Mauser

Mauser is the common name of German arms manufacturer Mauser-Werke Oberndorf Waffensysteme GmbH, as well as the line of bolt action rifles they built for the German armed forces. Their designs were widely popular and have been exported to a number of countries, and their design remains the model on which almost every successful bolt action rifle has been built.

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What was to become Mauser started on July 31, 1811, when Friedrich I of W?rttemberg established a royal weapons factory in Oberndorf, a small town in the German Black Forest. The factory opened for business the next year, employing 133 workers.

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In 1867 Wilhelm and Paul Mauser developed a rifle using an improved rotating bolt system for breechloaders based off the Chassepot (fusil modele 1866), itself an improved version of, and based off an earlier Prussian design. The Franco-prussian war had shown their rifle inferior to the Chassepot, so in 1871 the most recent version of their design became the standard German infantry rifle beating out the M1869 Bavarian Werder. The Mauser design was known in service as the Gewehr 71 (rifle model 1871), Gew 71 or G71 for short. Production started at the Oberndorf factory for the infantry version firing an 11 x 60 mm round from a long 850 mm barrel, and shorter versions were introduced with the 700 mm barreled jaeger and 500 mm cavalry carbine. A number of slightly modified versions were widely sold to other countries, with rounds that would today be considered very large, typically 9.5 to 11.5 mm in caliber. Serbia designed an improved version of the Model 71 in 10.15mm caliber, produced in Germany, called the Mauser-Milovanovich M1878/80.

German: German may mean:...

Bolt action: A bolt-action firearm is typically a rifle that is manually operated (i.e. by hand), specifically that the opening and closing of the breech is controlled manually by a bolt. The term "action" references the means by which a firearm operates....

Rifle: A rifle is a firearm that uses a spiral groove cut into the barrel to spin a projectile (usually a bullet), thus improving accuracy and range of the projectile. It is the same principle that causes an American football to be more accuate when thrown correctly. Examples of non-rifled firearms are sho...