The ZF-41 German WWII Scout Scope

so here we have the Zia 41 already in the mount the the rail the rifle so but here let's going to talk about the actual zeroing process with the Zia 41 I'm going to talk about the historical process then I'm gonna talk about what I went through to actually 0 this because I didn't quite have the same tools that they had historically speaking so when the Zia 41 is on the rifle there's a sunshade that's attached to the front which is spring-loaded it's actually rather tight a little hard to get off once that comes off there is a set screw which you then remove and there is a lock screw in the front of the optic for which there are specialized tools right here this is one of them this is what releases the rock the lock screw and then there are two pins that are used to adjust the drums so what happens is you actually release the lock screw on the front of the optic and then you can see these two drums that are exposed within the optic and these two pins go in essentially like this at that point what happens is you fire at the target and hopefully without disturbing the rifle you then turn these pins left or right to adjust the German post to in to relate to where the impact on the target was at 100 meters now historically speaking there was a prismatic piece of optic that they actually augmented or added on for the zeroing of these rifles which attach to the rear of the rifle and the rifle was mounted into a locked vise so that it couldn't be disturbed upon firing you would fire the gun at the target you would then look through the optic from the side because of the prism and you could see the impact and then you could adjust these drums at that point for the reticle to then indicate to this or point or index to the same point of impact on the target when you're doing this as an individual I don't have the prism for one I don't even know where you could get one nowadays and I wasn't locked in a vise so when you would fire on the target we would try to keep this thing in sandbags and slowly move these pins which inevitably would move the gun and these drums when they move don't but don't act like what you would think a modern piece of optic would you would think one is elevation is one in which is windage practice that's not the reality when you're actually looking through the optic and actually turning these little pins you'll find that it kind of tends to move in a figure eight and then on top of that the elevation and windage kind of Wiggles around as well so really when you're moving it you're kind of getting alright it's sort of moving left and it's sort of moving down or it's sort of moving right and it's sort of moving up and you only have so much area to cover in that regard so you have to actually make sure that your indexed on the mouth itself to to get close but that's a whole nother topic if you had this gun mounted in a vise and you were doing it in a locked stable position and you were doing it from the side with the prism be a relatively simple task doing it as an individual by yourself with a gun that kind of moves around when you're doing it it is a painful task and it went through - I went through 300 rounds getting there so um if you have a helper I'd recommend doing that and I'd recommend locking the gun down so that it's not moving around on you when you're trying to move the zero the optic this is m75 Yugoslavian surplus quote-unquote sniper ammunition it's made for their m76 sniper rifle however the reason it's good for this is it's also loaded pretty much to the world war ii spec of the highest quality german ammo it's 196 grain bullet loaded to the similar velocity that's why we're using this today and I have found it to actually be more accurate than just standard surplus alright so we just loaded five rounds of m75 ammunition we have clay pigeon targets from fifty to a little over 100 yards and field conditions we're going to set off a timer we're going to use the ZF 41 scope only no iron sights and going to see if we can get all five of them and at what time it takes us to get them we're going to compare later the same course of fire with iron sights so I'm going to put the first round in the chamber and is going to hit the timer and we're going to see how this goes get it ready stand by get ready stand by clean all right shut it clean okay now in historical times World War two this was a quick detached scope they kept it on a pack and a metal can on their belt it was considered fragile so you put it on only when you needed it I've never taken this off the mount yet we don't know if it's going to retain zero we're taking it off to shoot the test with iron sights we're going to put the scope back on later and see if the zero is where it should be here we go I don't like doing this how many hours did you spend zeroing that too many it's off we're going to find out all right let's do it same course of fire five rounds same ammo same gun iron sights with some fire ants to boot let's see how this goes shooter ready ready stand by and I'm out all right let me talk about how this went with the sea of 41 scope four rounds four hits 12 seconds same course of fire same target same distance iron sights I hit two of the targets in 17 seconds 17 seconds and missed the third target until I ran out of ammunition I think this decisively says there's something different about the Zia 41 unless I do great now we're going to find out all right now it's my turn to try this with iron sights 3 yeah for are you ready shuttle ready stand by oh hi come out and you're out of ammunition alright well I did pretty much the same as Carl didn't not quite as fast but I got two of the four targets with five rounds alright so now we have the scope we're going to put this back on we're going to fire it almost the farthest target we're gonna see if we retain zero all right it's locked in place I got myself two rounds here all right whenever you're ready here you're just above it you knocked it down alright we're going to reconfirm zero with a second shot at the spinning steel target this is about 50 yards go ahead hit I was terrified to take the scope off the rifle we took it off we did our iron sight test I put it back on we hit a target at just about a hundred yards first shot and hit a very small spinner target at fifty yards with no problems I'm gonna go ahead and say that it does retain zero and I'm happy about that you didn't want to go through Andrea Reiser all that no I was actually very scared of that but turns out it works Oh awesome alright so we just finished shooting we did our testing we both shot the same course of fire with the optic and with just the irons mm-hmm and what do you think was this an effective DMR rifle it was a highly effective DMR rifle if not an effective sniper rifle when you look at the scores and the times and our hits first of all it was considerably easier to engage find yep and engage these small hard to see targets yep the hits were easier to make they were better hits in fact we hit them all yes opposed with the irons which we didn't even get to the third target you didn't even need your fifth shot um no I'm one of the strings of fire I hit all four of them in 12 something seconds yep with the scope with the iron sights I never got past the third target yeah act I wasted the rest of our mission on third target so in terms of a field condition where this was designed to hit small hard to see targets in the field this absolutely does improve your odds of doing that absolutely that's exactly what my conclusion was as well which is what it was designed for yep not what it was eventually used for yeah well the problem was right about the time they put these things into mass production the the German army kind of realized that they needed sniper rifles and they had this thing coming out so rather than actually try and develop a full-on sniper rifle they just masse issued those to the snipers so the DMR guys you know the the good shot in every squad who wasn't maybe sniper quality but he was better than everyone else he got nothing he got just this same iron sights he know he's had the snipers who trained with these nice for power conventional scopes then went into the field issue these things so they were pissed nobody was happy yeah you know what happened was just to give the cliffnotes of the history yeah during the campaign in France in 1913 1940 they realized they needed something in the field that augmented the iron sights if you have a shot at car 98 the Barleycorn sights for hitting a man a reasonable distance they work but they something to be desired to hit anything that's smaller than a man likes a clay pigeons right well that's a head shot and you know what in the field I don't know if you've ever done this but if you're in the field trying to see what a person looks like at a hundred yards even if they're trying not to be seen they're hard to see at 300 yards they're nearly impossible to see these ideas of shots past 300 yards point yards the reason the army kind of went to 300 yards so realistic man on the field at 300 yards it doesn't want to be seen generally isn't yep so they needed something that was going to augment their firepower and get hits at distances they couldn't with these ions so there were there are two different kinds of ZF 41 k98 rifles that were used at the beginning of the war they actually they would take particularly accurate guns right off the production line and the factory would modify them to have a side rail to mount the scope on so you'd get the gun complete from the factory rail scope everything all set zero done permanent yeah permanent on the gun by late 1941 there was a really high demand for these and and they were making a ton of the Scopes and they figured it'd be simpler if they could come up with some way that they could be attached in the field by like a technical sergeant in armor and so they came up with an alternative mount that was actually field replaceable you'd take off the rear sight leaf slide this thing on and that gave you a rail that you could mount a Zia 41 on without having to send the thing back to have the stock in let it and a whole bunch of extra work done now the downside to this of course the plus side is they mounted a whole ton more scopes very quickly and easily that way the downside was no one had ever really paid attention to the tolerances on the sides of the rear sight block because it never mattered well now you're mounting a scope rail on that surface and it turned out according to the records we found only about one in five k98 had good enough tolerances on the rear sight block that you could put on a rail and you would actually be able to zero the scope for windage because a lot of them would be way off to the laughter way off to the right so it was quick and easy they didn't necessarily always work and this replica mount is an identical amount to that right a field it's a replica of that field of placeable mount and I have to admit when I put this on it did fit easily but I have to shim on this don't get windage so that's exactly realistic that's what true so if you're going to buy one of these that's something to keep in mind you may have to do a little bit of work you're not technically I don't either competent but handy handy you may get frustrated so don't necessarily say I'm going to go do that immediately unless you know you can you're capable and willing to deal with shimming and things you need to do to get it right yeah now you have there's a zero a bullet drop compensator on this it goes from 100 out to eight correct it goes from one date hundred it's just a knob that you turn the post moves up and down according to the elevation and bdc for the cartridge pretty easy being a long-term shooter and competitive shooter what happens is the it moves up and down so when the german post is at 100 it's actually kind of high in your field of view taking up a whole bunch of your your viewing area hated it didn't like it it's in the way so what I did is I frankly I turn the elevation all the way down to 450 which brought the post dead center into the optical clear clear part of the glass and I zeroed at 450 okay at 100 I'm never going to touch this BDC it's all holdovers this is a gun from 25 to 400 yards BCC's irrelevant holdover hold under that's all you need to learn that's what I did when I zeroed it then I'm reading the book yeah turns out they did the same thing in the field because of the same reasons they wanted a better sight picture and using the BDC was not realistic you just hold over yeah so you know one of the stories that we read in sniper on the Eastern Front you know the second highest scoring German sniper on the war he actually had an incident where he used one of these rifles to take shots through the viewing port of a t-34 tank at 50 yards yes correct and in fact these clay pigeons one of the first one we were engaging today was at 50 yards and I think if you roughly superimpose the shape of a viewing port that's very reasonable it's not the same shot so in fact what was happening is they're being overrun by Russian tanks and they had no anti-tank weapons they didn't know what to do and he kind of gives himself the credit he goes the snipers can do something and they went out in the field and they waited til the distance was close enough to get through that viewing port and they were killing drivers and they were stopping tanks so and it's because of something like this they'd be really hard to do with iron sight the iron sights I don't you might get a lucky shot yeah but it ain't going to happen not not consistent right and in the book at least he credits himself or credits the snipers I should say for stopping a good chunk of stuff tanks with that method yeah so optics even this gives you some capability to do that so at any rate so after that they issued these things and they were supposed to be DMR they turned out to be sniper rifles because they press them to service the Germans gave away a bunch of their sniper optics and stuff before the go-ahead there's the funny thing at the German army wasn't allowed to have sniper rifles according to the Versailles Treaty and they got around that by giving snipers to the Prussian police Corps basically I'm unit but by the early 30s they decided that their general marksmanship training was so good that snipers were actually obsolete and in 1931 they honest-to-god issued an order that sniper scopes in German inventory were to be taken out of inventory and they were to be sold to troops for their own personal use they weren't allowed to resell them they weren't allowed to use them in combat they were just you know if you want to go put the nice scope on your hunting rifle we'll sell you this army scope because we don't need them that order didn't actually get rescinded until 1938 yeah but at that point they're like can we get them back ok and you know what's funny is I was going to bring this up with you there's actually a real world history lesson in the u.s. very similar to this right which is very interesting history repeating itself right when the war is escalated in Afghanistan and the distances in Afghanistan were overcoming that of the capabilities of the m4 carbine or even the m16a2 with iron sights there was a need to issue something that was better a designated marksman rifle now we're not talking about the the SDM gun like the var but something further we're talking 800 yards right right and so what had happened is at one point they had a bunch of surplus m1 a m14 rifles that they were actually they were military rifles full m14 we can have pretty much that for whatever reason there was a loophole and you as a competitive high-power shooter could ask to borrow one and they loaned them out to all sorts of high competitive high power shooters that wanted to shoot em for teens in the matches in fact I shot with a guy that shot wasn't at the national matches it can't bury as things ramped up in Afghanistan they're like we need those back and actually a bunch of guys clean their rifles that they've been shooting competition sent them back and those things went to Afghanistan it's the same thing interesting parallel again yeah so at any rate these guys didn't like them because they were snipers but in reality I think we've proven today this truly does augment your as a designated marksman and to hit targets out to reasonable distances that you couldn't otherwise yes this stupid show is going to cost me a lot of money because I need to have yeah you're so much like I'm getting one of these they need one yeah you need to I am L it's just really slick yeah it is so I give it a thumbs up I do relieve it really does its its job it's historically been denigrated denigrated inappropriately because it was pushed into service it shouldn't have been but as what it was designed to do it does it yeah it's awesome you

Channel: InRangeTV

Views: 173,111

Rating: 4.9707642 out of 5

Keywords: Zf41, Zf-41, K98, Mauser, K98k, Sniper, Ww2, Wwii, 8mm, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, forgotten weapons

Id: 2oNTKnYMfI8

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/hellenkellersdog]

Could you guys do a video explaining hold off with scope video? I know it would be tough, but it would be super interesting for us to watch! Keep up the great work!