Vintage "Assault Rifles"...

The Firearm Blog's recent pieces on early "high capacity" repeaters had a picture of a Miegs rifle which, while interesting, would be no more than an extremely rare prototypical footnote if it hadn't obviously influenced the later rifles built by the Evans Repeating Rifle Company out of Maine, which were a qualified commercial success.

The Evans were manufactured from 1873 to 1879, and roughly fifteen thousand of the helical-magazine repeaters found buyers during that stretch of time, and were even endorsed by "Buffalo Bill". As a result, they're not terribly uncommon at gun shows today if you know where to look, and while premium examples bring premium prices, serviceable shooters can be had for well under a grand. The .44 Evans cartridge hasn't been commercially loaded for almost a hundred years, but the black powder rounds can be formed by cutting down .303 Savage brass.

Of course, "high capacity" is relative to the time and place: While the user of a later Evans, which due to its longer cartridges held six fewer rounds than the early models, had twenty-eight times as many rounds on tap as a contemporary U.S. soldier (who used a "Trapdoor" Springfield), he only had twice the magazine capacity of a Swiss private armed with a Gew. 1869 Vetterli.

Schmidts and K.31's: A tale of two bolts.

When the time came for the Swiss army to replace their black-powder Vetterli rifles, they cast about for only a few years before settling on a design by Col. Rudolph Schmidt, working out of Bern.

He had come up with a straight-pull bolt action design in which the bolt body itself was nested inside an outer sleeve. The sleeve carried the lugs which locked into mortises in the receiver body, and was rotated through ninety degrees when the bolt handle was pulled to the rear, by means of a lug on the operating rod acting on a helical track in the bolt sleeve.

The earliest Schmidt rifles were elaborate pieces of machinery; every part of the bolt assembly, from the cocking ring to the operating rod, was machined from steel forgings. For whatever reason, Schmidt had the actual bolt body itself projecting far forward from the encircling sleeve, while the locking lugs were at the extreme rear end. This resulted in the tubular machined steel receiver of the rifle being extremely bulky and heavy when compared to the various other rifle designs emerging at the same time, as well as requiring a fair amount of time and ordnance steel to manufacture; two strikes against a weapon from the standpoint of any bureaucracy.

Further, the breechface was the better part of a foot from the locking lugs. When the catridge was fired, a force of several tons was exerted straight back against the column of the bolt (know as "bolt face thrust"), and that long, thin column of steel was only supported by those two lugs at its rear end. This could lead to compression, flexing, and premature wear or failure of the action.

As higher pressure cartridges were introduced, the Swiss redesigned the rifle by moving the lugs towards the front of the bolt sleeve. This made the arrangement much sturdier and allowed the use of modern ammunition. They also lightened the rifle's receiver by milling several lightening grooves in it, and made it less bulky by going to a smaller-capacity magazine.

However, the basic layout of the long bolt protruding forward from its sleeve remained, and despite the lightening cuts, the receiver was still longer, heavier, and much more difficult to produce than its contemporaries. This solution, finalized in 1911, could be no more than a stopgap.

In the 1930s, Switzerland introduced a new service weapon. Following the trail blazed by the Americans and the British in dispensing with two different length weapons, they standardised on a "carbine" length weapon for everyone.

The new rifle had a much shortened action, the forward extension of the bolt body having been "telescoped" back into the sleeve. Even though it was roughly the same overall length as the earlier Schmidt K.11 cavalry carbine, the K.31's barrel was longer, due to the length saved in the receiver. Manufacture was further simplified by doing away with the complexly-shaped operating rod and going to a simple, flat piece. All in all, it was a far more practical weapon for mass production.

Despite these shortcuts, the K.31 retained a reputation for fit, finish, and accuracy that lived up to the legacy of its Schmidt-designed forebears.

BPCR: Black Powder Cartridge Rifle.

By the 1870's, the armies of the world had wholeheartedly begun the transition to breechloading rifles firing metallic cartridges. I'm fortunate enough to have five examples of the breed in my museum, from France, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the United States. It's interesting to compare and contrast these very different rifles that entered service all at roughly the same time, and the different imperatives and philosophies that drove their acceptance by those various nations. They fall into roughly three groups.

The first group is represented by the German Mauser Kar. 71 (a shortened derivative of their Gew. 71 infantry rifle), and the French Mle. 74 Gras. Of these five nations, Germany and France had the most experience with breechloaders as general-issue infantry weapons. The Prussian army had begun issuing the Dreyse rifle in 1841, and the French had followed suit with the Chassepot in 1866. Both weapons were "needle guns", which is to say that they fired combustible cartridges made of linen or paper that were loaded through the breech, which was of the pattern that we would come to know as the conventional "bolt action". They were called needle guns because the primer was in the base of the bullet, ahead of the powder charge, and a long, needle-like firing pin had to pierce all the way through the charge to reach the primer. Needless to say, this caused problems as the slender firing needle was exposed to the erosive effects of the combusting powder charge. Also, the paper or linen cartridges did not obturate, or seal, the breech, causing the firer to be exposed to occasional jets of hot gases in the face; something not conducive to accurate aiming.

After fighting a war between them with these older weapons, the Germans were the first to field a bolt-action rifle firing a self-contained brass cartridge. The first of a long line of Mauser-designed German rifles, the Gew. 71 featured a self-cocking bolt, unlike the Dreyse, which had to be manually cocked after closing. Using the camming action of the opening bolt gave good extraction of the spent case, but the Gew. 71 lacked an ejector, requiring the firer to tip the rifle on its side after opening the bolt to let the spent cartridge fall free. The French response was more parsimonious, having just come out on the losing side of the recent unpleasantness, their Mle. 74 Gras was designed so that it could be made by fitting a new bolt to an existing Chassepot, thus converting it to take brass cartridges. Both weapons are 11mm, or .43 caliber, a large step down for the Germans, whose Dreyses had sported a .60" bore.

Unlike the French and the Germans, who faced each other on the continent, the US and Britain were isolated by the sea, and faced only skirmishes with hostile, technologically-primitive natives on their expanding frontiers. The British had originally used a breechloading conversion of their Enfield muskets, based on a design by Snider, but the 1870's saw the .58 caliber Snider-Enfields replaced by a new falling block design by a Swiss named Martini. Pulling down on a lever under the action dropped the breechblock and ejected the spent brass from the previous round. A new cartridge was fed into the breech and the lever raised to close the rifle, which was now ready for firing.

The Americans, rebuilding after a savage civil war, weren't eager to spend fortunes on new munitions. A method was devised by a man named Erskine Allin, master armourer at Springfield Arsenal, to convert the massive stock of .58-caliber rifle muskets to cartridge breechloaders. Much like the Snider-Enfield, the Allin Springfield used a trapdoor breech. Like the British design, this allowed ignition to be accomplished by the existing sidehammer. Unlike the British design, which flipped open to the side, the trapdoor breech on the Springfield flopped open to the front. Oddly, for a country that had so much experience in a recent conflict with breechloading repeaters such as the Spencer and the Henry, in the early 1870s the US Army decided to start making "trapdoor" Springfields from the ground up, as new-built rifles. These required the soldier to place the weapon on half-cock, flip the breech up, insert the cartridge, close the breech, cock the rifle, and fire. In their favor, they had an ejector for the spent brass, which neither the Snider-Enfield or even the high-tech Mauser could claim at that point.

Unlike the French and German efforts, both the British and American rifles used .45 caliber cartridges that packed a serious wallop, even at extended ranges. As a footnote, the 1873 Springfield's .45-70 Government cartridge is still a popular sporting round today, a hundred and thirty-five years later.

The odd duck out is the Swiss Vetterli Gew. 69/71. Of the five rifles, it is the only repeater. In the 1870s, Napoleon's invasion was still a recent sore to the independence-minded Swiss, who watched the constant knuckle-jousts between Germany, France, and other continental powers with some trepidation. Switzerland relied on a citizen militia to ensure their sovereignty and, being a technologically-advanced country, selected a technologically-advanced weapon with which to arm them. The Vetterli fired a somewhat weak .41 caliber rimfire round, but it combined a modern breechloading bolt action with a 12-shot tubular magazine system inspired by the U.S. Henry lever-action repeaters. The disadvantages of rimfire priming were offset by a forked firing pin that struck the cartridge in two places simultaneously to ensure reliable ignition.

Reading about these different rifles and their reasons for being is quite interesting. It's another level of interesting altogether to have them where you can study and fire them side by side. Thankfully for the collector, all these rifles predate the 1898 cutoff by almost three decades; the Federal government doesn't consider these antiques to be firearms, and so they can be acquired and shipped without the need of special licenses. Buy a time machine or two and enjoy it!

Schmidt-Rubin Gew. 96/11: Like a Swiss watch.

The Swiss Vetterli, so outré in 1869, was beginning to look a little long in the tooth only a few short years later. By the mid-1870s, Switzerland's continental neighbors were fielding bolt-action designs like the Mauser Gew.71 and the Gras Mle.1874 which, while still single shots, fired modern centerfire black powder cartridges with ballistic performance that eclipsed the now-quaint-looking stubby little rimfire round chambered by the Vetterli.

Rifle performance at the time was limited largely by the bullet itself. Above certain velocity and pressure thresholds, the paper-patched lead bullets of the time just left smears of soft lead that quickly filled the rifling. By the early 1880s, Swiss engineers led by a Major Eduard Rubin were investigating the possibilities offered by enclosing the lead bullet in a protective jacket of copper alloy. They soon discovered that a smaller diameter bullet, 7.5mm versus the then-common 11mm, enclosed in a copper/zinc alloy jacket and seated over a compressed black powder charge could offer a much flatter trajectory and longer effective range than any current military round. The limiting factor was now the powder, as the residues from black powder charges would quickly foul such a small bore.

Schmidt-Rubin Gew.96/11. Photo by Oleg Volk

Meanwhile, also in the early 1880s, another Swiss Major by the name of Rudolf Schmidt was hard at work on a rifle design with a straight-pull bolt action, which was submitted to the army for trials. Unlike contemporary Mannlicher straight-pull designs, which used interaction between an inner bolt and outer bolt sleeve to manipulate a vertically-hinged locking wedge, Schmidt's design used a bolt handle connected to an operating rod; a lug on this rod traveled in a helical track on the outer bolt sleeve causing it to rotate the locking lugs in and out of alignment. Spurred by neighboring nations starting to adopt tube-fed repeating rifles, trials commenced using a combination of Major Rubin's cartridge designs, along with an innovative loading system using disposable chargers, and the straight-pull rifle designed by Schmidt. The leisurely pace of the testing was sped up when the French shocked the world by the adoption of the Mle.1886 Lebel, with its small bore smokeless cartridge.



LEFT: Disposable paper and tin charger holding six rounds of 7.5x55 Swiss. Based on the original charger loader designed by Major Rubin in the 1880s. Photo by Oleg Volk.








By 1890, the Swiss equipped their troops with the Schmidt rifle chambered in a stopgap "semi-smokeless" loading and designated the Gew.1889. Unfortunately, the original rifle design turned out to be somewhat of a stopgap, too. Its locking lugs were located at the rear of the bolt sleeve, which necessitated not only a very long receiver, but also severely limited the amount of pressure the rifle could safely stand. The GP90 cartridge (GP = Gewehr Patrone, or rifle cartridge), with its 211gr round-nosed iron jacketed and paper patched bullet pushed by a semi-smokeless propellant, only generated about 37,500psi of chamber pressure; about all the Gew.1889 could take. Improvements were clearly needed, and by 1896 a new variant with an action strengthened by the virtue of moving the locking lugs to the front of the bolt sleeve was put into service and designated the Gew.89/96.



RIGHT: Detail of the action. Clearly visible is the helical track on the bolt sleeve, as well as the rear edge of one of the locking lugs which are at the forward edge of the sleeve. The cocking handle is Bakelite. The grooves atop the receiver are lightening cuts. Photo by Oleg Volk.





Fortified with a stronger rifle, work began on a new cartridge. By 1911, the Swiss army adopted a modern cupro-nickel jacketed spire point 174gr bullet. Fired from a rifle-length barrel the new GP11 round offered an amazing 600 foot-per-second advantage over the old GP90, and while production ramped up on the new Gew.1911 rifles, old Gew.89/96 rifles were converted to the new Gew.96/11 standard. (The original Gew.1889 was, obviously, unsuited for conversion, as the 45k+ chamber pressures of the new round would turn the older design into a clumsily long pipe bomb.)

LEFT: Detail of the muzzle end. Note the upturned stacking rod tip to minimize the chances of snagging on underbrush, and the hinged barrel band secured by a screw so as to keep it from crushing the stock onto the free-floated barrel. Photo by Oleg Volk.


The 96/11, like the example shown here which was originally produced at Solothurn in 1900, exhibits the craftsmanship one would expect from a rifle made by the Swiss. The barrel bands are piano-hinged and tensioned with screws, rather than just being slid on and retained with leaf springs like most rifles. The walnut stock was carefully inlet to float the barrel and was prevented from swelling and touching the barrel at the muzzle end by a metal collar insert that surrounded the barrel. 89/96 rifles being brought up to 96/11 standards had pistol grips expertly inlet into their stocks in a display of woodworking skill rarely found on nice furniture these days.


RIGHT: Closeup showing the ring-type safety/decocker and the exquisite inletting of the pistol grip into the existing stock. Photo by Oleg Volk.





The rear sight, in keeping with the doctrines of the time, was graduated to 2,000 meters. Windage adjustments could be made by an armorer drifting the dovetailed front sight, which was unprotected by wings or a hood. The 96/11 replaced the 12 round magazine of earlier rifles with a 6 round magazine that protruded less and didn't interfere with carrying the rifle at the balance. The magazine cutoff, an archaic device intended to keep troops from "wasting ammunition", was also discarded on the newer rifles. Like all other rifles based on the Schmidt design, the 96/11 used a large ring on the rear of the striker as a combination safety/decocker, and it could also be used to cock the rifle for another try at a hard primer.

Though its length and weight betrayed its 19th Century origins, the Gew.96/11 and Gew.1911 served their country as frontline rifles until the 1930s, when they were relegated to reserve status with the adoption of the K31 carbine. Many remained in the hands of reservists well into the era of the automatic rifle before being sold off as surplus. The older Schmidt-Rubins are not seen anywhere near as often on the US collector scene as the recently-surplussed K31. Whereas older Gew.89 and 89/96 rifles are handloader-only curiosities, the 96/11 can handle modern Swiss 7.5x55, which can be found in surplus GP11 form as well as in commercial loadings from FNM, Wolf, Norma, and others. Prices for a good 96/11 can range anywhere from roughly $100 for an ugly one to as much as $400 for one in outstanding condition. Along with Finnish Mosins, the Swiss Schmidts are some of the most accurate bolt action military rifles ever made, and fortunate is the collector who gets his or her hands on a nice one.

Gew. 71 Vetterli: A 19th Century assault rifle.

The year is 1869. The U.S. military is pondering the cheapest way to convert its overstock of muzzleloading Springfields to single shot breechloaders, and the British are doing likewise with their large supply of P1853 Enfields. For countries whose only real zones of conflict are scattered brushfire wars against primitively-armed opponents, this is a cost-effective move. Continental European armies, however, are driven by a more serious imperative: The Prussians. For twenty years now, the Prussian soldier has been issued a veritable wonder-weapon: a single-shot breechloading bolt-action rifle, the Dreyse "Needle Gun", and has demonstrated its effectiveness against both the Danes and the Austrians. The French, ever anxious of their arch foes across the Rhine, have responded by fielding a similar arm; the Mle. 1866 Chassepot. Both of these rifles used primitive, combustible cases that were vulnerable to damp and mishandling, but the ability to fire from prone or kneeling and still reload rapidly that they granted their users was a large leap forward over the awkward frontstuffers of the day.

Rightly paranoid of the saber-rattling powers on their northern border, and ever-jealous of their independence and neutrality, the tiny nation of Switzerland responded with a weapon that, compared to other standard infantry arms of its time, was pure science fiction: The Gew. 1869 Vetterli.


ABOVE: Gew. 71 Vetterli. Photo by Oleg Volk.

While the Prussians and French had to worry about gasses blowing back into their face from badly-sealed breeches, and fumble with loose rounds after every shot, the Swiss rifleman had a 12-shot breechloading turnbolt that used self-contained metallic cartridges. The 10.4x38R rimfire cartridge was no great shakes ballistically, lobbing a 334gr bullet at a leisurely 1345fps, but magazine capacity can cover a multitude of sins, especially in the hands of of an experienced rifleman, a commodity that the Swiss have never lacked.

ABOVE: 10.43x38R, flanked by 7.62x51 NATO and 5.56x45 NATO.

The mechanism of the Vetterli was simplicity itself, being drawn from the 1866 Winchester; the bolt operated a bellcrank that knocked the cartridge lifter up and down. The bolt cocked itself on opening, and dual firing pins helped mitigate the occasional priming deficiencies of the rimfire cartridge.

ABOVE: Gew. 71 Vetterli action detail. Photo by Oleg Volk.

Never tested in battle, and superceded in only 14 years by the excellent Schmidt-Rubin series of rifles, the Vetterli often draws fire for its anemic cartridge and rear locking lugs, but compared to every other service rifle of the day, the fact remains that the Swiss were issuing the future while everyone else was still fumbling in the past.