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Prior to the introduction of the Gewehr 98 Mauser the German army had Mauser make several small series, about 1000, of experimental prototype rifles for troop test purposes. See Jon Speed's "Mauser Archive", page 23-25. After these tests ended, apparently several Suhl and Zella-Mehlis gunmakers bought up these actions, either production overruns from the Mauser factory or the stripped military rifles to build sporting rifles. Remember, these actions were still on par with the other "most modern" bolt actions of about 1900. Both the 1910 Stukenbrok and the O.Will, Z-M catalog mention a Modell 97 that cocks on closing. Here is another such rifle by Sauer & Sohn in 8x57I, also made on one of the pre-98 test actions:

As you see, this action already has most of the features of the 98 design, such as third safety locking lug and the gas flange on the bolt sleeve, but still lacks the safety lugs on the firing pin and cocks on closing like the Swedish M96. Like the M98 transitional actions and the WW1 Kar 98a carbine action, it is a small ring action. I rate these actions as strong as any of the small ring M98 actions, plenty for all 9.3x62 factory and factory level loads. When the 9.3x62 was introduced by Otto Bock, Berlin c1905, smokeless powders were still in their infancy and produced much higher pressures than needed today to achieve the same ballistics.

Edited by CptCurl (26/12/11 10:23 PM)

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