![1891 argentine mauser disassembly 1891 argentine mauser disassembly](https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/29573/25756196_1.jpg)
On the island of Cebu in the Philippines, village gunsmiths have been turning out home made firearms for over a century now. Rumor has it, incidentally, that the Breda contract rifles were actually merely assembled and marked there, and had actually been manufactured at Steyr. The Greeks eventually phased the rifle out of frontline service, replacing it with Mausers, and later, as a part of NATO, with British and American arms. Relief was to be had in 1926 when Breda, in Italy, was contracted to supply M/S 1903/14 rifles and carbines. After the war they needed more rifles, but Steyr was located in the new nation of Austria and, as part of the losing side, couldn't sell military arms on the world market under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. By the end of that conflict, Greece was badly short on Mannlicher-Schoenauers, and was making up their losses with captured Austro-Hungarian Steyr-Mannlichers and hand-me-downs from their allies.
![1891 argentine mauser disassembly 1891 argentine mauser disassembly](http://thisoldrifle.com/argentine1891/graphics/safety2.jpg)
In the end, the only nation that bought the rifle was Greece, who, in a bizarre twist of fate, found themselves on the wrong side of the trenches from their main rifle supplier when World War One broke out. Fearing complications caused by the slightly Rube Goldberg-esque magazine, armies stayed away from the new design in droves, and Schoenauer's baby was flattened by the Mauser juggernaut on the world market. The action was ultra-slick, with a full-length guide rib, and had several safety and reliability tweaks over the Commission rifle, but this didn't help sales. The button on the right-hand receiver wall releases the magazine's contents. Left: The rotary magazine, viewed from above. Packaging his new magazine in his latest upgraded rifle, he began shopping it around Europe. This magazine had a rotating spindle in it, notched to hold the bullets, and would feed cartidges very smoothly, as it minimized the friction of the cartridges rubbing against one another in the magazine, unlike the staggered box designs common on other rifles of the day. He set about making various refinements to the Gew.88 and, when the older rifle began losing ground to Paul Mauser's newer charger-loaded designs, fitted his modified version of the Commission Rifle with a slick new development: A rotary magazine. The resulting settlement allowed Steyr to manufacture Gew.88's for the German army, as well as for foreign sales.īy this time, Mannlicher had a new protege, and Steyr a rising star, in the form of a fortysomething engineer by the name of Otto Schoenauer. The Austrians took issue with the fact that the German Rifle Testing Commission had more or less pirated the clip loading system invented by Steyr's star designer, Ferdinand von Mannlicher. Germany had barely begun issuing the new Gewehr 88 to its troops when it found itself dragged into a courtroom by Osterreichische Waffenfabrik-Gesellschaft, better known here as Steyr. military use of the scattergun continues to this day, with Remington, Mossberg, and Benelli shotguns being used in a variety of roles, from house-to-house fighting in the Middle East, to its traditional role as a weapon for facilities guards, to specialized short versions used as breaching weapons, for blowing locks and hinges off doors in close-quarters battle in urban settings.
#1891 ARGENTINE MAUSER DISASSEMBLY SERIAL NUMBER#
Its serial number dates it to 1943, and it was probably used to guard a naval installation, or perhaps as a shipboard weapon. The one pictured above wears the "flaming bomb" U.S. It was a robust weapon, operating on the long-recoil principle, but was obviously designed as a sporting weapon rather than a military one, requiring tools for disassembly and reassembly. Browning had worked with them in the past, selling them several autopistol designs, one of which, a Model 1910, fired the shot that ignited World War One.įN produced the shotgun as the Auto-Five, and production was licensed to Remington as the Model 11. Before Remington could enter negotiations their president died, and Browning instead took the gun to Fabrique Nationale, the company originally formed by the Belgian government and Ludwig Loewe to produce Mausers for the Belgian army. Photo by Oleg Volk.īrowning had shopped the design to Winchester first, as he had all his previous longarm designs, but this time around they declined to pay royalties on the novel weapon and so he next shopped it to Winchester's arch-rival, Remington. 71 Vetterli: A 19th Century assault rifle. Argentine Mauser Modelo 1891: The last antique rifle.Fabrique Nationale SAFN-49: The proto-FAL.Martini-Henry Mark III: The Arm of Empire.Filipino blacksmith revolver: Fruit of a ban.Mannlicher-Schoenauer M1903/14: Revolutionary rotary.
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Remington Model 11: A very belligerent fowling piece.