Dutch Geweer 95 rifle

Found this old gal in a pawn shop today. It is a Steyr manufactured Geweer 95 rifle made in 1896 for the Dutch.
Around here, you will see a few Dutch Mannlicher carbines, but rifles are few and far between. So you have to grab these when they pop up.
I'm guessing it is missing the top handguard..however I have seen pics of two other G95 rifles without them. The Dutch had so many variants of rifles and carbines, so maybe this one wasn't meant to have one. Apparently there were different configurations for the Army, Marine (Navy) and the KNIL.
There is a unit mark, 'KK 96', on the buttplate. 'KK' seems familiar, but can't offhand remember what the designation is.
Glad to find this one..they don't pop up often.

Very cool, I have always wanted to get my hands on one of these or a Romanian M1893 to give it a try.

Nice find. It is a KNIL.
There were only 3 long rifles, leger (army), marine and KNIL. It would have had a handguard. The army and marine rifles differed only in the serial numbers. The marine did not have letters after the numbers and a slightly different bayonet.
The KNIL rifle was lightened by thinning the stock and omitting the cleaning rod. The handguard was secured by steel clips. It also had gas vents on the front of the receiver.
The home service handguard locked into the back sight base and is held into place by the barrel band.
Photo:
Top KNIL
Bottom Leger

I was pretty sure it is KNIL with the gas escape holes and no provision for a rod, along with the elongated finger grooves. I took it apart yesterday to give it a light cleaning, and the number inside matches the rifle.
I'm guessing finding an upper handguard for a standard rifle will be next to impossible, not to mention finding a KNIL version, as I recently found they differ slightly.

I have a rifle and carbine version of this rifle. (The rifle has been duffel cut. :( ). For those interested, the round can be duplicated by shortening and resizing them. Or reverse the steps. I use dies for 6.5 Carcano or 6.5 MS, they are close enough to fudge. The standard bullet was a 160 grain round nose. Hornady makes a similar bullet but is SP instead of FMJ. Make sure you have en bloc loading devices (clips) or the rifle will not function as a repeater.

Now the difficult part. There are at least five variations of the carbine version. (Mine is the bicycle version, I think.) The rifle is a long rifle. Not going to guess further. Very interesting from a historical and design point of view. Design by Ferdinand Ritter Von Mannlicher, mainly.

I wish there were only 5 carbine versions.
As I am an obsessive compulsive Dutch carbine collector (there is no cure) :madsmile:, there are 17 or 18 variants of the Dutch M95 carbine out there.
I only have 10 so far and worst of all I know that in all probability I will never find the other 7 or 8.
Photo 1:
Top - Old Model No 4 Wielers (cyclists) carbine
Bottom: No 3 New Model modified Genie (engineers) carbine. The bayonet is common to both carbines.
Photo 2:
No 1 New Model Cavalry carbine. Near identical to the new model No 4 for the cyclist.

I think the funniest part about the Dutch Mannlichers is during WWI they realized they had a lot of variants and it might be beneficial to simplify the types out there in case of war. The commission who was to look at reducing the number of variants instead ended up basically doubling the amount of variants.

Ah! The best laid plans!
The intention was to refurbish the old models into the new configuration. However, WW1 ended and so did the military budget. It wasn't until 1938/1939, when the Dutch mobilised again that there was a desperate need for carbines for the artillery. The A.I (artillerie inrichtingen) started to re-configure some of the thousands of long rifles they had in store and created the carbine No 5. The Navy followed with their carbine conversions. Adding to that the municipal police required carbines. So at least 3 police variants were converted. The police carbines retained the rifle sight with the graduations ground off.
And of course we haven't mentioned the KNIL yet.