When the German government bought up the controlling interest in Steyr in 1938, they made use of its production facilities to start making rifles for the Luftwaffe. Steyr had tooling for the Mauser 98, but not in K98k form – they had most recently made a Mauser-pattern carbine for Chile in 1934 (the M12/34). Under German ownership that rifle was put back into production, simply chambered for 8mm Mauser instead of the Chilean 7mm. About 50,000 in total were made between mid 1938 and the end of 1939, after which production changed to a standard K98k pattern. These rifles are known today as the G12/34 or G29(ö), and they are quite rare on the collector’s market.
Bolt Action Rifles
Rifles of Emperor Menelik II: Ethiopian Gewehr 88 and Karabiner 88
In 1889, Emperor Menelik II ascended to power in Ethiopia, and would rule for 20 years, moving Ethiopia (aka Abyssinia) forward into the modern age. He brought railways, sewer systems, telegraph lines, and other modern […]
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KrauseWerke .45ACP Luger at RIA
The story of the .45ACP Lugers is a bit complex, and widely misunderstood. What most people believe is that two such guns were made for US military testing, one was lost, and the other is […]
Prototype
RIA: Walther P38 Development
The Walther P38 was adopted by Germany in 1938 as a replacement for the P08 Luger – not really because the Luger was a bad pistol, but because it was an expensive pistol. Walther began […]
You have to wonder how many of those “randomly selected bolt” bring-backs blew up on their owners, and how many local gunsmiths suddenly found themselves with a new cash cow: Headspacing bring-back Mausers.
I’d always heard warnings about needing to do this before firing one of these, but I’d no idea why. The mixed-up bolts make perfect sense, now that I know this.
Oh, to be Sam Cummings, wandering the forgotten byways of Old Europe, right after the war. Man, what you could have picked up for a song…
it would be interesting to find out what the guaging system and tolerances were at the various plants
also the process and procedures for any final chambering.
IIRC, Colvin and Viall, showed the finish chambering on united state ’03 Springfields being done by guys with finishing reamers held in carpenters hand drill braces, with the rifles assembled.
A Mauser 98 eliminates at least one of the tolerances present in a 1903; that from the breech face (cone on a Springfield) to the shoulder on the barrel.
I wonder whether the plants were able to hold the tolerances on the distance from the bolt locking seats to the bolt face
and
the tolerance from the receiver ring locking surfaces to the front of the inner collar
tight enough to allow true interchangeability on bolts, at least when they were new?
i’m not aware of any numbers on mausers, like the numbered bolt heads in number 4 lee Enfields, that would suggest an explicit matching up process during assembly
the presence of serial numbers on absolutely everything, may be an implicit suggestion but strikes me as more of a bureaucratic initiative.
a curious one
The numbering of parts comes from the time of indivdually fitting/modifying parts until they resulted in a working action. This was all done with parts still in the white (weissfertig in German).
Then the parts were blued. And to assemble the correct parts, the numbering was needed. Of course, the bean counters soon discovered the possibilities, like numbering magazines same as the weapon they belong to and so on.
One wonders how much of all that was necessary vice being a vestigial memory of that which was?
I know I was horrified to learn that an acquaintance’s family had owned a set of surplus Chilean Mauser rifles that they kept up at their hunting cabin, and used in rotation for all the extended family to hunt with during the season, and that there’d be an end-of-season get-together for them to shut the cabin down for the winter, clean the rifles and store them.
Their means for cleaning…? They detail-stripped the lot, handed out all the bolts to one kid, all the actions/barrels to another, and just randomly stuck them back together. Never had a problem, from that, in like thirty years. No idea how it all worked… They were doing that from the 1950s through to the 1980s, when all of a sudden, everyone wanted scopes on their guns, and started bringing their own.
was it us marines? who would put all of their garand or M14 bolts etc into a central bucket of solvent, before each man pulled randon bits out and scrubbing them, then each assembled them onto their rifles at random?
I think that rale came from Rayle, at the time he was working on the M14
apparently FN FAL production involved selective assembly, and the FAL would likely have had problems in that culture.
I had incessant problems with people doing exactly the same thing with their M60s and M16 rifles, both of which were bolt-matched.
Any time I caught the idjits doing that, I had to schedule another mass gauging, which 3rd Shop hated.
I had a couple of weapons failures that were probably attributable to this manifest idiocy, but I could never prove it conclusively enough to prove for judicial action, and since it reflected poorly on the commander, they always wrote it off as “bad weapon/ammunition”. Frustrating.
Part of the problem comes down to “Voodoo Training”, in that they never bothered to explain the why and wherefore of such things, only that they had to do it. Rules being for fools, to all to many, they usually just blew right past the things they’d been taught in lockstep training and did what they wanted to. It’s an endemic problem, with all military forces everywhere. You typically have larger problems with short-service conscripts from cultures where weapons-handling isn’t a thing; your average Swiss conscript is going to come in miles ahead of someone doing National Service in the UK, and who has never had a weapon in their hands before doing their time.
I knew what headspace was before I enlisted; I had a pretty good idea of what a weapon improperly gauged would do, and I knew better. Precisely zero of my peers in my entire basic training company knew anything about that, and even a couple of the drill sergeants were confused on the issue. Given that they were the sort of idjits that thought using a brass bore brush on a drill was a suitable tool for cleaning rifles at the end of a training cycle…? Yeah. Ignorance abounds, throughout most military forces. I’m amazed any of my rifles in basic training shot anywhere near point of aim, to be honest. I had three of them, because they kept changing how they issued them. From what I could tell, the muzzle crowns were all smoothbore, from all the “cleaning”.
It’s my belief that you have to include all of this when you’re making your procurement decisions; you can totally hose your small arms system by designing it for “expert” sorts of people, and failing to take into account that you’re gonna be issuing them to actual proven idjit types.
I only ever had good luck getting people to understand the reasons and rules about mixing bolts up in the immediate aftermath of a weapon malfunction, and then only for those who’d witnessed that salutary lesson in why you don’t do those things.
The average soldier has limited to no interest in weapons, believe it or not. They take what they’re issued, and that’s it. Trying to get them to take the time to learn all the details and so forth? LOL… Ain’t happening, McGee. At least, in my experience.
In 25 years of military experience in a combat arms branch of the US Army, I only ever encountered one “interested” officer that knew his stuff about firearms. He was a National Match shooter who’d been prior service enlisted and who’d made his way onto a Marksmanship Training Unit position, and from there to West Point through the Preparatory program for junior enlisted. Every other one I worked for or around? Total disinterest in weapons; they were basically stage props to them. Stage props they had no interest in understanding or really using…
I reckon one could just tell ’em that mixing bolts can cause a blow up. A few color slides in a BCT lecture might drive the point home. Nothing technical.
@Martin Tyrsegg…
Oh, my sweet summer child, who has obviously never dealt with the usual sort of lower enlisted/commissioned personnel likely to actually enlist into the armed forces…
You have no idea how these things fail to get through to the average dolt. Seriously.
I had a guy whose M16 “just blew the f*ck up” one day in training. Upper receiver gone, barrel split, magazine blew out… Whole nine yards of your typical bolt failure. Did a little digging, determined that the squad in question had some questionable cleaning practices, and from that made the natural inference that it was likely due to headspace issues. QASAS, the ammo quality control people came in, looked at the weapon and ammo, said that if this was a case of bad ammo, then it was the only cartridge out of a couple hundred thousand in that lot which had been overcharged/undercharged, whatever. So… They agreed with me that it was most likely due to headspace issues attributable to swapped bolts between worn-out rifles. Our M16A2 fleet at that point had been through several successive years of running ROTC Advanced Camp, and God alone knows what else. At the annual gauging that year, we probably coded out 15% or more of the weapons for various wear-related issues; sticking one of those bolts into a weapon that wasn’t equally worn was a disaster waiting to happen. All the lugs had sheared off the bolt when it blew up. It was pretty spectacular, that failure… The soldier it happened to was left looking like a post-dynamite cartoon character, and was lucky to keep his eyesight, given that he’d been wearing zero protective eyewear. As I remember, he was walking around with a patch on for a couple of weeks.
Commander chose not to do disciplinary action over the event since we couldn’t “prove” anything about swapped bolts. We simply did a reinforcement training session that I made as graphic as possible… Went over to the safety office, asked for all their pictures of weapons failures, and showed them, along with explaining for about the hundredth time what headspace was, and why it was important. Even had one really memorable case-study where an improperly-headspaced .50 caliber M2HB had blown up, eviscerating the gunner. The proximate victim of the event was present for all training.
Year and a half later, in an entirely different unit, I ran into that specific dolt again. Now promoted to Sergeant, he’s running his own fire team and stepping up to fill in for a senior Staff Sergeant squad leader who was filling in for the Platoon Sergeant.
What, do you suppose, caught my eye? Walking through their platoon common area, I noticed that they were doing “production line weapons cleaning”, with no regard for what parts went to which weapons…
Normally, I’d have just put a bug into the ear of whoever he worked for. In this specific case, I lost my shit–I’d lost about a week of my off-duty time to investigating what went on with that blown-up weapon and setting up the training, and here this idiot was passing on the stupid to his guys, and repeating the same crap that led to him nearly losing an eye.
Absolutely none of his chain of command backed me, and all universally failed to understand at all why the issue was important or why I’d lost my shit on him. Very nearly got a reprimand out of it all…
So, yeah… Sure. Showing some pictures in a class most trainees will likely sleep through will certainly help. Likely not, but that’s the way “The System” likes to solve problems.
That was probably the most egregious example of that sort of thing going on I can remember. That idjit just did not believe a thing he was told, didn’t learn from personal experience, and was an example of “Evolution in Action” waiting to happen. I can’t remember what happened to him in Iraq or Afghanistan, but he wound up doing a tour in both, somehow survived, and then got medically boarded out of the Army sometime before I retired. I think it was cumulative TBI/hearing loss, which did not surprise me in the least.
In my opinion, that idjit was probably a pre-existing brain-damage case before he ever enlisted. Unfortunately, he looked really good in a uniform, said all the right things, and managed to do very well on anything that required him to look soldier-like. The rest of the job, like technical skills and common sense? Not a bit of it.