I actually have a couple of hundred original 173 grn R/N FMJ bullets for this rifle that was kindly sent to me by an old American friend who pulled them from rounds that the cases were all splitting from age. The headstamp date was 1897 if I recall correctly. I have vever seen any live rounds from this period.

When I got the rifle I did some research and somewhere there is a letter from the oer museum Blomfontein who tried to trace J.P DuPlessiss Jnr but it seems this was a common name and it could be any one of 13 such named persons. That is as far as we could get.

The rifle does shoot but it shoots high due to the bead being missing off the foresight. The bore is frosted again a lot to do with the poor care in the museum in Scotland that I was told it came from. I bought this rifle with two military M93's one an OVS marked rifle and a Carbine those two were sold some years back to replace the car after a nice man in a white van wrote it off for me (totalled it) Have since found that i still have the original carbine sling as it was fragile I put it safely in a biscuit tin intending to have a replicar made but that never happened. A lot of these Boer Mausers were brought back as trophys by regiments involved in The 2nd Boer War.

I do have Dr Besters book so have read about the short neck ammunition.