Today is a look at a Yugoslav M48 Mauser. This was the standardized model that Yugoslavia adopted to replace its assortment of repaired and rebuild older Mauser rifles in the aftermath of World War Two. It was a very finely made rifle, with all milled parts, and 238,000 were made between 1950 and 1952. After that, changes were made to introduce stamped components and reduce the cost, resulting in the M48A and M48B patterns.
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Yugoslav M52 Sniper: East Meets West
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Kragujevac.
Krah – goo – yay – vahtz for Americans.
That last syllable might vary, based on if there’s a diacritical mark over the c, not always transcribed into English. The main rule for German and Slavic language pronunciation is that their j equals the English y.
I have greatly enjoyed this series.
Kraguj is on serbian language, type of bird, more precisely-vulture, so name of the town directly translated would mean something like “Vulture town”.
There are lot of towns in territory of former Yugoslavia with “vac” in name ending.
In 0.00 he pronounced it better then in 2.08, also with Zastava (Crvena Zastava actually was the fyctory name during Yug.) first time he pronounced it correctly, second is wrong, so sometimes correcting yourself is not the best final outcome.
But which syllable is accented? That’s what tends to make one look/feel foolish.
I remember that a few years back Mitchell’s Mausers were advertising these in the American Rifleman. I think they were asking about $299. They also had echt Kar98Ks which were one or two hundred dollars more, but these would seem to have been good bargains at the time.
“SmorgasBorg” – a giant cubic buffet which flies through space, assimilating all food in the universe :p
Actually it is really good at playing tennis. 😉
On a more serious note: This auction lot turns out to be a really good catch!
Overall, do you think you got your $2.5 K’s worth?
The post-war Yugos are the best versions of the K98 to those of us who prefer not to own Nazi weapons, or who want a matching shooter. Really enjoyed this series.
This reminds me of vegetarians who do not want to eat meat, but will eat something that resembles meat, like vegetarian “burger” or veggie made “fried chicken” and other slightly hypocritical surrogate food stuff.
Consider growing a penis.
Tick
I have loved this series of videos.
Do you plan to keep some or all of the 3 additional rifles now that you have seen them at length and know a little more about them?
Very nice little series!
Nice presentation on this rifle. I do enjoy your videos.
Side note, I have a M1D from the Office of Civilian Marksmanship, and waiting for a letter from the Cody Museum for background information.
I’m old enough to look at a Mauser 98 rifle and want to open up the Brownells catalog first thing. Different times. If they had only found a stash of barreled actions or bare actions in a factory somewhere.
Thank you for sharing these, I think you got a fascinating selection or rifles.
Nice presentation. I do enjoy your videos. 🙂
some of the metal work, especially marks and numbers, is pretty uneven, which surprises me. i have a wwii produced model 98, which is relatively crude by german standards, and in some respects it is better finished.
interesting.
Every german original ones are better than this.
Not really. Fit and finish on working parts is better than on the most German war production Kar98ks. Finish elsewhere is so-so. Both are worse than pre-ww2 M24s or Kar98ks, but it does not really matter in the end.
I always wondered why the 7.9 mm cartridge for this rifle was designated M49, not M48.
Maybe to prevent logistic confusion, as you had also mg42s – m53 machine guns.
Because that is when local production of ammo was restarted. FOMU (now PPU) was an empty wreck at the end of WW2.
Thank you, Bojan.
Enjoyed the recent M48 video, the M48 is the first gun I bought when I got my C&R back @1999 and still have the gun, paid $100 for it then. Picked up a second with trench art from Yugo civil war, they seem well made like most of the Zastava guns pre yugo break up.
I really enjoyed adventures surplus rifles. It quite interesting to
see the history of these 4 rifles. I think future videos about other in appreciated rifles would be very popular.
It may not be the most valuable collection but I’ve got several Yugo rifles. In particular the M48 is one of my favorites as something about a post-war bolt action military rifle pleases me.
I bought my M48 in 2003 from Inter Ordnance for $150 (C&R License). Clean and solid bolt action.
In 2004, I bought a Yugo M24/47 for $139 and sold it last year for $250.
I have what appears to be one of these, but it is weird. It’s a matching number gun, but it has no crest of any kind. It has a straight bolt, but the stock has a depression where the turn down bolt handle would normally rest. The stock is serial-numbered to the rifle. Honestly, I’m not sure what it is, other than a good reliable military-styled shooter.
Wasn’t this supposedly a “scrubbed” version for export (to Egypt)? I recall seeing them for sale 15 years ago or so.
I hadn’t heard of those, I suppose that’s what this could be. I bought it when I was just out of my 20s as a shooter. I considered building a sporter on it and now I’m happy I never did so.
The versions without crests were meant for export…mostly for Egypt and maybe some other nearby countries too…. to hide the “Source” of the guns. Likely for the Egyption war in the late 50’s.
I have a Yugo M48 (great gun) the mussel is threaded do you know for What. I was told it was for a wooded bullet splitter used for training.