Old Carl Gustaf M96

[nijalninja]

So I am not too flash with Mausers, and nor do I ever have much I feel I can just show off, until now I reckon.

I bought this rifle for my father as a target rifle: The barrel was excellent and the price seemed good. Brought it home and decided to shoot it only to get a few rounds jamming very badly in the chamber. I got in there with a rod, some solvents, and rags on a drill and cleaned the chamber as best I could but still it seemed to jam, so it went into the safe never to see the light until a few days ago. Decided to pull it out and try to chamber some rounds again... and it worked fine. So we got it out and ran some shoots through it with no jamming whatsoever.

I learned a lot about Enfields since buying this gun so I thought I might try my hand at investigating it, and it now strikes me as a very cool rifle.

First off the stock has seen some very hard yards in its life, lots of gouges, bruises, and rounding of almost all edges, the butt-plate is proud of the stock quite a bit, and the wood is a very dark and splattery brown/red and almost black in places. I like this kind of thing.

Then the date of manufacture: 1899. I knew this was old and I knew the CG factory started in 1898, and the serial was quite low but I had nothing to solidify anything about the serial, so I found this: 1896 Swedish Mauser survey which tells me this was likely produced rather early in 1899 and is in fact the 5945th M96 produced. One of the lowest relative serialled rifles I own.

Then got to stripping it and cleaning everything: Lots of grease between the action/barrel and fore-end, but everything looked great, and on top of that? Everything but the mid-band and missing cleaning rod matched. Even the sights, fore-end, and handguard.

Anyway, the pictures should speak for themselves.

Information

Warning: This is a relatively older thread This discussion is older than 360 days. Some information contained in it may no longer be current.