliament and moved to modernize the Empire and it gets a lot more nuanced from their post 1908 I don't have that many records about disposition of these guns but photo evidence seems to have them finally making it out to the fight by the time of the Balkan Wars first failing Lee against the combined forces of Bulgaria Serbia Greece and Montenegro and then much more effectively albeit with fewer shots fired against Bulgaria's backside as they tried fighting their former allies there wasn't a lot of severe fighting for the ottomans on this front so realistically the model 1893 wouldn't get a real workout for another year and some change when war were declared [Music] yep just like the 1892 1893 went practically unused until a decade after it had been replaced with the more modern Mauser 98 style model 1903 still these guys were fairly common in the empire I mean you're talking about a body that is overcharged with troops and underrepresented by equipment these were clip loading smokeless powder rifle still very up to date and firing the current service ammunition when compared to the then first line model 1903 these guys work on clothes and had a silly magazine cutoff and were honestly a little lighter those are the only real differences so for the Great War we can consider them standard unfortunately I can't find any recorded opinions on this particular model because while it seems they were overall approved of it's not like the average Turkish soldier had any experience with any other designs or could even tell this apart from the 1903 at a glance the Australian and New Zealand forces did have plenty to say about Ottoman rifles as a whole one of the most common points noted was the surprisingly accurate and overwhelming fire coming from the enemy regularly we will see descriptions of attempted landings only to see their front lines chopped to pieces and bodies carried away by the serf having been cut down by rapid and accurate fire from even the smallest Turkish platoons the 765 cartridge and long-barreled highly accurate mousers were being put to effective use northern group commander as sat Pasha responsible for much of the defense strategy and organization at Gallipoli would recall one wave would collapse upon us like a wooden fence and then a new wave would immediately appear and in this way the enemy tried to advance unfortunately the rifles in the troops hands overheated the grease between the wooden and metal parts was sizzling and the mechanisms stopped working the rifles had to cool and our enemies profited from this situation by then the battle was being waged hand-to-hand it was then I was shot okay yeah that is pretty intense service use and considering asset pasha was not caught I'm gonna say they managed to still hold the line that day honestly the whole Gallipoli campaign when were called by the participants it's fairly unique in that the mention of rifle fire is constant and continuous ahead of any mention of artillery trenches and machine guns etc I mean those all get talked about and used but the rifle seems to have been the major implement here even ahead of things like the mortar or the coordinated and in this case it was a showdown between the Mauser and the Enfield of course that's a supremely reductionist argument but if the Mauser had been significantly inferior if the Sultan had failed the stock his army with more modern guns well this could have been a very different story now as far as collecting goes the original my house our 1893 the Ottoman diversion it's a very rare sight on the market thanks to German support during World War one those guys slowly swapped over to more and more 7.92 millimeter cartridges post-war and post collapse Turkey would eventually standardize on this particular ammo and in the 1930s a series of conversions would wipe out nearly all original 1903 s converting them into a standard pattern more like the model 1903 with a tangent sight stalked through a hole and semi pistol grip the magazine cutoff was removed and filled in sometimes left exposed sometimes covered up by the stock although I suspect many of those are 1890s further converted anyway these so-called 1893 33s are extremely common much to the detriment of a proper World War one collection once again we're very lucky to have our friend John to help us out and so let's get this guy as rare as he is over to May and get her opinion on the rather storied rifle our again we have a thing of rare beauty and we have May so let's put the Ottoman 1893 in her hands and get your opinion don't forget by the way we've handled guns in this class right this family the Swedish 94 and 96 Azhar in this family and you actually I remember you actually quite like the Swedish 94 I think one of our guys on team had one that you gotta sure you loved it to death oh yeah very smooth action yeah so you handled this but we're going to pretend you haven't you know what I mean like you've handled cousins but we're gonna talk about this particular gun when you're handed the Ottoman 1893 as it stands what are your impressions of just sort of fit and feel of this gun first handed the gun it feels heavy but you know it's not as heavy as I was expecting it's a near nine pound gun nine pounds rough little under but I'm expecting it to be I guess a pound heavier maybe it's just I can maybe it's the length on it or something I can't quite tell but it's not too bad so I put it medium range not too heavy not as light as I would like it but not too bad it does have a good bit of length to it unfortunately that is gonna wear on you as the day goes on was shooting so look forward to that I suppose you know it's interesting though I'm I'm looking at the gun and when I was holding on ranged I noticed I had a good positive grip with my left hand even though there's no grooves cut into the wood here for me to necessarily place my hand it didn't ever feel like I was losing my grip up there which was really nice and even though it's got this weight and length to it the balance point on it it's it's pretty well centered it's it's right where your left hand wants to fall so that's a nice thing to look forward to on this one unfortunately notes in my pistol grip and that is something that I've always said I really think it's necessary on these guns for pulling them into your shoulder getting a good purchase on them it's a small thing but I think it makes a huge difference in your shooting experience unfortunately never been a fan of [ __ ] on closes but I will say this is not as bad like as the Arisaka is that I've handled before it's not the best what I'm necessarily handled but I'd say it's probably mill road it's not too bad you just got to make sure you put a good bit of force for it and make sure you're pushing all the way forward in order to actually close the action always into your wrist thing doesn't it though because if you're shooting this from the shoulder man yes if you're shooting this from the shoulder I've heard you complain about this before which is that okay I'm firing we don't national told her in the show and I get this all the time and we've explained it few times but just to be clear we need enough time between shots to confirm that we don't have split or damaged bulging cases so when this gun ejects we've got somebody on range that watches those cases up close if necessary with the dista scope like we keep an eye on the cases as she feeds because of what usually happens in some of you may see marked special on this you start to see in the cases before you see most guns go up and when it comes to rare stuff like this it's better just set the precedent that we inspect as we go may he's watching to make sure there's no double feeds there's no binding of the ammo she watches it very closely when it comes forward and even on the few that I have shot from the shoulder like if you review the Winchester episodes like the Winchester 94-92 even though I did cycle them from the shoulder I was still like you can see me pop in my head up to verify the rounds as they're coming out just because we couldn't really we had one person spotting on range but it was also good for me as the shooter to kind of keep my eye on that - yeah preservation of these is much more important than looking fast on camera dealing with this era now if we get out of here and we start dealing with much more common things or things that are less likely to be prone to these sort of problems more replaceable not that you know we want to think that way we can get a little slicker but I'm not about to run than autumn in 1893 hard so pretty well you are bringing it down but from the shoulder you know with a [ __ ] on close I find that it's gonna push forward and you've even complained about this so it pushes you forward now you've got to resettle the gun well if we come here you don't want to pull it back in with your trigger finger if you try to pull it from this wrist you can get some but it's a straight wrist so you're not getting a lot so you end up kind of pulling in with your left hand but you really don't want to be bearing a lot of weight in your left hand that's gonna throw your shot - so the semi pistol grip is the ability to take the right hand and bring in a shoulder nice and firmly without any slippage and losing your trigger position it's actually pretty important but it's also costly in terms of selecting the wood and it makes it so that you have to pay way more attention to the wood of the stock the Japanese found a way around that with the two-piece dock though so it was a technological hurdle in a way or at least a heavy expense and so that's why you don't see it implemented everywhere though it was a known advantage for a number of years so let me give that back to you I'm sorry you had just spoken about the cop town close action you were telling us how smooth it was yeah and leading in from there the safety on this gun I did want to make sure I mentioned that so as we get into the older guns we've noticed that depending on the wear of the gun like if one looked really bad off the safety would always not have a really positive sensation with it when it came to sound and it also would always feel like it was dragging or gritty it just you could always tell like how bad a gun off was with the Safety's on them this one even though it's got some good age on it although it looks gorgeous by the way I love this I love this Arabic writing on here it's beautiful but it's got a nice positive clip over like it really does just click over in such a way that it's just you can hear it you can feel it it's still smooth it's really impressive the condition of that so absolutely loving it not again a huge fan of these magazine cut-offs I just especially on these bolt-action rifles it just it doesn't make sense to me I mean I get it has some to do with like ammo conservation things like that with them but for these it just it really doesn't make sense for for wartime I mean Mays an individual shooter she's not shooting in a group and the idea was that as a commanding officer you could control magazine cut-offs there for the office or not for the soldier the idea is to control the rate of fire on the line obviously this was abandoned I mean good drill would just allow you to control the rate of fire on the line without a magazine cut off there's no need to go through all this you know and then the other thing is magazine cut-offs persist in the shotgun world because of change overs for loading so shotguns have different available loads for different tasks and you may want to have a tube full of buck and then flip that off take a specialty round throw it in shoot just one of those and then re-engage your magazine right that's the thing that people might want to do or maybe the specialty load doesn't cycle on automatic shotgun action so these there's reasons for even military or police magazine cut-offs it's just not super advantageous in World War one to have a magazine cut off on a bolt-action rifle that part is not really selling any features right now so through our eyes this is you know not a lot of metal but it's not no metal and it's one more part to sort of maintain that's not really doing anything for you so that is sort of the one little leftover piece of this gun that doesn't make a lot of sense but I really feel like an urgent situation I don't want to have to be worrying about the mag cut off and me accidentally firing one round thinking I'm chambering another and in the urgency of the situation have failed to notice that that my mag cut off is still on that seems like a scary situation to be in and luckily this one it is a very positive for door backs position but it's not really clearly labeled on here and like I said in an urgent situation I might not notice yeah that's true it is one more potential point of failure so I think that's got your economics the only thing is from watching the footage people may have noticed that you had a little bit of a pressure issue are you able to replicate that I can I can replicate it every time all you have to do is it was every time I was manipulating the bolt like and the first maybe two rounds three rounds I did it especially if he pushed a little bit of pressure down on this bowl it's going to drag and snap there we go right there it snags right there every time and that's unfortunate that it really doesn't require much force I'm putting maybe a pound pound two pounds on it I would say probably two to three pounds just to be on the safe side it's not a lot but it's just enough that it's gonna snag it you really have to make sure using a linear force when moving the bolt back and forward it is gonna snag he put like a little bit of downward force on that yeah it's actually kind of astounding I never realized this about these guns because I just had never bothered to happen to me I just didn't accidentally sort of you know Mays putting the gun down to bolt and she's in a hurry and she sort of counterbalancing what she's doing so she put some weight on there next thing you know it's I mean is frozen I'm putting I'm now pulling back with it probably took about 20 pounds of force to get that to open up whereas if I do the exact same thing and I just just to finger it it's nothing oh yeah there's a difference thing to know is you know try not to bear down on the back here bolts I mean this is true for a lot of them but I have a suspicion with all the extra surface area of this inside rail here it's much more noticeable on this particular gun luckily it is something that you can diagnose on this one very quickly I mean I noticed that maybe it was the third shot when I noticed oh that's what's causing it and literally from there on out you could tell that I was just focusing on linear force only I didn't have any problems after that that's true it's also less likely to happen at the shoulder which is how these would generally be used if you weren't checking for again case problems so speaking of cases though I guess we get into firing this this is a 765 Argentine cartridge and generally that's been fairly light for us and that's a heavy gun so I imagine it must be pretty well but do you want to walk us through you know the usual stuff of what it feels like to get behind the gun and actually have it go bang lining up the sights on this one I thought like I said with the comb it was the comb itself is actually pretty well aligned with a sight so I didn't feel like I was too over top or underneath it felt pretty perfect and the sights are very clear standard v-notch with the blade it's nothing super special on that the sights do look a little bit worn so it's maybe not as clear as it could be yes they could be taller that would be nice too but that's a perfect world in this world though it's actually pretty decent they're pretty readable and honestly I don't like really extra busy sights because that just blocks up your field of vision and this one it's pretty flat so that's actually really nice I've got a I've gained a lot of peripheral vision with these sights which is fantastic long seit radius again yes it could be longer in a perfect world but still not too bad they're using a good bit of length on this gun which is great winding up the trigger on this one you know the trigger actually it is really nice it's just got a lot of take-up it's a very like light pull with the take up but when you get to the second stage of that trigger it's it suddenly gets like a good bit of heft to it like you feel a giant cliff right there and then bang you there is like pretty much nothing to the second stage there is barely any pull through with that one but you do have to put significant more amounts of pounds into it so when it does go bang you can't be surprised by the first 1 or 2 shots now you would say it's not nearly as brutal however at some of those old single stages that we were dealing with goodness no nothing those were completely awful in my opinion just because it was such it took such a tremendous forced to even just pull through with them this however is a beautiful single strange trigger both stages while totally different amounts of pressure of course expected the two-stage trigger it's very smooth both ways it's just surprising how short that second stage of the trigger actually is now the recoil on this gun I was actually very surprised about that it was a it was a moderate amount of recoil I thought the gun carrying the weight that it did it wasn't gonna be as bad but know that sevensixfive Argentine that cartridge it's kind of good bit of a lift to it I was a little bit surprised about that um but yeah shooting I was I was fairly accurate don't get me wrong I could have done better honestly that day I am a little bit surprised that I didn't do as I didn't have a drill a better hole with the target but you know it wasn't too bad all that was on target it was just I basically like aligned the left side of the target from Rohmer incorrectly well we've had other special projects going on so your physical exhaustion level has been astronomical so when we give you a long barrel like this at a standing position at good range there's gonna be some walkin I can think of quite a few 40 pounds something or others we've been hauling around that are gonna slow it down by the way I know some of you are already furiously typing because you described that as a single stage trigger for one brief moment before then talking about is a two-stage yes it is a two-stage it was just in misspeak so there is a long light take-up then you hit a little wall and there's some pull I thought the pool weight was you know middle-of-the-road really it's it's probably only like 8 pounds if that that's probably been trying too hard to guess what I feel with my finger and I should probably just start getting a scale but I I'd considered a mid weight second stage pulling this gun the problem is I agree with you when I fired it it has almost no actual distance to that it's like the minute you're up against that second stage any amount of force and it's dropping which would be fine if this was like a featherweight trigger of some sort but it's not and so you're anticipating and there's a chance for you especially as an untrained soldier to flinch so we'll see if this gets improved on any others in this family but for now the one sample of the bottom in 1883 it's a it's a middling trigger I would say actually I shouldn't say middling we've seen much worse as an average for everything we've seen the show it's above average trigger it's just my little bit spoiled by certain things like the month like a shootout or where they have very nice Tuesday's triggers it's true we have been a little bit spoiled but we have also experienced some of the worst triggers as well so I would say it's definitely on the higher side of my trigger rankings so you said recoil is fine you trust 765 Argentina's a cartridge it's my face yeah I thought it was a fairly solid cartridge I definitely think it is a a matin stopper cartridge so I would I would agree with that it's a decent cartridge I definitely feel like there's you know we talking about 30.6 in eight millimeter labelled and less so 303 but then eight millimeter Mauser the German cartridges and they're very hard-hitting cartridges like very good penetration and things like that but for the most part they really are overkill and they get abandoned you know we move towards intermediate cartridges later on after World War two and so for me I actually have a preference for things like 765 Mauser and then as we're gonna see very soon seven millimeter Mauser those are nice middle-of-the-road cartridges in terms of the full powered rifle cartridge that do a lot of heavy lifting without beating the crap out of you so I frankly found this to be very pleasant that's fair I just I I guess I like I said I was expecting just less recoil than what was given to me and honestly it's interesting like I just I don't know I guess I just had the expectation with it not being as heavy as it was or being as I are as heavy as it was on range that it just was gonna eat up more of that to be fair you also have shot 6555 suite out of a very similar platform you may have been anticipating that or it feels a lot like an re sock and you may have been submitting 6.50 a shotgun and that could have been your sort of trained response and this hit a little harder than that I do love 6.5 Arisaka that is pretty good round alright so we've gone through the gun would you take this into battle yes I would consider taking this one into battle it's it's not even that it would be low rankings this would not actually be somewhere in the middle road it's not my 10 but I would definitely take this one into battle performance-wise it did very well we didn't have any failures when it came to cycling rounds we didn't have any issues when it came to the cartridge itself we really didn't experience any flaws of the gun other than like I said any downward pressure on that bolt when you know pulling back does cause it to snag that just realistically the only downside I would say to this guy yes there are some extra features like this magazine cutoff is an extra feature that I think is unnecessary but you know it if as long as you know what you're doing with it you're really not going to have any faults with it but performance wise it was very accurate gun I did well with it not as well as I would have liked again I will probably concur with you and say that yes I was probably a little bit fatigued that day but other than that it was a solid gun solid performance solid cartridge I don't think I could turn this down the only thing I wish is that I wish it were in a carbine version I feel like this in a carbine it would kick some serious butt yeah I'm gonna agree with me that I have a lot of confidence in this gun although it may have actually wandered into my top 10 I'd have to kind of review when we've actually aired for the show because it's hard to get better than this I actually put this above the German Gewehr 98 on the basis the gran 98 feels a little heavier and ungainly to me but also because it has much worse sights I mean granted this gun is using a rear ladder and those are a little more fragile but that's had one hundred and something years it's still sitting there I know it's a sample size of one it's sort of a survivor bias yes I would rather have a flat tangent rear Leafs night but I will take that ladder over those long-ago Vizier that block my peripheral vision so terribly like this is preferred with the 765 Argentine cartridge and everything I take this whole platform over the German standard-issue cover 98 I absolutely would so that's got to put it pretty high up in March because the very 98 is a good rifle I'm not saying that's terrible it has one fatal flaw in the sights and that's about it so yeah this is this is great for me I mean what is for you or you take I would absolutely agree like this is definitely above its like I said I just don't think it makes it necessarily until I talk to him but you know top like 25 yeah I could definitely see that to be honest I have to think about it in that perspective simply because we're nearing 100 episodes here but that's not all the guns that we've shot some episodes we've shot more than one gun and to be honest we've shot more than what we have put out there so far so I've got to think of that from a good you know full-body perspective on what have I shops you also have strong bias towards carbines yes and so if we offer this in a carbine package well maybe you should stay tuned for next episode because there are things that are so rare it makes my eyes bleed so if you want to see me cry red stick around for the next episode anything else on this particular gun today me nope it is absolutely gorgeous and I am glad that we got to try it honestly wasn't sure we ever would at any point so this was a nice thing to be able to attempt yeah this is another John clear special so thank you very much for that support thanks John alright well in that case we're gonna sign off for the day so you know everybody says that we need a catchphrase and we've never come up with one for the show and I suppose were supposed to sign off with it but we've had one unofficially behind the scenes so may I introduce the CN Arsenal catchphrase to you all everyone thinks for experts were actually just determined idiots have a good one good night [Music] [Music]

Channel: C&Rsenal

Views: 81,933

Rating: 4.9678102 out of 5

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

Id: MaLjJkteJ3I

Length: 58min 20sec (3500 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 28 2019