Bolt Action Rifles. Wayne Zwoll
the gun was mine and I had only a few bucks to play with, I’d leave it alone. Here’s why:
The 8mm bore limits rechambering to wildcat cartridges only – the 8mm/06, for example. The action’s too short for the 8mm Remington Magnum unless you want to remove some of the lower lug buttress. You’d have to lengthen the magazine and open the bolt face for the magnum as well. Even the 8mm/06 would require a longer box.
Rebarreling to 280, 30-06 or 35 Whelen would be another option. You’d still need the longer box, and the fitted barrel would cost at least $200. Drilling for scope bases, altering the safety and installing a new trigger will jack the cost above the price of a commercial sporting rifle.
No matter what you do with that 98—even if you handload 8x57s above factory specs— you’ll do well to have it Rockwell tested for hardness. Unlike Winchester 70s and Rem-ington 700s that are built of chrome-moly steel, Mausers were of carbon steel, heated to harden the surface. This "shell" around the soft steel action core may be only .004" thick, Mauser Legacy and its hardness will vary. Some parts may not be treated at all. Mausers built late in the war are notoriously unpredictable in this regard. Your receiver should test 38-42 on the Rockwell C scale. The bolt is best treated to Rockwell 42-46, so it operates smoothly.Thickness of the hardened surface should be .015", according to a gunsmith friend of mine.If your 98 doesn’t make the grade, you can have it heat-treated, another expense.
You may want to keep your 98 for those foul-weather days in deer cover when a receiver sight and century-old cartridge are all you need. That would be my inclination.
Sincerely,
Wayne van Zwoll
I wrote that note more than a decade ago. Many hundreds of similar responses to similar questions had no doubt chattered off the carriages of manual typewriters for decades previous. The fall of the Third Reich brought a flood of battle-bruised Mausers stateside. Soldiers had learned to respect this rifle, not as quick to repeat as a Garand, but sturdy, reliable and accurate. Returning G.I.s properly looked upon it as the sound basis for a custom rifle. They set about rechambering, rebarrel-ing and restocking. The best work could turn a pitted veteran of the Ardennes into a veritable work of art. But in their haste to revamp and refurbish, to make American rifles of war trophies, American shooters overlooked the merits of both the rifle as issued, and the cartridge that conquered Europe. While Mauser 1898 infantry rifles lack the refinements coveted by hunters, it now seems a shame that so many 98s were sacrificed in crude attempts to make them like sporting rifles that were easily affordable. Beaten-up Mausers may have served no better purpose, but not all rifles liberated had been beaten up. American cartridges naturally had more appeal to soldiers on the lookout for a cheap hunting rifle. But the 8x57 was no pipsqueak round. In fact, developments in military 8x57 ammunition set the evolutionary course for our ‘06.
The rimless, smokeless 8x57 clearly outperformed the 30-40 Krag. Beginning in 1900, when Army Ordnance set out to design a new infantry round, it fashioned the 30-03 after the 8x57. The original loading of a 220-grain, full-jacket 308 bullet at 2300 fps was essentially a match for the 8x57’s 236-grain load at 2100 fps. About a year after the 30-03 entered service, however, Germany came up with a new bullet and load: a 154-grain spitzer that rocketed downrange at 2800 fps. The U.S. had to respond. Its Ball Cartridge, Caliber 30, Model 1906 featured a 150-grain pointed bullet at 2700 fps. Because the bullet was somewhat shorter than its predecessor, case dimensions were changed. The 30-06 that resulted has a hull .07" shorter than that of the 30-03: 2.494 inches. Pursuant to the change, all 30-03 rifles were recalled and rechambered. In battle, the 8x57 and 30-06 proved deadly equals. Hunters who’ve since loaded or sought out commercial high-performance 8x57 ammunition will tell you it’s as versatile as the ‘06 on big game. Sadly, the standard loads most accessible to sportsmen in this country feature round-nose bullets at modest velocities. They’re good deer killers but hardly show the potential of the round.
If you were to start a book on bolt-action rifles, you could start it with America’s first, or the earliest evidence of a turnbolt breech, but you’d run into lots of short dead-ends. The story really begins with Peter Paul Mauser and his brother Wilhelm, whose struggle to develop acceptable bolt-action rifles for the Prussian army resulted in the 1898 rifle. From there, and from the 8x57 cartridge, has evolved the modern bolt-action rifle in its myriad forms and chamberings. Soldiers, hunters and target shooters the world over have confirmed its utility. Even now, when gas-operated autoloaders shoot sub-minute groups at long range, sportsmen and snipers remain loyal to the bolt action and its powerful cartridges. Here’s the story, distilled, from the beginning.
Wayne’s 358 Norma Magnum is a rebarreled Mauser with Leupold scope.
Wayne’s 458 has a Mauser action with receiver sight mounted on the bolt release.
The Mauser has taken many forms. This sleek safari rifle in 416 Rigby shows Mauser heritage.
Mauser
A hundred years ago Teddy Roosevelt was spurring his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, while Alaskan gold tugged prospectors, nose to heel, over Chilkoot Pass. On the other side of the Atlantic, a German inventor finished work on a firearm that would outlast memories of both the Maine and the Klondike. Almost all bolt-action sporting rifles now in use can be traced to Paul Mauser’s Model 1898, a design that capped two decades of invention and refinement.
Peter Paul Mauser was born the youngest of 13 children in 1838 in the Swabian village of Oberndorf in Wuerttemberg. Brother Wil-helm, next oldest and four years his senior, would later work with him as a partner. Wil-helm’s business acumen complemented Paul’s mechanical talent. Unfortunately, the union was to be severed by Wilhelm’s untimely death in 1882.
Unlike manufacturers now, Paul Mauser did not merely fashion a rifle to function with existing cartridges — for several reasons. First, the self-contained metallic cartridge was still relatively new in the 1860s when the young entrepreneur began his work in earnest. Secondly, blackpowder would soon be supplanted by smokeless, which radically altered the requisites and opportunities in rifle and cartridge design. And finally, the standardization we take for granted did not then exist. At the turn of the century, many sportsmen had more ammunition options than their counterparts have today!
The Mauser cartridge line began with the 11.15x60R, a 43-caliber blackpowder round designed for the Model 71 single-shot Mauser rifle that became a repeater as the 71/84. Loaded for a time by Remington and Winchester, the 11mm Mauser fared poorly against the 45-70 in the States, though it had an enthusiastic following of sportsmen in Europe. In 1887, just 16 years after the German military establishment adopted the 11mm, Turkey equipped its army with the last Mauser-designed blackpowder cartridge: the 9.5x60R. Chambered in the 71/84, which soon gave way to the Model 1889-pattern Mauser rifle and the smokeless 7.65x53 Mauser cartridge, the 9.5x60R was also used in Peabody-Martini single-shot rifles.
In 1892 Paul Mauser developed what is still the darling of deer and sheep hunters and for a time became the most popular military round in the world. The 7x57 was first chambered in a limited number of Model 92 Mausers by the Spanish government, which shortly replaced the 92 (a modified 1889) with the improved 1893. This rifle and cartridge soon popped up in arsenals all over South and Central America. The 7x57 Mauser is the only 19th-century military cartridge still commonly chambered in sporting rifles.
Oddly enough, the most famous Mauser cartridge of all, the 8mm, came not out of Paul Mauser’s shop, but from German Infantry Board engineers at Spandau Arsenal. Initially designed for the Gewehr 88 (a modified Mannlicher, not a Mauser), the 8x57 was really a 7.92x57, with a round-nose, 226-grain, .318-inch bullet at about 2100 fps. In 1898 the superior Mauser rifle supplanted the Mannlicher derivation, but Germany did not change cartridges.