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I found this wonderful 'Schlegelmilch 1896 Experimental Rifle' on Forgotten Weapons. It's design is rather a departure from others of its day and it competed in trials with the Mauser 98.

Click link for video: Sclegelmilch 1896 Video

So what has an innovative military design proposal by a guy named Schlegelmilch have to do with a Mannlicher dedicated thread?

Louis Schlegelmilch was responsible for redesign of Mannlicher's 'Ruck - Zuck' straight pull bolt design (think M1885, M1895..) to a turn bolt for the Gewehr 88 'Commission Rifle'. His design was carried forward to our beloved Mannlicher Schoenauers.

I'll let Kuduae explain in an excerpt from a post of his regarding a 1909 Haenel:
NitroExpress Haenel

"The bolt of both the Mannlicher –Schoenauers and the Haenels is not Schoenauer's, but Louis Schlegelmilch's...

Louis Schlegelmilch was the head gunsmith of the Prussian Spandau arsenal. He designed the turn bolt action now usually associated with "Mannlicher". The Steyr factory got an order for several hundred thousand M88 military rifles for the German armies and was allowed to use Schlegelmilch's turning bolt for their own export rifles...

Steyr could not use Mauser's staggered magazine, then state of the art, for patent reasons. Their director Otto Schoenauer designed his own rotary magazine, stripper clip loading too, and fitted it to the basic Schlegelmilch turnbolt action instead of Mannlicher's magazine. So the famous "Mannlicher – Schoenauer" was born....

So both the "Mannlicher – Schoenauers" and the Haenels M1900 and 1909 are in fact parallel developments. None retains any Mannlicher design feature"

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Good stuff!

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Citizen of the Cherokee Nation

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