[ Luger Carbine ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company.
I'm taking a look at some of the guns that are coming up for sale
in their September of 2016 Premier Auction.
And one that I wanted to take a look at today is a Luger carbine.
Now this sort of thing existed ... for a lot of different guns around the turn of the 1900s,
Luger being no exception.
What people were doing as the automatic pistol was first coming into existence and development,
and people were finally able to get functional self-loading pistols,
everyone immediately then started thinking about,
"Well, what if we put a little bit longer barrel on, and we put on a shoulder stock, and
now we've got this light semi-automatic rifle."
Because proper rifle-calibre semi-auto rifles would take a little bit longer to develop.
They had a lot higher chamber pressure, they were a more difficult mechanical gun to get working.
But once you've got the pistol, it's easy to ... leave the pistol action alone,
and just put rifle accoutrements on it and get yourself a rifle.
And these were somewhat popular.
Everyone made them, they didn't turn out to sell as well as people thought they would.
So these kind of go hand in hand with the shoulder stocks for pistols that were developed.
Now with the Luger this goes back to really the very earliest days
of Luger development and military trials.
Some of the very first trials, the Swiss trials and the Dutch trials of the Luger
in like 1898 and 1900, shoulder stocks were sent along with the test guns.
In the Swiss case they didn't ask for it,
but Georg Luger and DWM apparently kind of looked at it went,
"Well, they might want that
because they kind of liked it on the Borchardt, so we'll send one anyway."
The Dutch trials, the Dutch actually did ask for a shoulder stock version.
And then after that, development kind of progressed over the next couple of years.
They were experimenting with different ways to mount the shoulder stock onto the pistol,
different types of rear sights. ...
The regular Lugers just had a fixed V-notch rear sight,
which is adequate and appropriate on a pistol.
But if you're adding a shoulder stock and a longer barrel,
you're giving people the capability to shoot accurately a bit further.
And so it's worth giving them a rear sight that allows them to exploit that extra range.
So there were a couple of different versions of rear sights that were experimented with.
Ultimately, this all culminated in basically the 1904 / 1905 time period
when most of the actual production Luger carbines were manufactured.
This one included, this is probably a 1905 production gun.
... Like I said, they were popular, sort of.
There were some notable people who had these.
Kaiser Wilhelm II actually is a notable owner and user of a Luger carbine.
And for an interesting reason,
he suffered from having a withered or deformed left arm from his birth
and so he wasn't able to shoot a rifle with both hands.
When he was shooting a bolt-action rifle, hunting for example,
he'd actually have an assistant there to run the action for him.
Which, nyah, that's not so great.
But with a self-loading Luger carbine, he was able to shoot that with only his right hand.
Do it by himself, and do it accurately and well.
Which I'm sure endeared the design to him.
Another notable owner of one of these guns was US President Theodore Roosevelt.
He ... actually apparently had a pretty early one.
It's not entirely clear to me if it was a presentation gun, or if it was one he purchased.
But he had it before he was President.
... Apparently there's some Army [correspondence] from 1902,
... where he's trying to get ammunition for it.
So he apparently had it no later than 1902, which is pretty early.
He and his son actually took it with them
on their 1913 expedition into the Amazon, which is pretty cool.
Anyway, let's go ahead and take a closer look here.
I'll show you some of the details of this one,
which is kind of the standard production Luger carbine pattern.
There weren't many of these made, but when you find them
this is pretty much how they ought to look.
So the major modifications made here,
of course the lengthened barrel, this is a 300mm barrel.
Which would be about 11.8 inches.
The shoulder stock added on the back.
Now this uses the same mechanism as the other detachable shoulder stocks on Lugers.
Most notably the 1904 German Navy Lugers used the same type of stock lug.
Although the Navy Lugers had a flat board instead of a full-figured stock like that.
And then of course the rear sight which is distinctive to the Luger carbines.
So the very first sights were actually mounted back here on the toggle
on the early developmental versions of the carbines.
And those were adjustable out to 600 metres.
That stems initially from the Chilean Army prototypes and trials models.
Now the ones that were actually produced [for] the large commercial production,
well, large as far as these were ever produced in large numbers.
In total somewhere between like 2,000 and 2,300
of these standard production Luger carbines were made.
That doesn't include the early developmental prototypes, but just the run of the ones like this.
Anyway, this has a rear sight that goes out to 300 metres.
We push in this button and we can slide this back.
It'll latch at 100, 200, 250 there, and 300.
And it simply elevates the rear sight notch up.
Now these carbines are in 7.65 Parabellum calibre, 7.65 Luger.
It's a nice little bottle-necked cartridge.
It was the cartridge used by a lot of the early Lugers, including the Swiss adopted guns.
It was the German military adopting the 9mm version
that really started the 9mm on its way to becoming a world standard cartridge like it is today.
One of the better features of the Luger compared to some of its competitors in this carbine realm,
is that the forend here is actually attached directly to the frame, not to the barrel.
So the Luger is a short recoil gun, meaning that when you fire
the whole barrel assembly has to recoil backwards in order to unlock the toggle.
On some of the competitive guns, most notably the Mannlicher pistol carbines,
this forestock was actually attached to the barrel.
So if you held onto it tightly, you forced the gun to malfunction when it fired.
On the Luger however, you could have a nice tight hold on the forend
and the gun would still operate properly.
We can actually take this off and take a look at how it's connected.
Go with a Universal Disassembly Tool once again here.
We just have a wedge going through the stock there.
Pull out like that, and then rotate this forward and off.
Now something to take a look at here, we actually have a little plunger and spring
in the front of the stock, right there.
That's a helper spring, because this barrel is about ... three times as long ... as a standard Luger,
and so this just gives it a little bit of extra oomph to go back into battery.
So it's not all dependent on the mainspring.
That's pretty much all you've got in there.
Nice finish. You'll notice ... the last three digits of the serial number
are repeated on the inside of the forend there.
Nice checkering on the outside.
And then ... here you can see this support that's built into the frame, comes out.
It's got a little cross hole in it for the wedge to hold the forend in place.
You've got this lug on the front, ... that's what the helper spring connects to.
And the full serial number of the gun is right here on the bottom.
So this is 24,158.
These production carbines, ... they are not a complete unbroken serial number chain,
but they start generally in the 21,000 - 22,000 range, and they run up into the high 24,000s.
So that's where you'll find these, this serial number is appropriate.
You'll also find the last two digits of that serial number on a number of the parts.
58 here and here.
We also have it on the stock itself, the last three, 158, right there.
... And the back of the toggle itself is numbered, 58.
Now the front sight on these is also different from a standard Luger.
It's got this nice serrated anti-glare blade coming up
to a kind of a round bead of a front sight.
So this actually gives you a really quite nice sight picture,
with the bead ... and then the rear notch up here.
These were manufactured by DWM, so they will have a DWM script logo on the toggle there.
And that's pretty much it for markings.
Some of them you will find commercial proofed here on the side, but not all of them.
To be honest I'm not entirely sure at this point
what the difference is with the ones that are, and are not.
Magazines on these are totally normal, exactly the same as a standard Luger.
Just like that.
The stocks attach with this swinging lever and a lug on the back of the grip.
If you have a Luger you'll probably find that stock attachment on it,
virtually all of them were made with that attachment.
Although very few were actually sent with stocks.
Now to remove the stock we just rotate the lever down,
and then the stock pivots off like so.
So we have a ... groove that matches this lug on the back of the pistol.
Once the stock is on all the way, rotating this lever up locks it in position.
Now one of the developmental things that was done
was to strengthen and lengthen this tang ... and put in two connecting screws.
A lot of the early guns, for example Teddy Roosevelt's,
... it has a shorter tang with only one screw, like that.
So when they got into the actual final commercial production of these, you'll find them with two.
The butt plate was made out of horn, although there are a lot of reproductions
that have been floating around since like the 1970s, if not earlier.
But some cool detail on the butt plates, like this extra little bit of just fanciness.
It's not just a flat butt plate, it's actually fitted, it has a little point like that in there.
So, same with the checkering.
It's a nice high-end commercial gun.
These in 1904 were selling for about $50.
Which was about double the price of a typical standard Luger pistol,
which would have been about 25. ...
If you convert that into 2016 dollars, you're looking at about $1,200 or $1,300 for the stocked carbine,
and about half of that for a standard pistol.
Now I mentioned that these weren't all that popular.
DWM made this relatively large (a couple of thousand gun) production run in 1904 and 1905.
And then that was it, pretty much, they stopped producing them at that point.
And they stayed in catalogues until at least World War One,
with the price steadily dropping over time.
It turned out there just weren't a lot of people who wanted to spend the extra money
on a stocked carbine version like this, which really was kind of of limited value.
Even today we would kind of recognise that ...
because it's just a small pistol calibre, it's kind of underpowered for a rifle.
But, as you can see here, as a pistol it's rather overly large and bulky.
And so it took them a while to sell these off.
There were more made in the 1920s.
Those are of much more dubious provenance.
The ones that were actually made by DWM
(as opposed to being manufactured later by, well, just call it after-market folks),
the ones made by DWM were pretty much thrown together with random extra parts they had left over.
At that point in the 1920s there were some economic issues worldwide, certainly in Germany,
and the US was seen as a better market for a lot of this sort of thing.
So they figured they could try and make some sales in the US with parts they already had
rather than having to manufacture anything new.
So ... this would be probably considered a 1902 pattern carbine, manufactured in '04 or '05.
These, at least to me, are much more representative of
what DWM was actually manufacturing for people in the realm of a Luger carbine.
Thanks for watching guys, hope you enjoyed the video.
Definitely one of the most scarce and rare major variants of the Luger here.
And a really cool gun, they look good, they handle nicely, they are just pretty darn cool.
If you'd be interested in adding this one to your own personal collection,
of course it is coming up for sale.
Take a look at the description text below,
you'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on the gun.
And you can see their pictures and description, and place a bid right there online,
or come down here to the auction house and participate in person.
Thanks for watching.