Some recent additions to my collection

[Nyles]

Bureaucracy sounds about right - I once waited almost a year for the Canadian firearms program to de-register my Chamelot-Delvigne that someone called a .45 Colt... ugh.

Got some good stuff from the postman today! It's a very WW1 sort of week in the guntorium...

First, I got a very nice Italian Carcano M91 Fucile, made at Terni in 1918, to replace my very not nice 1897 M91. This one is in really good shape, all matching and isn't missing the cleaning rod. Great example of a WW1 Italian rifle - too bad it was made too late to see much of the war, and it cost 3 times as much as the other one, but the other one was so rough I only ever bought it as a place holder. I still think the Carcano is a really under-rated rifle, they're not very prettily finished and the action isn't smooth, but they shoot surprisingly accurately with the gain-twist rifling and are really very practical battle rifles.



I also got a very nice 1916-dated German S98/05 "butcher" bayonet to go on my Gewehr 98. This is a very impressive, very heavy 15" blade to mount on the end of a 50" rifle. These were called "butcher" bayonets because the very broad blade resembled a butcher's knife. These were also made with a saw-toothed back for issue to engineers and machine gun troops for cutting brush, however most of these were either thrown away or had the teeth ground off because they inflicted horrific wounds and the Allies started summarily executing anyone caught carrying one!

[SPEMack618]

Neat! Love the sites on the Carcanco.

[Nyles]

Yeah, they're quite neat. A spring loaded button the left pushes the leaf aside so you can move it, when released it locks it into grooves on the base corresponding to your various ranges. There's even a cutout on the handguard so you can flip it all the way down and expose a fixed battle sight on the base, which is an unusualy large notch - put the blade at the top of the notch and it's good for 200M, at the bottom 100M. The later M38 series operated with just the fixed sight, which I think is plenty good enough for most combat ranges!

[SPEMack618]

Cool. That system seems very similar to the sights on the, and I'm gonna botch this, the Vitterelli rifles.

[Nyles]

That's absolutely where it came from. The Swiss came out with the Vetterli with a tube magazine in 1869, and then Italians adopted them in a single-shot version in 1870 (followed up by the Vetterli-Vitali with box magazine in 1887). When the Italians came out with the Carcano they just used the same system of sights their soldiers were familiar with. Interestingly, due to rifle shortages, in 1915 the Italians actually reissued Vetterlis converted to 6.5mm with a Carcano-type magazine to rear-echelon troops. I'm actually planning on picking one up soon-ish, though I have other priorities at the moment since they're not actually safe to shoot!

[SPEMack618]

Hey!

That explains what Great-Grandpa was doing with a convertered Vetterli-Vitali. I knew the gun was a war bring back but couldn't figure out why it wasn't in 10mm Rimmed or whatever the heck it was originally chambered in.

Neat gun, cleaning rod included.

[Nyles]

Got one great acquisition this month - an FN 1924 Mauser made on contract for the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which became Yugoslavia in 1928. Yugoslavian Mausers are pretty common in North America, but only the post-war Communist era models - the M48 and M24/47, which was a rebuild of an FN M1924 or Kragujevac M24 (which was the same rifle actually made IN Yugoslavia) with a new barrel with hooded front sight. Because almost all the M1924 or M24s were rebuilt to the M24/47 standard, you rarely find original pre-communist Yugo Mausers.

This one is all original, with a great monarchist crest and FN factory adress, along with the CXC stamp for Serb, Croats and Slovens and clear King Alexander I cartouche. It's all matching, and came with a postwar-era Yugo sling. As far as history goes, obviously it was used by the Yugoslav Royal Army up until the German invasion in 1941, but Yugoslavia went to utter shit in the 40s (not unlike Yugoslavia in the 90s), at which point it would have ended up in the hands of Communist Partisans, Serb Royalist partisans (Chetniks - some of whom then allied with the Germans to fight the Communists), Serb collaborationist government, Croatian Fascist militia (Ustasha) or regulars (Croatian Home Guard), pretty much all of whom fought everybody else at one point or another. I don't know how it managed to escape the Communist-era reworks, but it's a great uncommon WW2 rifle.