Evolution and Impact of the Mauser Rifle

last time we covered the first Mouser a single-shot black-powder behemoth but could it make the jump to the age of the repeating rifle [Music] hi I'm Matthias and this is in frame now there we go this is the German infantry Gewehr 71 84 this is a magazine Mauser rifle let's get it over to the light box with an overall length just under 51 inches it's a little bit shorter than its predecessor but weighs in just over 10 pounds wolf now that is before you load 8 11 millimeter cartridges into its tubular magazine one at a time now we've had two previous early Mauser episodes and we've also talked about the Gewehr 98 way early in the series and like this guns gonna come up a lot and I did say that I was gonna try to avoid having the all Mauser channel for a while unfortunately plans don't always go the way we make them now some things have arrived that we're going to get to very soon but little setbacks little fixes taking care of things that may be been out of service for a hundred years well that comes first you wouldn't want us to accidentally damage anything or ourselves so instead we're gonna fall back on the original plan which is oh boy more mousers now if you're disappointed by that I don't think you should be watching this channel go away alright for the rest of you let's do a quick recap of what we've learned so far we started at the beginning with the Mauser 1871 Germany's first centerfire metallic cartridge rifle except Bavaria then we went on to discuss the Jaeger books and carabiner versions of the same although that carbine wasn't really a World War one era gun we just snuck it in because we had it handy as part of the history we met the brothers Mauser who had invented an action suitable to use as a breech loading conversion but worked into a whole rifle with a mess of features they showed it around with the help of 1 Samuel Norris who tried to market it especially to the French and Germans but gave up on the design a little bit prematurely the brothers however kept trying and did manage to get German adoption and they were underpaid for their efforts and silence through the secrecy around the gun but they did get a contract to make sites for their guns and then use that to build their own small factory then they bought the factory they grew up working in if boom we have Mauser Obon Dorf who received a contract to produce a limited number of their own rifles for the German government whole rifles well we're not even at this gun yet so number one thing I want to point out this is gonna come up time and again the mousers had to go into debt they had to sell portions of their growing company to banks in order to keep growing all right that's important these are men who did not have anything to start with they're coming from the ground up from poverty up they have no assets to throw at this that is going to leave them vulnerable as we'll see you later on it also leaves them vulnerable right now because with debts to pay at an even rate I mean they got pay on the month right like I have money coming on the month so they can keep their employees on hand and ready to go and also pay down the bank and reclaim more and more of their own company it'd be really nice right well the problem is Germany like we said declared the 71a secret and so it gets tricky to try to market that internationally and they didn't get paid a ton for it so they really hammered on the ability to finally release this gun and they got it alright so about the time that they're able to start marketing the gun someone else enters the field to actually be a potential fire this is an emergent in nature in a nation that has existed but has now found its identity once more and has cast off the Ottomans this is Serbia now Serbian independence that took decades of uprisings but ultimately the matter was best resolved by the russo-turkish war following this conflict Serbian independence was finally recognized by the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the world but they weren't allowed to date Bosnia rough so that drops us off in 1878 and I don't want to go into too much detail here because sadly this is one rifle that has eluded us throughout the whole production of series the original Serbian Mauser notice the 1878 80 or the just plain 1880 this gun incorporated a number of improvements that were provided by both the and one Serbian major constantine coca mil Ivanovitch production would begin in 1881 and about 100,000 were ordered now the mauser coca as it's often called didn't just keep the doors open at Oberndorf it was also a significant evolution of the 1871 again I don't have one here but let's just list off some of the changes that came before our gun today the cocking piece was redesigned and allowing the mass of the cocking piece to aid in striking down on that primer I'll show you that a moment an ejector was added that's kind of handy the vertical blade was gone from that firing pin the one I showed you last time it's now tapered it no longer hangs things up the other battery lock was now handled by an extended raise channel in the rear of the receiver in which an extension on the cocking piece rides this looks a lot like that Italian vet early 87 modification and speaking of Italy the Carcano would not be the first military progressive rifling rifle you know sometimes it's really hard to avoid being redundant on this show but anyway progressive rifling again is gained twist rifling the rifling spiral gets tighter the further you go down the barrel it helps ease erosion at the throat of the barrel we talked about this in our Carcano episode well the Serbian 1880 it had progressive rifling along before the 1891 that's 11 years if I can do math good so just a curious gun and one that's really eluded us so if you haven't have one I would love to talk about in the show it's sort of the missing link in all this discussion regardless keep in mind all these features because this is what Mauser had going on in his sort of realm just as the Germans wax off we're thinking about well maybe we want a repeating rifle you see they had reformed a rifle commissioned in 1877 to debate on the merits of what they want to do about having a single-shot rifle versus some of the things that were they were starting to see coming slowly into the military market these darned magic repeating rifles and again this is not a period where we're learning something from the russo-turkish war blah blah blah blah blah blah pleven up one of the earlier examples of an adopted repeating rifle would be the French Navy's 1878 crop a check also if you have one of these speak up soon because we're talking about its cousin just around the corner now there's anything we know it's that Germany cannot tolerate France getting ahead of them on anything and so once the French Navy had a repeating rifle Germany was going on whoa whoa if the army follows we're gonna be up against those things are they actually advantageous I mean do we want them we probably want them it's very the crow Patrick would have been it had been offered to the Serbians and they passed on it and we see this a number of times repeating rifles are on the market people are just worried about them because the value isn't proven yet but Germany is leaning towards yeah we don't like it in the French do something so they have to think about adopting a magazine rifle and in doing that they have to face the classic dilemma that we've seen before especially when we talked in our Mosin episode they have to make one of two choices one they can adopt a magazine conversion system for the existing rifle or two they can adopt a whole new rifle we have seen this dilemma before so I don't want to beat it to death but basically if you can convert the existing gun you save money if you adopt a new one you save on faults and we already know that Germany has aware of some problems with the 71 that they really like to address especially in terms of light strikes with firing pin and a little bit of an accuracy issue that may not be completely emergent just yet so there's some real value to thinking about are we gonna waste all the time refurbishing a gun that has some inherent problems or should we just go ahead and spend the cash on a brand new system go all out and that allows you by the way to do things like new cartridges or new whatever else that you need not that you have to go that far well I don't want you to think that they didn't strongly consider just the conversion program because they experimented with it as a matter of fact there's a fantastic video by Ian out there in which he's playing with what is essentially a calf sole magazine conversion for the 71 I highly recommend taking a look at that thing it is cool instead of saving money the Germans went for broke they actually went for a new rifle system it's very similar the old one that helps with training but these parts are not interchangeable with the 71 and in doing so they had to look for which kind of magazine they want it they really leaned into the crop a check and the shul huh although I should say that the Winchester elevator system as applied in the vet early would have also been a curious point now I don't want to give the impression that this is a committee rifle because Mauser made the decision to go with the crop a Czech style magazine on his rifle and the German government liked it alright if he had gone with the shoe HOF system maybe they would have liked that I'm not sure I'm not sure how much back and forth there was in this situation we do know that Mauser did experiment with different magazine systems so it may be that the Germans found more favor with the tubular magazine I certainly think it's a much more elegant solution than what other things were available at that time although as we'll see there's better answers than this out there that's for sure but this is where they land they land on a mauser with a crop a Czech style magazine and that's the direction we're gonna go turning back to the brothers Mauser they were kept busy from the adoption of the 1871 and into the manufacture of the Serbian contracts Wilhelm especially had put in a lot of travel in the course of their work Paul however had been focused down on adapting their design into a repeater and his patents were out as early as 1881 technical drawings of this repeater appeared in the French reviewed artillery in 1882 so not a rock-solid secret on this one overall it's the Serbian styled gun the firing pin is round and tapered and has a reduced rear diameter to allow the cocking piece to add mass to the strike also an ejector was fitted and again this is all mated to a modified corp a czech style magazine this gun would be shown to the German government and the Kaiser himself in September of 1881 on the occasion he would also award both the brothers high honors but this would be the last for one of them in failing health wilhelm mauser would pass away in january of 1882 and that more than anything else is why we always hear the name of Paul Mauser instead of Wilhelm now they had worked together very well up until his death as far as I understand it there would be interestingly many years later some descendants arguing about these things certainly his son versus you know Paul Mauser his nephew versus Paul Mauser and the courts on certain opinions but realistically everything I've read said that Paul shared the credit was a brother that the they're working together they're selling together they're talking about design changes together yes one might have been a bit more of a tool room guy one might have been a little bit more of a communicator it doesn't matter they shared the credit that shared the cash and so it's interesting to know that if it weren't for this death we'd always think about Paul Mauser as part of a team a team of two brothers and instead he becomes this sort of sole inventor that we know today because of all the things that come after this first repeater because this is the last project that they've worked on together it's good news though that the model ish 1881 the early version well that thing was ordered to the tune of 2,000 for trial so they didn't like the design now these were very secretive trials and I have not turned up any information on how they were run or what opinions were given other than a sort of side note that came through because again the Kaiser had visited and so therefore in writing about the Kaiser they noted that they were very impressed with the volume of fire that was able to come from these experimental rifles well that's very good but I want you guys at home to be aware of one thing we're talking about these early repeaters rate of fire is not really affected by having a magazine it is for a small slice but not over the entire army let me explain it if I single load and fire this gun or if I load the whole tube one by one and then fired until empty well both are about the same overall fire rate especially when averaged over several lines of infantry though the advantage here is that you have an available burst of rapid fire for the right moment say an unexpected enemy at your flank or breaching your wall or a cavalry charge still that could be a very important advantage I mean sometimes seconds count and that's when you have the magazine in reserve now the gun did well in trials obviously because the Germans went forward with it now they did have a couple requested changes now from the drawings we see from the early 1881 and this ain't that gun most notably sort of the big thing that sticks out even visibly on the outside of the gun is that they did not opt for that Serbian style Raceway to retain the out of battery rotation instead the ejector was extended rearward thus forming a bar to fit over the raised lug on the cocking piece preventing rotation now this also would serve as part of the magazine system but we'll get there a little bit later now the changes wouldn't just come to the rifle now they also had to modify the ammunition a bit and I'm kind of getting ahead because the ammunition changes came about as the rifle was being you know trialed slash produced and then on into production the rifle but and just feel like it covers pretty well right now you see during their trials process and during the early issue of the rifle they ran in the same problems that the Russians did they were getting chain detonations in the tube magazine that it's because when we load in a tube magazine we put you know bullet tip to primer cup bullet tip to primer cup and if you have shake that thing up like a good game of Scrabble well every once in while you a nice cook-off I know a lot of people say that it's not a real risk and we eventually talked about how it never really occurs with certain models well a lot of that has to do with the way you design the ammunition and the ammunition for the 11 millimeter single-shot it was not set up to avoid this particular problem yet you see the original 71 cartridge had a shallow primer cup and a round nosed bullet right away they set that primer deeper in this was done by the time the rifle was adopted the next year after that bullet tip would be flattened and these two measures seemed to have solved the issue production of the new ammo however would take a couple of years they were busy consuming they already produced eleven No and I guess consuming some rifles with it there would be a few other minor changes but for the most part we've covered the good stuff now I'll show you the details in the shakedown in just a moment instead let's just say that in January of 1884 we get this the infantry Gewehr 71 84 and there's something curious about that name in testing it had been known as the infantry repeater Gewehr C 82 but in the name of secrecy the repeater part was dropped and because they adopted in 1884 in 82 went up to doodles it would not be acknowledged publicly as a repeater until as late as 1886 though again all this secrecy for a gun mostly defined in the French commercial publication all the way back in 1882 Oh curious sight note the magazine tube was a bit of a technical challenge in terms of production but they actually borrowed technology that have been developed by Danzig in order to make the sort of bodies shafts of lances in order to do this with a cold drawing process so that's just kind of a cool tidbit but anyway we now have this gun and so you know what part of show is this is this is the part where we take a closer look so let's zoom on in hey big rifle so all the way the rear notice links we will straight wrist there's a sling swivel up on the trigger guard little reinforcement down here but obviously no magazine because it's a tube run under these the entire length of this there's our front sling swivel side mounted bayonet log more on those in a moment the attachment is still pretty firm like the old gun and then boom we have our cap for the magazine tube and a stacking rod they have not gone with a clearing rod or a cleaning rod this is a pull-through rifle only and then oh I'm gonna water all the way back down here we've got our rear sight which is now an unjacketed ladder although it works mostly the same we have a couple positions there's our flat sight and then we can flip this guy up at the rear to get a couple hundred extra meters or we can dial it in on the long range all right manufacturers will be found here more on that in a moment and well here's the business end now most this should look pretty familiar from the Mauser 71 so I'm not gonna go into huge detail on the bolt right away although I want to show you some differences in just a moment instead let's look at this magazine so there is our elevator and a follower is down in here I'm not sure that I can really you guys go down in there so you would load your rounds down into this and I'm sorry I don't have eleven millimeter dummies but you pack them in there and then when you're ready you would pop this bolt back that tips this guy up you can throw another one on the elevator or you could pick up the one that you left down in it and then that will feed into the action now when I feed forward that's gonna lower the elevator and we'll see this in the animation more clearly that's gonna pick up the next round if you want to use the magazine cut off located over here you have to do it with the elevator up the bolt back now you can throw the switch it doesn't work any other position so bolt forward elevator down ain't happening bolt back elevator down ain't happening so it's not a super flexible thing it can only be used at this one point now since I want to take this bolt out I'm gonna go ahead and throw this forward that's actually pretty critical so just remember we've thrown our lever forward we're gonna loosen up our screw and release that Brown nuts screws loose do not force these this is captive it can only go that far out we talked about that on the 71 updates so we'll let gravity do our work and I'll kind of use this upside down sorry if that's hard for you guys to see I'm gonna pull this to the rear and it's held up by our elaborate so as I'm pulling this rearward I want to rock this back and forward so just back with a little click and then back for it to tip and boom we're free alright so the gun can be set aside and we can go back to the bolt okay so here's our bolt should look pretty familiar just like the 71 although internally there's some big differences I'm gonna see them in a moment and just externally a the shroud should look a bit different but be look at this combination part here it's our ejector elevator control and out of battery lock all in one at the moment it's not preventing anything because it counts on being in the receiver to keep it from rotating it's not so I can do this off and she'll come right apart so this will be pretty important but we'll see it in better detail in the animation the bolt head should be able to rotate and come free the extractor set in there that all we know although I will say it's now much better for gas control see how it's recessed in there it's a pretty big improvement no ball body right previously we would put pressure down on this firing pin and rotate this guy at the rear now we get to take the safety itself which is on a spring and compress it inward and rotate so no more putting weight on that firing pin unnecessarily and I'm sorry that there's not a lot to look at but it's a fair bit of pressure at play here and I'm trying to do it while being on camera so I'm just rotating this rear nut slash shroud to the left oh now she is under spring tension to some degree so you might want to give it some pressure to ease things up as you get to the end not a lot though not bearing on it like we had to do before but just enough to sort of ease everything out so you don't have a spring fly across your room or tear up the very ends of the thread when it releases so just a little spring pressure on that firing pin not the full bore push all right so now you can see that safety had that spring in there Afghan this is visibly animation bold bodies mostly the same actually nuts a little different but that's not a big deal we care about is actually here so this step in the firing pin and the fact that we now have this nice tapered round front end so I'm gonna grab the previous 71 firing pin and cocking piece bring him in for a little comparison so already on the firing pins this flat which added so much surface area and so much potential snag is gone down to this nice round and then two at the rear this is I mean this is uniformly round with diameter here is uniform this step right here it counts for a lot so on the early 71 cocking piece when we fired the gun this guy has the ability to freely slide up and down the firing pin further than the strike down and look how far forward we on this so that adds almost none of its mass when this impacted this cocking piece didn't add its mass to that impact it was the impact of the spring and the firing pins weight and that was it on this guy we actually have and let me get that safety other way we actually have no ability to go past that mark and that mark is ahead of it actually coming down the firing pin so that means that that mass gets added to our strike that really helps with our clear firing no more light strike issue alright I'm waving a bunch of parts around sometimes it's hard to see how they interact so let's go ahead and get over to the animation all right let's get this tube loader filled up [Music] of course that's going to be one round at a time so it takes a while [Music] once the magazine is full watch this lever will pop the bolt back and lock it in to single-shot operation in order to use our magazine we'll switch that lever back and bolt forward empty to feed the next round we then have to cycle again in order to load it into the chamber from the left side we can see how the ejector extension controls the elevator tipping it up and down with a stroke of the bowl [Music] notice that we have to drop the bolt all the way into battery before it will free the next cartridge this prevents double feed the safety is just like others we've seen turning it moves a half cylinder of metal into the path of the cocking piece locking it rearward [Music] from here I think you've got it so let's just sit back and relax and with things wrapping up we can get this over to Mae for a demonstration [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I am not gonna lie most two borders give us some form of trouble this one did not I rather enjoyed it on the range which the animal wasn't so hard to get now this gun was secret stuff to the Germans even though everybody already knew about it but they cared a lot about the secret so they kept it very hush-hush it's a matter of fact they had to camouflage the funding and play Mary with the books to make sure that nobody picked up on the fact that they were now going to start assembling like a million guns this by the way would really get rolling and say August of 1885 that's when things start pushing out the assembly lines they would be produced at the big three German Arsenal's spandau Danzig and Erfurt Plus Mauser I open Dorf Amburg would also trail behind the rest by about a year the machine tooling was provided by an emerging power the Vega lova who will be important later again Germany wanted total rearmament as quickly as possible and so they pushed their Arsenal's hard with day and night production shifts into 1887 which is the same year that most the contracts started wrapping up this would leave Mauser Oberndorf available for a rifle I'll be happy to cover very soon total production of 71 84 is a bit of an estimation but it hits right around 1 million on average it cost the German government about 55 marks pop which is dang handy because this time Paul Mauser made a deal for licensed production and apparently took home three marks for the first 100,000 rifles and one mark after that this would keep the open door factory paying back the banks although as we'll see apparently not enough oh and those guns did come with bayonets which would actually way out live their hosts the SG 71 84 would be reworked time and again into World War two there would be by the way a Jaeger version of this rifle as well at first they considered doing some custom rear sight with minor changes but ultimately they just went with the same universal sight the 70 184 Yeager ultimately just ended up being a different rear sling swivel set into the buttstock instead of the trigger guard a carving form was considered but there wasn't enough time to get one off the ground as well soon see okay detail work out of the way as these were issued in order to keep the secret going they were given to the same four infantry regiments that had been involved in the testing of the 82 and they were sort of said look it's another trial really these are your guns now so again more German attempts to really not let on as to what they had and it's kind of funny because again these guns really started pushing out in late 1885 and they really got rolling in the middle of 1886 that's when you start to really see them turning up we know that within the year Moe France is about to unleash their own secret and it's a much bigger secret yeah they weren't adopting the first smokeless cartridge along with their LaBelle repeating rifle I mean the 71 84 isn't just a little outclassed by this the 8 millimeter labelled cartridge is an incredible leap in terms of range let alone not giving away your position as easily and not fouling up the gun with powder whoo ok so Germany would have to immediately spin up I mean think about they just got this done they're patting themselves on the back and they have to spin up a smokeless powder magazine rifle program from scratch I mean they gotta go oh man that's got to be really disappointing I mean they went the extra mile didn't just modify this anyone they spent the money to make this and it's done for I mean by the time it's really getting the troops hands done it's useless so here's where they're stuck too they can't just stop because they don't know when they're gonna be able to wrap their new smokeless rifle and in the meantime they don't want to have black powder single-shot guns up against French smokeless repeaters so they keep cranking away like they're desperate to get the 71 84 out in the meantime they're also trying to get it out they want to get another gun entirely all right well the funny thing is because we're not in chronological order we've actually talked about what replaced this gun look they're 1888 a mix of ideas both good and bad developed without Paul Mauser or any real open trials process complete secrecy and assembled by committee it was middling in many ways and as we'll see it will inspire Mauser to show them all how to really design a military rifle so that means service life for the 71 84 is exceptionally short and that might be for the best because if it had lasted this may have been not the most fondly remembered rifle there were a number of manufacturing problems and performance problems with this gun out the gate because a couple things one we talked about this in the 71 but weather changes and so does your point of impact same is true and worse in this gun again it's fixed a little too sternly at the front the barrel as it expands has nowhere to really go that drives off the precision too they had to change the way they treated the stocks because in the first batches they would swell up with any kind of moisture or weather change and boom changed the point of impact so they had to do a lot of extra steps to sort of pre-soaked these stocks so that they knew exactly where they're going to be in the service in those temperature you see where I'm going with this it gets really difficult to keep a tube magazine and a thin stock really sort of lined in you can have a tube magazine my thicker stock and a lot better drying and treatment procedure for the stock itself because temperature moisture that's gonna affect this thing above and beyond just the fact that you could now drop it and it's gonna take a pretty hard impact that stock can be very easily damaged compared to the old single shot and then sort of some limits on the ammo there's some concerns about the powder maybe changing with temperature and moisture that's also potentially a thing that would change but I think it should drop off more than it should change direction but hey there's there's whole people that study ballistics for this one of the big killers though is the fact that this action is inherently biased to one side because it has only one blocking surface yep it locks on that guide log that serves as the root of the bolt handle which is strong enough for the cartridge but does not evenly support that compression caused by firing and over time this uneven distribution will drive precision even further out now Paul Mauser would solve that problem with the addition of another locking lug but that again is a rifle for next time not this one the Germans didn't pick up that option because it came about the time that Lebel dropped and they were busy chasing a hole their secret rifle and they weren't really letting Mauser in on that that's a whole other story so again this gun not a lot of opportunity to shine because Germany isn't really fighting any wars between 1884 and well let's say 1890 when the guevara 88 starts rolling out although one thing is the German Navy did not adopt the 1888 and instead they stuck with the 71 84 which is why you would see this particular gun in combat in the Boxer Rebellion this was a pro nationalist movement in China where a bunch of martial artists ie boxers decided to toss out the ever encroaching foreigners the response well it was a multinational Smackdown and nearly every European power plus the Americans decided to show up for the fight this included the German Navy and Marine Forces who again were still trucking around the 71 84 even though the Gewehr 1898 had already released just had it settled quite into their hands yet now one of the most notable roles of the German Marines were serving under the seymour expedition a failed British led drive to Beijing unfortunately for the Germans they were about the only Europeans with black-powder weapons in that campaign and on at least one occasion when the multinational firefight commenced the Chinese opponents would return fired directly at the German plumes of giant white smoke ignoring the rest well I'm sure the others appreciated it there was one advantage of the 71 84 in the Boxer Rebellion though the Chinese were making use of the old 1871 s and some 84 s as well and that means local ammo and parts on hands this photo is neat but it's actually from 1915 and that is about it for this gun because after that while the navy guy compared 98 and here's the thing your Germany you have Mauser 71 single shots everybody understands those and they have the same flag safety in bolt action as the 88 and the 98 like it's similar enough okay you have very deets that you can use this sort of second line rifles and you have the Mauser 98 all over the place that's good you guys know that gun this one that ends up being a weird stepchild because yes it's a magazine rifle so therefore probably better than the 71 but the magazine is wacky I mean you saw it you have to know to have it back and flip this then and don't you know and if you don't know that you might force it and break it that was a common problem like people not understanding when to be-what on this gun and damaging it well it's not worth supporting is you'd rather just you have some black-powder ammo use it up on the single shots we really need a magazine for anyway if they're using the black-powder stuff so these guys got sold off to exporters and friendly nations very quickly lots went to China lots went on the commercial market not many stayed in Germany by 1906 they were completely replaced all the way through the land where and everyone else nothing nothing to be done with this now the Navy technically held on to theirs in reserve more on that in a moment this thing's done for okay it's gone it's sort of the Forgotten son of Germany or were declared yeah you guys know the routine anything and everything was dug out for the war in like with the 71 well we saw buyback programs and we are selling and we saw you know playing with a trigger guards we saw all sorts of none of that no these things they've bought a few thousand that they could get off the exporters that were still in Germany they got him out of the reserves where they were still possible a few would sort of scrolled their way into the colonies very very few there's not a lot I mean these things are actually kind of hard to find photos of in the war and it's doubtful that they ever saw frontline action and when they were used as guard rifles I don't know that you necessarily would have bothered loading the magazine because it really was gone but there were some exceptions it was the official rifle of the C where a naval variant of the lond we're basically three years active naval service four years in reserve and five in the sivir these were not really combat troops and I'd be very curious to hear of any shots fired and anger although if you did chances are it was a 71 84 and there you have it this is another one of those remington rolling block scenarios and we've talked about guns that were available in fewer numbers and freed up fewer guns to the front it served a role like wherever this was something more useful was where it belonged where it could be serviceable so I give it that much credit now I don't like doing all the reserve rifles that never even went to Europe but this was there so it squeaks in and it's also very important to Mauser developmental history because the truth is this is not a bad rifle it's just the rifle that existed in a very small period of time imagine if smokeless gunpowder had taken another 10 years to find 20 years to find this would have been a top-line rifle for quite a while the only real thing that's sat in front of it was that it hadn't gone down to a small bore black powder cartridge not yet anyway we have another episode so outside of that for a very brief period this was truly advanced and truly top align and it was a good chance to stick it to the French it just didn't last and so not so much the gun or the designer or the country or anybody's particular failure it's just that technology jumps twice in a row from single shot to magazine to smokeless so fast that everybody was put off and Germany really took a hit I mean this is a big financial cost to invest in all of this it's a hit that the French mostly managed to avoid they got to leap from single shot to repeating smokeless so sorry Germany this one was loose for you but I still like this rifle and I know a lot of you have handled them because there's so many in the collectors market in excellent condition because they were put out of combat so early their Knights they're beautiful collectors they're beautiful handling guns they're for time that never existed more than a few years and I still love it so I'm glad I shared it with you today but let's go get Mays opinion on actually handling this thing all right once more we've made room for May and we still have just enough room for this gun although if any of you happen to be in the Charleston area and have an old church you don't need anymore maybe it's time for the biggest ceiling we could possibly get before we start covering things like your jingles or something all right so let me give you that that's the first repeating round or repeating rifle for Germany and we need your opinion coming off with a 71 the Jaeger books and the carbine let's drop last two let's go with the long rifle versus this how are we feeling about the ergonomics of the 71 84 not super rate about it but here's why so here here down here right here like oh oh this is very similar to the 71 okay but there are some big differences so the gun is slightly shorter than the 71 I mean that's nice that should take away some of the weight wrong does not there's actually more weight to this gun and right now nothing loaded that's not bad but it's also not the best it's just okay but then adding more rounds to it your hand is very slowly gonna scooch forward on this guy and you're going to notice that as you're going through rounds it this weight really does well weigh on you as you're going on through it it can be can be quite exhausting but yeah I I don't want to get into I guess just the the firing with a rapid fire of this guy just yet I want to get into it in a separate section but the action manipulating it it is very smooth but you have to be very deliberate with the action in order to to have it function properly so that is something we're gonna get to in a second but I just want to make sure I pointed that out flag CP simples operate not a huge fan of the sling swivel being this far forward it's kind of weird and then the comb the comb is alright for the height like it puts you where you need to be for the site in my opinion but yeah ergonomics wise my favourite and with this action things can get a little slow on the battlefield I can tell that she's distracted by the weight because we didn't hear the one complaint that I thought we would do might maybe want to notice the one thing that you yell about for every one of these old firearms like this may be where your middle finger is right now no okay no no but yeah really there is no semi pistol grip that is true like I'm sorry I say it for everyone I feel like at this point it's kind of weird to keep talking about it yeah well yeah okay yeah y'all want to know that's true I'm sorry yeah it's true there is no semi pistol grip on this I think that like that's just I'm sorry it's not that hard hey it's a you know it's a muzzle heavy gun and on a muzzle heavy gun you really want to be able to bring that in I think anyway I mean it certainly stood out to me but hey I guess for once they snuck one by you alright so you said you want to talk about the magazine separately I can understand that because recall you are a German soldier this is the first magazine rifle that they are issuing and it's a huge jump you used to open a rifle put cartridge in rifle closed rifle fire there's no carrying the one there's one the bullet Hey well the cartridge goes all the way in that's it that's all you're keeping track up one at a time now you got a load eight and then seal it up and then put one in put one in and then open up all this stuff at least I'm like with the 71 I'm no longer in the single-shot range but yeah I'm having to deal with that too magazine right that's gonna weigh on you so you get a burst of fire but there's a lot to keep this is math now I mean you're yes we all had public education at this point and you know we're seeing here a hundred years later I must very well think I don't want to sitting and be like Oh everybody a hundred years ago was dumb but this is a lot under fire to keep track up so walk us through this magazine a little bit more exactly so that they understand where the sort of the faults are with this new system so here we are in this place where hurray we've got a tube magazine we've got the ability to carry more rounds should be great with this gun it does require some very specific settings for where the action is in order to manipulate this magazine cutoff so it would be very convenient if the gun was sealed up action closed in order for me to just manipulate the magazine cutoff no you have to have the bolt all the way far back elevator up you have to actually have that setting in order to push the magazine cutoff forward and then at that point well now it's four that means obviously it's it's gonna elevate er is gonna stay rise it's not gonna feed up the next round automatically so I'd have to throw in like a Lucy or something like that and then just single load it from here on out okay let's say I'm ready for the magazine to function let's say I'm ready for the elevator to do its job and stop being lazy now this command is given as an emergency something on the battlefield has happened well yes we are there's a change it's not necessarily just the command for the magazine I mean you might get lucky and that there's a breakthrough right in front of you but chances are this is being told to you because we need to adapt now okay you're in whatever position your gun might be closed and you're about to fire your bolt might be back with the this elevator would still be up okay you don't know where you are in the cycle but something's happen and it's time to switch to magazine now a worst-case scenario I'm sealed like I'm sealed I just fired my last round but I'm still sealed when I'm given the order spent case in their spent case yes casing here now by the way the good officer the good officer and everybody in rhythm should be knowing where you are in the cycle so that he can tell you when to make this magazine change and he's going to judge it again but as we know and chaos okay so go ahead yes so at this point I'm sealed there's an empty casing in here there's like two ways I can do this but basically like I said before I can't I can't take this magazine cut off I can't put it off like it's it's got to be in this position as it is until I pop the bow all the way back now I can thumb it back okay now you've got two decisions here either one you can choose to throw in it like a single and then just fire on from there or two you can just choose to close the bolts empty open it back up and then now you've got a cartridge that's fed from the follower pop into the elevator pops it up and you can then decide to bolt forward and have your live round in the barrel that's a lot of steps that's a lot of extra steps that you have to decide there and when you're on the battlefield I'm imagining you don't really have a little jury of time especially in the situation in which you have the urgency where you've just been given the order that guy's things are happening get rocking and rolling take those magazine cut-offs off that to have to like decide in that instant moment oh god there's people coming at me and make your decision that's that's a bit much I really feel like this is overly complicated for what it is I'd agree now I know we're gonna get a lot of comments on drill and if you like drill and you like sort of understanding where this comes from from the top it's not German but British lamella looters is a friend he talks about these sort of things a lot it's very good to understand that yes an officer generally supposed to make this decision good luck being heard by the time you've got other problems and then also even if you are heard if the operation is complex or has to be just so if so many futs is with it and then has to play catch-up which happens I mean who hasn't been to like exercise or yoga or some other class and not been like oh I missed a step and now I got to play let's say handle the action very gingerly and I don't actually cause the elevator to pop up that can happen guys yeah any little problem and you've got to play catch-up well now the operations for you to catch up to the rhythm are not as simple as closed blow flip lever pop open you're ready to roll and the reason we're playing this out just in this kind of detail is because this is sort of the first of the German experience for this other guns are going to try to avoid this exact problem so that's kind of why we're overworking it okay so we talked about handling we talked about loading in the magazine a little bit maybe too much let's talk about actually shooting the gun you get behind it you get behind the sights you pull the trigger how are you doing line up with the sights now on the other ones did have a sleeve over the top of it I really didn't feel like that was necessary but I will say that site did seem more robust than this one this one actually seems very delicate like I really feel like even just me manipulate it now I still feel like I would somehow break it like I feel like I don't really want to mess these sights too much which is good usually I'm not having to shoot over that long of a distance so hey I can just get it ready and hopefully not to fire over like 200 yards or something like that but yeah the sights aren't bad they're pretty straightforward action like I said be very deliberate with it then firing there is a significant amount of recoil with this one because it is a very large mass that is coming out of this gun that bullet is massive so there is a significant amount of recoil with it that doesn't quite match up with the gun and then add the weight of those rounds that you're carrying in there there's a lot coming back into your shoulder so the heavier this guy is the worst off it's going to be for you trust me on that one I did have to fire this one several times so that we can get the right takes for it but hey you know what for shooting it did function very well the whole time we didn't really have any problems with anything any misfires or anything like that it did work very well but yeah other than that shooting wise it was fun I enjoyed it but the problem is black powder that's again that's likes waving a flag above my head I can't really hide with this guy now for anybody concerned about the mass comment because I know we're gonna get that the heavier the rifle the easier it is on recoil usually usually the concern here is that you have a floating mass in the stock somewhere so the springs keeping it to the rear for the most part but when you fire it you still get a little play in there we debated this I don't feel it may feels it there's a perception of a change in the recoil almost randomly depending on the position of those cartridges rocking in there like it's just a uncontrolled sliding map I would say honestly it's the difference between if you have the two fully loaded versus if you just have one or two rounds in there I would say that's when you actually notice the difference and it took several workings with this gun in order for me to even notice it so it isn't really something super perceivable I will say that you're gonna have to try it out for yourself it's certainly nowhere near as much as what you'd perceive what's say like an auto five shotgun where you have no full recoil and a long recoil operating system where you feel that double-hung it's not that pronounced but anyway that is just a conversation we had on the side that I'm partially came out in this number two with the black-powder smoke this was actually concerned with these guns is that if we have a bunch of people firing in line and we start using the repeating rifle with black powder because smokeless wasn't available at the time there's this fear that we're going to smoke out of our own environment we won't be able to see what we're shooting at but we're certainly a big enough body that we can be fired into because we're in line so there was some fear on repeating rifles and there was an argument against them in many ways that they would over smoke their own position just from the sheer volume of fire which is why again you're s'posed eases single loader and the repeating fire is for emergencies or very specific problems with almost break throughs or cavalry charges or things like that and with the black powders I think we saw as May cleared this thing with the camera the way it was set up it's really hard to see because you're looking at her I try to show it with the high-speed I tried to get backed off a little bit some of that cloud forming there was a haze in the air for a good couple minutes after we were done filming just one man yeah not disappear it does take a while to go away so take a line of 20 or her doing that and I could see it actually becoming a real problem all right so all of that covered it's the Great War now because we're not talking about using this in 1886 we're talking about the Great War as a reserve rifle are you gonna get anywhere near the front line with something like this no are you kidding me it's a black powder it's completely unbalanced it's it's awkward to handle and you have to be very deliberate with your motions when manipulating the bolt on this guy no I'm gonna give this a hard note just because there is too much that I think would go wrong with me taking this to the front lines yeah I'm a hard path too and I start to think that we can seem a bar that sure I think we're starting to see why the 71 had longer legs than the repeating version of itself like this has improvements over the 71 but the stocks vulnerable with that tube magazine it needs more it's more parts to maintain it's more weight it's more complexity it's certainly not the easiest thing to use with lines of poorly trained men well it's no wonder this thing didn't even really make the trip to Africa instead the single-shot semi one stuck around for so long this thing really got kicked off the front line early because it's just advanced enough to be a hindrance to itself and not advanced enough to get around the real problems and it's good though 71 84 is a really good marker for showing us a the evolution of the Mauser family B the evolution of sort of small arms technology and see why there was a hump to go from single-shot to repeater not just technologically but also because there may be some distinct disadvantages to a smoked black powder repeating rifle I mean probably the best example we've seen of a black-powder repeater is probably the Austrian straight-pull 1886 uh I would argue you can simultaneously load five rounds so you actually do load faster you actually speed everything up however you again you run into the risk of the clouds of smoke and obscuring your vision and things like that but complexity is way down so keep that in mind maybe they get the ultimate repeater where is something like this yes it works and it can be good for certain situations but yeah that works isn't always gonna cut it yeah no it's still a beautiful piece if you only won I'd be very happy I'd be proud to own one they're gorgeous and to me probably like a revolver one of those kin aesthetically pleasing guns I highly recommend somebody out there start manufacturing dummy cartridges for the people that own these because you can't feel it when you handle it empty but with live and well not even live over there you know in the magazine when you rack this thing and it comes back forward and it releases the cartridge on the elevator that click that yeah that feels real good guys yeah go watch go back and watch the video it's so pleasant I'm sorry I really get into stuff like that where I can feel the mechanism working under my fingers dies super cool it's like the click of a revolver it's just nice not really helpful in the battlefield that's fun as a collector alright I think that's kind of covered is there anything else any other mentions for this gun no I honestly liked it it was fun shooter in general I would love to have one of my own personal collection someday but for protection of my own life not gonna bet on it now no all right well thank you for tuning in and stay after the credits for updates and we'll see you next time [Music] pigging update is that we just got back from a trip to visit another old local gun channel iraq veteran 8888 now as part of that we did borrow an mg o h sled to take with our borrowed mg o 8 which had borrowed fittings I'm gonna say that it took quite a bit to put this whole package together but we got it done and so I can finally start working on the episode proper the research is there the script needs to be made and then I have to film the indoor bits you guys know how this goes so it'll be a couple weeks but as I said that gun does free up finally all of this backlog of machine gun so you'll start seeing more of these peppering the stack alright thank you once again to all of our viewers and especially our patrons because there is no way we could get all of that Horror Show over with without your financial support

last time we covered the first Mouser a single-shot black-powder behemoth but could it make the jump to the age of the repeating rifle [Music] hi I&#39;m Matthias and this is in frame now there we go this is the German infantry Gewehr 71 84 this is a magazine Mauser rifle let&#39;s get it over to the light box with an overall length just under 51 inches it&#39;s a little bit shorter than its predecessor but weighs in just over 10 pounds wolf now that is before you load 8 11 millimeter cartridges into its tubular magazine one at a time now we&#39;ve had two previous early Mauser episodes and we&#39;ve also talked about the Gewehr 98 way early in the series and like this guns gonna come up a lot and I did say that I was gonna try to avoid having the all Mauser channel for a while unfortunately plans don&#39;t always go the way we make them now some things have arrived that we&#39;re going to get to very soon but little setbacks little fixes taking care of things that may be been out of service for a hundred years well that comes first you wouldn&#39;t want us to accidentally damage anything or ourselves so instead we&#39;re gonna fall back on the original plan which is oh boy more mousers now if you&#39;re disappointed by that I don&#39;t think you should be watching this channel go away alright for the rest of you let&#39;s do a quick recap of what we&#39;ve learned so far we started at the beginning with the Mauser 1871 Germany&#39;s first centerfire metallic cartridge rifle except Bavaria then we went on to discuss the Jaeger books and carabiner versions of the same although that carbine wasn&#39;t really a World War one era gun we just snuck it in because we had it handy as part of the history we met the brothers Mauser who had invented an action suitable to use as a breech loading conversion but worked into a whole rifle with a mess of features they showed it around with the help of 1 Samuel Norris who tried to market it especially to the French and Germans but gave up on the design a little bit prematurely the brothers however kept trying and did manage to get German adoption and they were underpaid for their efforts and silence through the secrecy around the gun but they did get a contract to make sites for their guns and then use that to build their own small factory then they bought the factory they grew up working in if boom we have Mauser Obon Dorf who received a contract to produce a limited number of their own rifles for the German government whole rifles well we&#39;re not even at this gun yet so number one thing I want to point out this is gonna come up time and again the mousers had to go into debt they had to sell portions of their growing company to banks in order to keep growing all right that&#39;s important these are men who did not have anything to start with they&#39;re coming from the ground up from poverty up they have no assets to throw at this that is going to leave them vulnerable as we&#39;ll see you later on it also leaves them vulnerable right now because with debts to pay at an even rate I mean they got pay on the month right like I have money coming on the month so they can keep their employees on hand and ready to go and also pay down the bank and reclaim more and more of their own company it&#39;d be really nice right well the problem is Germany like we said declared the 71a secret and so it gets tricky to try to market that internationally and they didn&#39;t get paid a ton for it so they really hammered on the ability to finally release this gun and they got it alright so about the time that they&#39;re able to start marketing the gun someone else enters the field to actually be a potential fire this is an emergent in nature in a nation that has existed but has now found its identity once more and has cast off the Ottomans this is Serbia now Serbian independence that took decades of uprisings but ultimately the matter was best resolved by the russo-turkish war following this conflict Serbian independence was finally recognized by the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the world but they weren&#39;t allowed to date Bosnia rough so that drops us off in 1878 and I don&#39;t want to go into too much detail here because sadly this is one rifle that has eluded us throughout the whole production of series the original Serbian Mauser notice the 1878 80 or the just plain 1880 this gun incorporated a number of improvements that were provided by both the and one Serbian major constantine coca mil Ivanovitch production would begin in 1881 and about 100,000 were ordered now the mauser coca as it&#39;s often called didn&#39;t just keep the doors open at Oberndorf it was also a significant evolution of the 1871 again I don&#39;t have one here but let&#39;s just list off some of the changes that came before our gun today the cocking piece was redesigned and allowing the mass of the cocking piece to aid in striking down on that primer I&#39;ll show you that a moment an ejector was added that&#39;s kind of handy the vertical blade was gone from that firing pin the one I showed you last time it&#39;s now tapered it no longer hangs things up the other battery lock was now handled by an extended raise channel in the rear of the receiver in which an extension on the cocking piece rides this looks a lot like that Italian vet early 87 modification and speaking of Italy the Carcano would not be the first military progressive rifling rifle you know sometimes it&#39;s really hard to avoid being redundant on this show but anyway progressive rifling again is gained twist rifling the rifling spiral gets tighter the further you go down the barrel it helps ease erosion at the throat of the barrel we talked about this in our Carcano episode well the Serbian 1880 it had progressive rifling along before the 1891 that&#39;s 11 years if I can do math good so just a curious gun and one that&#39;s really eluded us so if you haven&#39;t have one I would love to talk about in the show it&#39;s sort of the missing link in all this discussion regardless keep in mind all these features because this is what Mauser had going on in his sort of realm just as the Germans wax off we&#39;re thinking about well maybe we want a repeating rifle you see they had reformed a rifle commissioned in 1877 to debate on the merits of what they want to do about having a single-shot rifle versus some of the things that were they were starting to see coming slowly into the military market these darned magic repeating rifles and again this is not a period where we&#39;re learning something from the russo-turkish war blah blah blah blah blah blah pleven up one of the earlier examples of an adopted repeating rifle would be the French Navy&#39;s 1878 crop a check also if you have one of these speak up soon because we&#39;re talking about its cousin just around the corner now there&#39;s anything we know it&#39;s that Germany cannot tolerate France getting ahead of them on anything and so once the French Navy had a repeating rifle Germany was going on whoa whoa if the army follows we&#39;re gonna be up against those things are they actually advantageous I mean do we want them we probably want them it&#39;s very the crow Patrick would have been it had been offered to the Serbians and they passed on it and we see this a number of times repeating rifles are on the market people are just worried about them because the value isn&#39;t proven yet but Germany is leaning towards yeah we don&#39;t like it in the French do something so they have to think about adopting a magazine rifle and in doing that they have to face the classic dilemma that we&#39;ve seen before especially when we talked in our Mosin episode they have to make one of two choices one they can adopt a magazine conversion system for the existing rifle or two they can adopt a whole new rifle we have seen this dilemma before so I don&#39;t want to beat it to death but basically if you can convert the existing gun you save money if you adopt a new one you save on faults and we already know that Germany has aware of some problems with the 71 that they really like to address especially in terms of light strikes with firing pin and a little bit of an accuracy issue that may not be completely emergent just yet so there&#39;s some real value to thinking about are we gonna waste all the time refurbishing a gun that has some inherent problems or should we just go ahead and spend the cash on a brand new system go all out and that allows you by the way to do things like new cartridges or new whatever else that you need not that you have to go that far well I don&#39;t want you to think that they didn&#39;t strongly consider just the conversion program because they experimented with it as a matter of fact there&#39;s a fantastic video by Ian out there in which he&#39;s playing with what is essentially a calf sole magazine conversion for the 71 I highly recommend taking a look at that thing it is cool instead of saving money the Germans went for broke they actually went for a new rifle system it&#39;s very similar the old one that helps with training but these parts are not interchangeable with the 71 and in doing so they had to look for which kind of magazine they want it they really leaned into the crop a check and the shul huh although I should say that the Winchester elevator system as applied in the vet early would have also been a curious point now I don&#39;t want to give the impression that this is a committee rifle because Mauser made the decision to go with the crop a Czech style magazine on his rifle and the German government liked it alright if he had gone with the shoe HOF system maybe they would have liked that I&#39;m not sure I&#39;m not sure how much back and forth there was in this situation we do know that Mauser did experiment with different magazine systems so it may be that the Germans found more favor with the tubular magazine I certainly think it&#39;s a much more elegant solution than what other things were available at that time although as we&#39;ll see there&#39;s better answers than this out there that&#39;s for sure but this is where they land they land on a mauser with a crop a Czech style magazine and that&#39;s the direction we&#39;re gonna go turning back to the brothers Mauser they were kept busy from the adoption of the 1871 and into the manufacture of the Serbian contracts Wilhelm especially had put in a lot of travel in the course of their work Paul however had been focused down on adapting their design into a repeater and his patents were out as early as 1881 technical drawings of this repeater appeared in the French reviewed artillery in 1882 so not a rock-solid secret on this one overall it&#39;s the Serbian styled gun the firing pin is round and tapered and has a reduced rear diameter to allow the cocking piece to add mass to the strike also an ejector was fitted and again this is all mated to a modified corp a czech style magazine this gun would be shown to the German government and the Kaiser himself in September of 1881 on the occasion he would also award both the brothers high honors but this would be the last for one of them in failing health wilhelm mauser would pass away in january of 1882 and that more than anything else is why we always hear the name of Paul Mauser instead of Wilhelm now they had worked together very well up until his death as far as I understand it there would be interestingly many years later some descendants arguing about these things certainly his son versus you know Paul Mauser his nephew versus Paul Mauser and the courts on certain opinions but realistically everything I&#39;ve read said that Paul shared the credit was a brother that the they&#39;re working together they&#39;re selling together they&#39;re talking about design changes together yes one might have been a bit more of a tool room guy one might have been a little bit more of a communicator it doesn&#39;t matter they shared the credit that shared the cash and so it&#39;s interesting to know that if it weren&#39;t for this death we&#39;d always think about Paul Mauser as part of a team a team of two brothers and instead he becomes this sort of sole inventor that we know today because of all the things that come after this first repeater because this is the last project that they&#39;ve worked on together it&#39;s good news though that the model ish 1881 the early version well that thing was ordered to the tune of 2,000 for trial so they didn&#39;t like the design now these were very secretive trials and I have not turned up any information on how they were run or what opinions were given other than a sort of side note that came through because again the Kaiser had visited and so therefore in writing about the Kaiser they noted that they were very impressed with the volume of fire that was able to come from these experimental rifles well that&#39;s very good but I want you guys at home to be aware of one thing we&#39;re talking about these early repeaters rate of fire is not really affected by having a magazine it is for a small slice but not over the entire army let me explain it if I single load and fire this gun or if I load the whole tube one by one and then fired until empty well both are about the same overall fire rate especially when averaged over several lines of infantry though the advantage here is that you have an available burst of rapid fire for the right moment say an unexpected enemy at your flank or breaching your wall or a cavalry charge still that could be a very important advantage I mean sometimes seconds count and that&#39;s when you have the magazine in reserve now the gun did well in trials obviously because the Germans went forward with it now they did have a couple requested changes now from the drawings we see from the early 1881 and this ain&#39;t that gun most notably sort of the big thing that sticks out even visibly on the outside of the gun is that they did not opt for that Serbian style Raceway to retain the out of battery rotation instead the ejector was extended rearward thus forming a bar to fit over the raised lug on the cocking piece preventing rotation now this also would serve as part of the magazine system but we&#39;ll get there a little bit later now the changes wouldn&#39;t just come to the rifle now they also had to modify the ammunition a bit and I&#39;m kind of getting ahead because the ammunition changes came about as the rifle was being you know trialed slash produced and then on into production the rifle but and just feel like it covers pretty well right now you see during their trials process and during the early issue of the rifle they ran in the same problems that the Russians did they were getting chain detonations in the tube magazine that it&#39;s because when we load in a tube magazine we put you know bullet tip to primer cup bullet tip to primer cup and if you have shake that thing up like a good game of Scrabble well every once in while you a nice cook-off I know a lot of people say that it&#39;s not a real risk and we eventually talked about how it never really occurs with certain models well a lot of that has to do with the way you design the ammunition and the ammunition for the 11 millimeter single-shot it was not set up to avoid this particular problem yet you see the original 71 cartridge had a shallow primer cup and a round nosed bullet right away they set that primer deeper in this was done by the time the rifle was adopted the next year after that bullet tip would be flattened and these two measures seemed to have solved the issue production of the new ammo however would take a couple of years they were busy consuming they already produced eleven No and I guess consuming some rifles with it there would be a few other minor changes but for the most part we&#39;ve covered the good stuff now I&#39;ll show you the details in the shakedown in just a moment instead let&#39;s just say that in January of 1884 we get this the infantry Gewehr 71 84 and there&#39;s something curious about that name in testing it had been known as the infantry repeater Gewehr C 82 but in the name of secrecy the repeater part was dropped and because they adopted in 1884 in 82 went up to doodles it would not be acknowledged publicly as a repeater until as late as 1886 though again all this secrecy for a gun mostly defined in the French commercial publication all the way back in 1882 Oh curious sight note the magazine tube was a bit of a technical challenge in terms of production but they actually borrowed technology that have been developed by Danzig in order to make the sort of bodies shafts of lances in order to do this with a cold drawing process so that&#39;s just kind of a cool tidbit but anyway we now have this gun and so you know what part of show is this is this is the part where we take a closer look so let&#39;s zoom on in hey big rifle so all the way the rear notice links we will straight wrist there&#39;s a sling swivel up on the trigger guard little reinforcement down here but obviously no magazine because it&#39;s a tube run under these the entire length of this there&#39;s our front sling swivel side mounted bayonet log more on those in a moment the attachment is still pretty firm like the old gun and then boom we have our cap for the magazine tube and a stacking rod they have not gone with a clearing rod or a cleaning rod this is a pull-through rifle only and then oh I&#39;m gonna water all the way back down here we&#39;ve got our rear sight which is now an unjacketed ladder although it works mostly the same we have a couple positions there&#39;s our flat sight and then we can flip this guy up at the rear to get a couple hundred extra meters or we can dial it in on the long range all right manufacturers will be found here more on that in a moment and well here&#39;s the business end now most this should look pretty familiar from the Mauser 71 so I&#39;m not gonna go into huge detail on the bolt right away although I want to show you some differences in just a moment instead let&#39;s look at this magazine so there is our elevator and a follower is down in here I&#39;m not sure that I can really you guys go down in there so you would load your rounds down into this and I&#39;m sorry I don&#39;t have eleven millimeter dummies but you pack them in there and then when you&#39;re ready you would pop this bolt back that tips this guy up you can throw another one on the elevator or you could pick up the one that you left down in it and then that will feed into the action now when I feed forward that&#39;s gonna lower the elevator and we&#39;ll see this in the animation more clearly that&#39;s gonna pick up the next round if you want to use the magazine cut off located over here you have to do it with the elevator up the bolt back now you can throw the switch it doesn&#39;t work any other position so bolt forward elevator down ain&#39;t happening bolt back elevator down ain&#39;t happening so it&#39;s not a super flexible thing it can only be used at this one point now since I want to take this bolt out I&#39;m gonna go ahead and throw this forward that&#39;s actually pretty critical so just remember we&#39;ve thrown our lever forward we&#39;re gonna loosen up our screw and release that Brown nuts screws loose do not force these this is captive it can only go that far out we talked about that on the 71 updates so we&#39;ll let gravity do our work and I&#39;ll kind of use this upside down sorry if that&#39;s hard for you guys to see I&#39;m gonna pull this to the rear and it&#39;s held up by our elaborate so as I&#39;m pulling this rearward I want to rock this back and forward so just back with a little click and then back for it to tip and boom we&#39;re free alright so the gun can be set aside and we can go back to the bolt okay so here&#39;s our bolt should look pretty familiar just like the 71 although internally there&#39;s some big differences I&#39;m gonna see them in a moment and just externally a the shroud should look a bit different but be look at this combination part here it&#39;s our ejector elevator control and out of battery lock all in one at the moment it&#39;s not preventing anything because it counts on being in the receiver to keep it from rotating it&#39;s not so I can do this off and she&#39;ll come right apart so this will be pretty important but we&#39;ll see it in better detail in the animation the bolt head should be able to rotate and come free the extractor set in there that all we know although I will say it&#39;s now much better for gas control see how it&#39;s recessed in there it&#39;s a pretty big improvement no ball body right previously we would put pressure down on this firing pin and rotate this guy at the rear now we get to take the safety itself which is on a spring and compress it inward and rotate so no more putting weight on that firing pin unnecessarily and I&#39;m sorry that there&#39;s not a lot to look at but it&#39;s a fair bit of pressure at play here and I&#39;m trying to do it while being on camera so I&#39;m just rotating this rear nut slash shroud to the left oh now she is under spring tension to some degree so you might want to give it some pressure to ease things up as you get to the end not a lot though not bearing on it like we had to do before but just enough to sort of ease everything out so you don&#39;t have a spring fly across your room or tear up the very ends of the thread when it releases so just a little spring pressure on that firing pin not the full bore push all right so now you can see that safety had that spring in there Afghan this is visibly animation bold bodies mostly the same actually nuts a little different but that&#39;s not a big deal we care about is actually here so this step in the firing pin and the fact that we now have this nice tapered round front end so I&#39;m gonna grab the previous 71 firing pin and cocking piece bring him in for a little comparison so already on the firing pins this flat which added so much surface area and so much potential snag is gone down to this nice round and then two at the rear this is I mean this is uniformly round with diameter here is uniform this step right here it counts for a lot so on the early 71 cocking piece when we fired the gun this guy has the ability to freely slide up and down the firing pin further than the strike down and look how far forward we on this so that adds almost none of its mass when this impacted this cocking piece didn&#39;t add its mass to that impact it was the impact of the spring and the firing pins weight and that was it on this guy we actually have and let me get that safety other way we actually have no ability to go past that mark and that mark is ahead of it actually coming down the firing pin so that means that that mass gets added to our strike that really helps with our clear firing no more light strike issue alright I&#39;m waving a bunch of parts around sometimes it&#39;s hard to see how they interact so let&#39;s go ahead and get over to the animation all right let&#39;s get this tube loader filled up [Music] of course that&#39;s going to be one round at a time so it takes a while [Music] once the magazine is full watch this lever will pop the bolt back and lock it in to single-shot operation in order to use our magazine we&#39;ll switch that lever back and bolt forward empty to feed the next round we then have to cycle again in order to load it into the chamber from the left side we can see how the ejector extension controls the elevator tipping it up and down with a stroke of the bowl [Music] notice that we have to drop the bolt all the way into battery before it will free the next cartridge this prevents double feed the safety is just like others we&#39;ve seen turning it moves a half cylinder of metal into the path of the cocking piece locking it rearward [Music] from here I think you&#39;ve got it so let&#39;s just sit back and relax and with things wrapping up we can get this over to Mae for a demonstration [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I am not gonna lie most two borders give us some form of trouble this one did not I rather enjoyed it on the range which the animal wasn&#39;t so hard to get now this gun was secret stuff to the Germans even though everybody already knew about it but they cared a lot about the secret so they kept it very hush-hush it&#39;s a matter of fact they had to camouflage the funding and play Mary with the books to make sure that nobody picked up on the fact that they were now going to start assembling like a million guns this by the way would really get rolling and say August of 1885 that&#39;s when things start pushing out the assembly lines they would be produced at the big three German Arsenal&#39;s spandau Danzig and Erfurt Plus Mauser I open Dorf Amburg would also trail behind the rest by about a year the machine tooling was provided by an emerging power the Vega lova who will be important later again Germany wanted total rearmament as quickly as possible and so they pushed their Arsenal&#39;s hard with day and night production shifts into 1887 which is the same year that most the contracts started wrapping up this would leave Mauser Oberndorf available for a rifle I&#39;ll be happy to cover very soon total production of 71 84 is a bit of an estimation but it hits right around 1 million on average it cost the German government about 55 marks pop which is dang handy because this time Paul Mauser made a deal for licensed production and apparently took home three marks for the first 100,000 rifles and one mark after that this would keep the open door factory paying back the banks although as we&#39;ll see apparently not enough oh and those guns did come with bayonets which would actually way out live their hosts the SG 71 84 would be reworked time and again into World War two there would be by the way a Jaeger version of this rifle as well at first they considered doing some custom rear sight with minor changes but ultimately they just went with the same universal sight the 70 184 Yeager ultimately just ended up being a different rear sling swivel set into the buttstock instead of the trigger guard a carving form was considered but there wasn&#39;t enough time to get one off the ground as well soon see okay detail work out of the way as these were issued in order to keep the secret going they were given to the same four infantry regiments that had been involved in the testing of the 82 and they were sort of said look it&#39;s another trial really these are your guns now so again more German attempts to really not let on as to what they had and it&#39;s kind of funny because again these guns really started pushing out in late 1885 and they really got rolling in the middle of 1886 that&#39;s when you start to really see them turning up we know that within the year Moe France is about to unleash their own secret and it&#39;s a much bigger secret yeah they weren&#39;t adopting the first smokeless cartridge along with their LaBelle repeating rifle I mean the 71 84 isn&#39;t just a little outclassed by this the 8 millimeter labelled cartridge is an incredible leap in terms of range let alone not giving away your position as easily and not fouling up the gun with powder whoo ok so Germany would have to immediately spin up I mean think about they just got this done they&#39;re patting themselves on the back and they have to spin up a smokeless powder magazine rifle program from scratch I mean they gotta go oh man that&#39;s got to be really disappointing I mean they went the extra mile didn&#39;t just modify this anyone they spent the money to make this and it&#39;s done for I mean by the time it&#39;s really getting the troops hands done it&#39;s useless so here&#39;s where they&#39;re stuck too they can&#39;t just stop because they don&#39;t know when they&#39;re gonna be able to wrap their new smokeless rifle and in the meantime they don&#39;t want to have black powder single-shot guns up against French smokeless repeaters so they keep cranking away like they&#39;re desperate to get the 71 84 out in the meantime they&#39;re also trying to get it out they want to get another gun entirely all right well the funny thing is because we&#39;re not in chronological order we&#39;ve actually talked about what replaced this gun look they&#39;re 1888 a mix of ideas both good and bad developed without Paul Mauser or any real open trials process complete secrecy and assembled by committee it was middling in many ways and as we&#39;ll see it will inspire Mauser to show them all how to really design a military rifle so that means service life for the 71 84 is exceptionally short and that might be for the best because if it had lasted this may have been not the most fondly remembered rifle there were a number of manufacturing problems and performance problems with this gun out the gate because a couple things one we talked about this in the 71 but weather changes and so does your point of impact same is true and worse in this gun again it&#39;s fixed a little too sternly at the front the barrel as it expands has nowhere to really go that drives off the precision too they had to change the way they treated the stocks because in the first batches they would swell up with any kind of moisture or weather change and boom changed the point of impact so they had to do a lot of extra steps to sort of pre-soaked these stocks so that they knew exactly where they&#39;re going to be in the service in those temperature you see where I&#39;m going with this it gets really difficult to keep a tube magazine and a thin stock really sort of lined in you can have a tube magazine my thicker stock and a lot better drying and treatment procedure for the stock itself because temperature moisture that&#39;s gonna affect this thing above and beyond just the fact that you could now drop it and it&#39;s gonna take a pretty hard impact that stock can be very easily damaged compared to the old single shot and then sort of some limits on the ammo there&#39;s some concerns about the powder maybe changing with temperature and moisture that&#39;s also potentially a thing that would change but I think it should drop off more than it should change direction but hey there&#39;s there&#39;s whole people that study ballistics for this one of the big killers though is the fact that this action is inherently biased to one side because it has only one blocking surface yep it locks on that guide log that serves as the root of the bolt handle which is strong enough for the cartridge but does not evenly support that compression caused by firing and over time this uneven distribution will drive precision even further out now Paul Mauser would solve that problem with the addition of another locking lug but that again is a rifle for next time not this one the Germans didn&#39;t pick up that option because it came about the time that Lebel dropped and they were busy chasing a hole their secret rifle and they weren&#39;t really letting Mauser in on that that&#39;s a whole other story so again this gun not a lot of opportunity to shine because Germany isn&#39;t really fighting any wars between 1884 and well let&#39;s say 1890 when the guevara 88 starts rolling out although one thing is the German Navy did not adopt the 1888 and instead they stuck with the 71 84 which is why you would see this particular gun in combat in the Boxer Rebellion this was a pro nationalist movement in China where a bunch of martial artists ie boxers decided to toss out the ever encroaching foreigners the response well it was a multinational Smackdown and nearly every European power plus the Americans decided to show up for the fight this included the German Navy and Marine Forces who again were still trucking around the 71 84 even though the Gewehr 1898 had already released just had it settled quite into their hands yet now one of the most notable roles of the German Marines were serving under the seymour expedition a failed British led drive to Beijing unfortunately for the Germans they were about the only Europeans with black-powder weapons in that campaign and on at least one occasion when the multinational firefight commenced the Chinese opponents would return fired directly at the German plumes of giant white smoke ignoring the rest well I&#39;m sure the others appreciated it there was one advantage of the 71 84 in the Boxer Rebellion though the Chinese were making use of the old 1871 s and some 84 s as well and that means local ammo and parts on hands this photo is neat but it&#39;s actually from 1915 and that is about it for this gun because after that while the navy guy compared 98 and here&#39;s the thing your Germany you have Mauser 71 single shots everybody understands those and they have the same flag safety in bolt action as the 88 and the 98 like it&#39;s similar enough okay you have very deets that you can use this sort of second line rifles and you have the Mauser 98 all over the place that&#39;s good you guys know that gun this one that ends up being a weird stepchild because yes it&#39;s a magazine rifle so therefore probably better than the 71 but the magazine is wacky I mean you saw it you have to know to have it back and flip this then and don&#39;t you know and if you don&#39;t know that you might force it and break it that was a common problem like people not understanding when to be-what on this gun and damaging it well it&#39;s not worth supporting is you&#39;d rather just you have some black-powder ammo use it up on the single shots we really need a magazine for anyway if they&#39;re using the black-powder stuff so these guys got sold off to exporters and friendly nations very quickly lots went to China lots went on the commercial market not many stayed in Germany by 1906 they were completely replaced all the way through the land where and everyone else nothing nothing to be done with this now the Navy technically held on to theirs in reserve more on that in a moment this thing&#39;s done for okay it&#39;s gone it&#39;s sort of the Forgotten son of Germany or were declared yeah you guys know the routine anything and everything was dug out for the war in like with the 71 well we saw buyback programs and we are selling and we saw you know playing with a trigger guards we saw all sorts of none of that no these things they&#39;ve bought a few thousand that they could get off the exporters that were still in Germany they got him out of the reserves where they were still possible a few would sort of scrolled their way into the colonies very very few there&#39;s not a lot I mean these things are actually kind of hard to find photos of in the war and it&#39;s doubtful that they ever saw frontline action and when they were used as guard rifles I don&#39;t know that you necessarily would have bothered loading the magazine because it really was gone but there were some exceptions it was the official rifle of the C where a naval variant of the lond we&#39;re basically three years active naval service four years in reserve and five in the sivir these were not really combat troops and I&#39;d be very curious to hear of any shots fired and anger although if you did chances are it was a 71 84 and there you have it this is another one of those remington rolling block scenarios and we&#39;ve talked about guns that were available in fewer numbers and freed up fewer guns to the front it served a role like wherever this was something more useful was where it belonged where it could be serviceable so I give it that much credit now I don&#39;t like doing all the reserve rifles that never even went to Europe but this was there so it squeaks in and it&#39;s also very important to Mauser developmental history because the truth is this is not a bad rifle it&#39;s just the rifle that existed in a very small period of time imagine if smokeless gunpowder had taken another 10 years to find 20 years to find this would have been a top-line rifle for quite a while the only real thing that&#39;s sat in front of it was that it hadn&#39;t gone down to a small bore black powder cartridge not yet anyway we have another episode so outside of that for a very brief period this was truly advanced and truly top align and it was a good chance to stick it to the French it just didn&#39;t last and so not so much the gun or the designer or the country or anybody&#39;s particular failure it&#39;s just that technology jumps twice in a row from single shot to magazine to smokeless so fast that everybody was put off and Germany really took a hit I mean this is a big financial cost to invest in all of this it&#39;s a hit that the French mostly managed to avoid they got to leap from single shot to repeating smokeless so sorry Germany this one was loose for you but I still like this rifle and I know a lot of you have handled them because there&#39;s so many in the collectors market in excellent condition because they were put out of combat so early their Knights they&#39;re beautiful collectors they&#39;re beautiful handling guns they&#39;re for time that never existed more than a few years and I still love it so I&#39;m glad I shared it with you today but let&#39;s go get Mays opinion on actually handling this thing all right once more we&#39;ve made room for May and we still have just enough room for this gun although if any of you happen to be in the Charleston area and have an old church you don&#39;t need anymore maybe it&#39;s time for the biggest ceiling we could possibly get before we start covering things like your jingles or something all right so let me give you that that&#39;s the first repeating round or repeating rifle for Germany and we need your opinion coming off with a 71 the Jaeger books and the carbine let&#39;s drop last two let&#39;s go with the long rifle versus this how are we feeling about the ergonomics of the 71 84 not super rate about it but here&#39;s why so here here down here right here like oh oh this is very similar to the 71 okay but there are some big differences so the gun is slightly shorter than the 71 I mean that&#39;s nice that should take away some of the weight wrong does not there&#39;s actually more weight to this gun and right now nothing loaded that&#39;s not bad but it&#39;s also not the best it&#39;s just okay but then adding more rounds to it your hand is very slowly gonna scooch forward on this guy and you&#39;re going to notice that as you&#39;re going through rounds it this weight really does well weigh on you as you&#39;re going on through it it can be can be quite exhausting but yeah I I don&#39;t want to get into I guess just the the firing with a rapid fire of this guy just yet I want to get into it in a separate section but the action manipulating it it is very smooth but you have to be very deliberate with the action in order to to have it function properly so that is something we&#39;re gonna get to in a second but I just want to make sure I pointed that out flag CP simples operate not a huge fan of the sling swivel being this far forward it&#39;s kind of weird and then the comb the comb is alright for the height like it puts you where you need to be for the site in my opinion but yeah ergonomics wise my favourite and with this action things can get a little slow on the battlefield I can tell that she&#39;s distracted by the weight because we didn&#39;t hear the one complaint that I thought we would do might maybe want to notice the one thing that you yell about for every one of these old firearms like this may be where your middle finger is right now no okay no no but yeah really there is no semi pistol grip that is true like I&#39;m sorry I say it for everyone I feel like at this point it&#39;s kind of weird to keep talking about it yeah well yeah okay yeah y&#39;all want to know that&#39;s true I&#39;m sorry yeah it&#39;s true there is no semi pistol grip on this I think that like that&#39;s just I&#39;m sorry it&#39;s not that hard hey it&#39;s a you know it&#39;s a muzzle heavy gun and on a muzzle heavy gun you really want to be able to bring that in I think anyway I mean it certainly stood out to me but hey I guess for once they snuck one by you alright so you said you want to talk about the magazine separately I can understand that because recall you are a German soldier this is the first magazine rifle that they are issuing and it&#39;s a huge jump you used to open a rifle put cartridge in rifle closed rifle fire there&#39;s no carrying the one there&#39;s one the bullet Hey well the cartridge goes all the way in that&#39;s it that&#39;s all you&#39;re keeping track up one at a time now you got a load eight and then seal it up and then put one in put one in and then open up all this stuff at least I&#39;m like with the 71 I&#39;m no longer in the single-shot range but yeah I&#39;m having to deal with that too magazine right that&#39;s gonna weigh on you so you get a burst of fire but there&#39;s a lot to keep this is math now I mean you&#39;re yes we all had public education at this point and you know we&#39;re seeing here a hundred years later I must very well think I don&#39;t want to sitting and be like Oh everybody a hundred years ago was dumb but this is a lot under fire to keep track up so walk us through this magazine a little bit more exactly so that they understand where the sort of the faults are with this new system so here we are in this place where hurray we&#39;ve got a tube magazine we&#39;ve got the ability to carry more rounds should be great with this gun it does require some very specific settings for where the action is in order to manipulate this magazine cutoff so it would be very convenient if the gun was sealed up action closed in order for me to just manipulate the magazine cutoff no you have to have the bolt all the way far back elevator up you have to actually have that setting in order to push the magazine cutoff forward and then at that point well now it&#39;s four that means obviously it&#39;s it&#39;s gonna elevate er is gonna stay rise it&#39;s not gonna feed up the next round automatically so I&#39;d have to throw in like a Lucy or something like that and then just single load it from here on out okay let&#39;s say I&#39;m ready for the magazine to function let&#39;s say I&#39;m ready for the elevator to do its job and stop being lazy now this command is given as an emergency something on the battlefield has happened well yes we are there&#39;s a change it&#39;s not necessarily just the command for the magazine I mean you might get lucky and that there&#39;s a breakthrough right in front of you but chances are this is being told to you because we need to adapt now okay you&#39;re in whatever position your gun might be closed and you&#39;re about to fire your bolt might be back with the this elevator would still be up okay you don&#39;t know where you are in the cycle but something&#39;s happen and it&#39;s time to switch to magazine now a worst-case scenario I&#39;m sealed like I&#39;m sealed I just fired my last round but I&#39;m still sealed when I&#39;m given the order spent case in their spent case yes casing here now by the way the good officer the good officer and everybody in rhythm should be knowing where you are in the cycle so that he can tell you when to make this magazine change and he&#39;s going to judge it again but as we know and chaos okay so go ahead yes so at this point I&#39;m sealed there&#39;s an empty casing in here there&#39;s like two ways I can do this but basically like I said before I can&#39;t I can&#39;t take this magazine cut off I can&#39;t put it off like it&#39;s it&#39;s got to be in this position as it is until I pop the bow all the way back now I can thumb it back okay now you&#39;ve got two decisions here either one you can choose to throw in it like a single and then just fire on from there or two you can just choose to close the bolts empty open it back up and then now you&#39;ve got a cartridge that&#39;s fed from the follower pop into the elevator pops it up and you can then decide to bolt forward and have your live round in the barrel that&#39;s a lot of steps that&#39;s a lot of extra steps that you have to decide there and when you&#39;re on the battlefield I&#39;m imagining you don&#39;t really have a little jury of time especially in the situation in which you have the urgency where you&#39;ve just been given the order that guy&#39;s things are happening get rocking and rolling take those magazine cut-offs off that to have to like decide in that instant moment oh god there&#39;s people coming at me and make your decision that&#39;s that&#39;s a bit much I really feel like this is overly complicated for what it is I&#39;d agree now I know we&#39;re gonna get a lot of comments on drill and if you like drill and you like sort of understanding where this comes from from the top it&#39;s not German but British lamella looters is a friend he talks about these sort of things a lot it&#39;s very good to understand that yes an officer generally supposed to make this decision good luck being heard by the time you&#39;ve got other problems and then also even if you are heard if the operation is complex or has to be just so if so many futs is with it and then has to play catch-up which happens I mean who hasn&#39;t been to like exercise or yoga or some other class and not been like oh I missed a step and now I got to play let&#39;s say handle the action very gingerly and I don&#39;t actually cause the elevator to pop up that can happen guys yeah any little problem and you&#39;ve got to play catch-up well now the operations for you to catch up to the rhythm are not as simple as closed blow flip lever pop open you&#39;re ready to roll and the reason we&#39;re playing this out just in this kind of detail is because this is sort of the first of the German experience for this other guns are going to try to avoid this exact problem so that&#39;s kind of why we&#39;re overworking it okay so we talked about handling we talked about loading in the magazine a little bit maybe too much let&#39;s talk about actually shooting the gun you get behind it you get behind the sights you pull the trigger how are you doing line up with the sights now on the other ones did have a sleeve over the top of it I really didn&#39;t feel like that was necessary but I will say that site did seem more robust than this one this one actually seems very delicate like I really feel like even just me manipulate it now I still feel like I would somehow break it like I feel like I don&#39;t really want to mess these sights too much which is good usually I&#39;m not having to shoot over that long of a distance so hey I can just get it ready and hopefully not to fire over like 200 yards or something like that but yeah the sights aren&#39;t bad they&#39;re pretty straightforward action like I said be very deliberate with it then firing there is a significant amount of recoil with this one because it is a very large mass that is coming out of this gun that bullet is massive so there is a significant amount of recoil with it that doesn&#39;t quite match up with the gun and then add the weight of those rounds that you&#39;re carrying in there there&#39;s a lot coming back into your shoulder so the heavier this guy is the worst off it&#39;s going to be for you trust me on that one I did have to fire this one several times so that we can get the right takes for it but hey you know what for shooting it did function very well the whole time we didn&#39;t really have any problems with anything any misfires or anything like that it did work very well but yeah other than that shooting wise it was fun I enjoyed it but the problem is black powder that&#39;s again that&#39;s likes waving a flag above my head I can&#39;t really hide with this guy now for anybody concerned about the mass comment because I know we&#39;re gonna get that the heavier the rifle the easier it is on recoil usually usually the concern here is that you have a floating mass in the stock somewhere so the springs keeping it to the rear for the most part but when you fire it you still get a little play in there we debated this I don&#39;t feel it may feels it there&#39;s a perception of a change in the recoil almost randomly depending on the position of those cartridges rocking in there like it&#39;s just a uncontrolled sliding map I would say honestly it&#39;s the difference between if you have the two fully loaded versus if you just have one or two rounds in there I would say that&#39;s when you actually notice the difference and it took several workings with this gun in order for me to even notice it so it isn&#39;t really something super perceivable I will say that you&#39;re gonna have to try it out for yourself it&#39;s certainly nowhere near as much as what you&#39;d perceive what&#39;s say like an auto five shotgun where you have no full recoil and a long recoil operating system where you feel that double-hung it&#39;s not that pronounced but anyway that is just a conversation we had on the side that I&#39;m partially came out in this number two with the black-powder smoke this was actually concerned with these guns is that if we have a bunch of people firing in line and we start using the repeating rifle with black powder because smokeless wasn&#39;t available at the time there&#39;s this fear that we&#39;re going to smoke out of our own environment we won&#39;t be able to see what we&#39;re shooting at but we&#39;re certainly a big enough body that we can be fired into because we&#39;re in line so there was some fear on repeating rifles and there was an argument against them in many ways that they would over smoke their own position just from the sheer volume of fire which is why again you&#39;re s&#39;posed eases single loader and the repeating fire is for emergencies or very specific problems with almost break throughs or cavalry charges or things like that and with the black powders I think we saw as May cleared this thing with the camera the way it was set up it&#39;s really hard to see because you&#39;re looking at her I try to show it with the high-speed I tried to get backed off a little bit some of that cloud forming there was a haze in the air for a good couple minutes after we were done filming just one man yeah not disappear it does take a while to go away so take a line of 20 or her doing that and I could see it actually becoming a real problem all right so all of that covered it&#39;s the Great War now because we&#39;re not talking about using this in 1886 we&#39;re talking about the Great War as a reserve rifle are you gonna get anywhere near the front line with something like this no are you kidding me it&#39;s a black powder it&#39;s completely unbalanced it&#39;s it&#39;s awkward to handle and you have to be very deliberate with your motions when manipulating the bolt on this guy no I&#39;m gonna give this a hard note just because there is too much that I think would go wrong with me taking this to the front lines yeah I&#39;m a hard path too and I start to think that we can seem a bar that sure I think we&#39;re starting to see why the 71 had longer legs than the repeating version of itself like this has improvements over the 71 but the stocks vulnerable with that tube magazine it needs more it&#39;s more parts to maintain it&#39;s more weight it&#39;s more complexity it&#39;s certainly not the easiest thing to use with lines of poorly trained men well it&#39;s no wonder this thing didn&#39;t even really make the trip to Africa instead the single-shot semi one stuck around for so long this thing really got kicked off the front line early because it&#39;s just advanced enough to be a hindrance to itself and not advanced enough to get around the real problems and it&#39;s good though 71 84 is a really good marker for showing us a the evolution of the Mauser family B the evolution of sort of small arms technology and see why there was a hump to go from single-shot to repeater not just technologically but also because there may be some distinct disadvantages to a smoked black powder repeating rifle I mean probably the best example we&#39;ve seen of a black-powder repeater is probably the Austrian straight-pull 1886 uh I would argue you can simultaneously load five rounds so you actually do load faster you actually speed everything up however you again you run into the risk of the clouds of smoke and obscuring your vision and things like that but complexity is way down so keep that in mind maybe they get the ultimate repeater where is something like this yes it works and it can be good for certain situations but yeah that works isn&#39;t always gonna cut it yeah no it&#39;s still a beautiful piece if you only won I&#39;d be very happy I&#39;d be proud to own one they&#39;re gorgeous and to me probably like a revolver one of those kin aesthetically pleasing guns I highly recommend somebody out there start manufacturing dummy cartridges for the people that own these because you can&#39;t feel it when you handle it empty but with live and well not even live over there you know in the magazine when you rack this thing and it comes back forward and it releases the cartridge on the elevator that click that yeah that feels real good guys yeah go watch go back and watch the video it&#39;s so pleasant I&#39;m sorry I really get into stuff like that where I can feel the mechanism working under my fingers dies super cool it&#39;s like the click of a revolver it&#39;s just nice not really helpful in the battlefield that&#39;s fun as a collector alright I think that&#39;s kind of covered is there anything else any other mentions for this gun no I honestly liked it it was fun shooter in general I would love to have one of my own personal collection someday but for protection of my own life not gonna bet on it now no all right well thank you for tuning in and stay after the credits for updates and we&#39;ll see you next time [Music] pigging update is that we just got back from a trip to visit another old local gun channel iraq veteran 8888 now as part of that we did borrow an mg o h sled to take with our borrowed mg o 8 which had borrowed fittings I&#39;m gonna say that it took quite a bit to put this whole package together but we got it done and so I can finally start working on the episode proper the research is there the script needs to be made and then I have to film the indoor bits you guys know how this goes so it&#39;ll be a couple weeks but as I said that gun does free up finally all of this backlog of machine gun so you&#39;ll start seeing more of these peppering the stack alright thank you once again to all of our viewers and especially our patrons because there is no way we could get all of that Horror Show over with without your financial support

Transcript for:Evolution and Impact of the Mauser Rifle

Transcript for:
Evolution and Impact of the Mauser Rifle