Mauser C-96 • • • Main Page • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • NOTE - Total newbies trying to identify a gun might want to start on the Uncredited Net-trawled illustrations, most likely from A.B. Zhuk, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Handguns: Pistols and Revolvers of the World from 1870 to the Present. The M-30 at upper right has the wrong lanyard ring loop, and the serial number is in the wrong place. These pistols are collector's items. That means that nobody now uses them as workaday guns. Best Auto Kms Activator Office 2010 Free Download 2016 - Free Full Version.
No military or police force anywhere is known to carry the C-96 - the last ones I've heard about were the ceremonial guards at Mao's tomb. But mention collectors, and you'll see combat a-plenty - it's the inevitable cage match between the Aristotelians and the Platonists, the 'splitters' and the 'lumpers'. Some collectors see differences everywhere - they're classic 'splitters.' And the C-96 is good material for splitters.
One of the books describes and pictures some seventy distinct variations. I've identified more.
Mauser 1910 Serial Number Confusion. Is the first model 1914 pistol. The.25 caliber Mauser pocket pistols. Serial numbers of the original production. New to the Forum. Does any Mauser Model 1914 collector have the number of mausers produced each year 1914-1918? If anyone does, do you also have the serial numbers.
It's as bad as collecting PEZ dispensers, but more expensive. On the other hand, a historian of firearms production would note that not all variants are equal. Some sold in large numbers. Others were duds, and were quickly dropped.
In a very real sense, the common ones are the important ones. And they are the ones which approach the Platonic ideal of the Mauser - the one you'd show them when the kids ask, 'What's a C-96?' For the purposes of this site, I am going to make a break with the, ignore the rarer variants, and concentrate on the 'ordinary' guns which anyone, dedicated collector or casual shooter, is most likely to encounter. The vast majority of oddball pistol variations date from the early years of production. It didn't take the Mauser factory long to debug the design, and very soon after startup, reliable and remarkably sturdy pistols were being cranked out by the thousands. Except for an enforced hiatus at the end of World War One, the pistol stayed in continuous production for more than forty years. But for a while, the factory flailed about with a blizzard of minor variations and strange stylistic experiments.
Six-shot and twenty-shot magazines, the 'flatside' frame, the cone hammers, the large ring hammers, and the early Bolos all date to the first eight years or so of production. These had all pretty much disappeared by the time serial numbers reached the 40,000 range (very approximately, 1905 - possibly as early as 1902, though I doubt it; lacking documentation, it's all guesswork), and so constitute a very small fraction of the total production of well over a million pistols. If we eliminate this small percentage of early pistols, a mere half-dozen major variants remain. Ninety five percent of the guns made were one or another of these variants - • Prewar Commercial, of two minor variants - around 240,000 made between about 1905 and 1912-14 (In the C-96 context, the 'war' is always the Great War of 1914-1918.) • Wartime Commercial - around 144,000 made between 1912-14 and 1918 • 1916 Prussian Contract - a.k.a.
Red 9 - around 135,000 made between 1916 and 1918 • Postwar Bolo, of two minor variants - around 345,000 made between the early 1920s and 1930 • M-30, of several minor variants - around 120,000 made between 1930 and 1937 • Schnellfeuer - close to 100,000 made between about 1932 and 1937 - rare in the USA, thanks to the 1934 National Firearms Act Most of the terminology is not entirely standardized. And most of it is modern - Mauser never sold a new gun as a Prewar Commercial, for instance.
Model variations of 6.35mm and 7.65mm Mauser Pocket Pistols of the 1910 design Because Mauser did. Mauser Pocket Pistols. 1914 to 1923, serial number.
However M-30 is almost an official Mauser designation, as is Schnellfeuer (more properly, Schnellfeuer-pistole). The unofficial names used by modern collectors are relatively well-known but vary somewhat in practice. On this site, I refer to all variants of the pistol as the C-96, due to habit more than anything else. The name Bolo is common but not standardized. Razorsql Download Serial Key.
I use it for any C-96 with a small grip and short (3.9 inch) barrel. Others may apply the term to guns with either a short barrel or nasty little grips. Parts names I use appear on the. And keep in mind that 'prewar', 'wartime', and 'postwar' in the C-96 context refer to the Great War of 1914 - 1918. I refer to the days when these guns were manufactured as the Stable Production Period (something of a misnomer, I'll admit, as it was none too stable for a few years after the war). Stable Production Period is a new term - it doesn't appear in the books.
It extends from about 1905 to 1937, encompassing all serial numbers from about 40000 on up, and all Prussian Contract guns and Schnellfeuers regardless of serial number. But exactly how to chart C-96 production is a bit of a puzzle. By serial number?
All choices have drawbacks. By Date Unfortunately, most Mauser production records were destroyed when French occupation forces demolished the Oberndorf factory and offices after WW2. There have been attempts to blame this vandalism on American troops, but for several reasons I don't buy it. In any event, this lack of records means that few dates can be established with certainty. Terms such as '1898 Model,' '1902 Model,' '1908 Model,' '1912 Model,' etc. Are often bandied about, but Mauser never sold the guns as such, and the production dates can't be established with certainty.
A few contracts have known dates, such as the Italian contract for 5000 guns (1899) and the Prussian contract for 150,000 guns (1916). But Mauser called them all 'the military pistol' until 1930 - the 'Modell 1930' (usually contracted by us impatient modern types to 'M-30') was Mauser's designation for the series of variants introduced in 1930, and a year or two later the 'Schnellfeuer' appeared. All other dates have been supplied after the fact, too often by collectors with more enthusiasm than accurate data.
So classification by date isn't entirely satisfactory. By Serial Number Classification by serial number doesn't work all that well either. Although the Mauser serial number system is simple in theory - start at 1 and go up to whatever - it was violated in practice.
Mauser skipped some sizeable blocks of numbers in the early days, sometimes filling them in subsequently with later-production pistols. And some contract guns had their own serial numbers, starting again at 1. The Schnellfeuer had its own series, also starting at 1. So Mauser actually made at least four C-96s with the serial number 4095 (to pick a number more-or-less at random). Low serial number guns with later production features turn up, implying smaller and otherwise unknown contract runs with their own serial ranges, so exactly how many guns with a particular serial number were actually made can be hard to determine. Higher serial numbers are unique, though, as the highest serial contract gun would be about 139000, from the 1916 Prussian Contract, and the highest serial Schnellfeuer was somewhere around 95000. So a high number like 881837, as seen on one of my M-30s, is a number unique among C-96s.
It remains difficult to account for 'flyers' - guns with serials substantially separated from their sisters with identical production features. A good example is 232232, by all appearances a Wartime Commercial. But the immediately previous version, the Prewar Commercial, is found with serials well into the 270000 range. Nearly all surviving Wartime Commercials have serials above the 290000 range. So what exactly was going on at Mauser between the times the 232000 and 290000 ranges were made? Was 232232 actually made at the same time as the 290000-range pistols, but given a lower number to fill in a previously-skipped number block?
At this late date it is generally impossible to say. To finish up the mysterious case of number 232232: The best theory is that 232232 started life as an ordinary Prewar Commercial, but was returned to the factory for a defective safety. She was then retrofitted with the New Safety hammer and safety lever. Since the only differences between the Prewar and Wartime commercial guns were those two parts, 232232 was magically transformed from a Prewar to a Wartime Commercial.
Perhaps that's how it happened, but absent a paper trail, we can't say for sure. By Feature Classification by feature is useful, as it's purely phenomenological. Features actually observed on a particular gun are sufficient to categorize it. This is the rationale for the common classification of all C-96s as Cone Hammers, Large Ring Hammers, or Small Ring Hammers. Cone Hammers were made from approximately 1896 to 1899, and run up to serial numbers in the 14000 range. Large Ring Hammers were made from approximately 1899 to 1905, and run up to serial numbers in the 40,000 range. All later guns have small ring hammers.
This includes all the guns of the Stable Production Period. Hammer type is a poor way to classify guns of the Stable Production Period, as very different guns, such as Postwar Bolos and M-30s, all had small ring hammers of one sort or another. So other features become important.
Prewar Commercial By the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, Mauser had stopped all their initial foolishness and settled down to a stable design, known today as the Prewar Commercial. A few odd features still turned up on Prewar Commercials, but even those disappeared as the decade drew to a close.