Building a Wooden Mountain Hunters K98K Mauser Rifle

This will be a scoped Mountain Hunters version of the Karabiner 98 Kurz Rifle of WWII, which was used by the Nazi SS, police units, Paras and mountain hunters. The K98 bolt action rifle was designed by Mauser in 1935 to replace the Gewehr 98, with a more accurate and reliable rifle and utilized a five round stripper clip of 7.92x57mm ammunition.

On to the build... Start with plenty of research as usual, get loads of pictures, then I drew the rifle to scale, and hopefully I've got it right. Here in the first set of pictures you can see I started working on the bolt assembly (non-working, purely for display purposes), and the barrel end and clamp rings.

Non of the parts are fixed together yet, that will come later on in the build when more parts are ready and it looks like it's going to assembly correctly.

Now the next bit is the completed rifle... I'm having to get a rattle on... a tad behind and too many tea breaks... so my apologies.

Anyway, as you can see, this cheeky little devil took a fair bit of work, but the end result looks cracking, so much so that I didn't want to let it go. The telescopic sight was tricky to attach, since the genuine K98K's had to go back to the gun smith for modification, in order for the scope to attach the LHS, overhang to the centre line of the rifle and not impede loading and bolt action.

The rifle you see here is predominantly made from pine, whereas the early 98k stocks were made from one piece walnut, which is a little expensive, but would have looked amazing. The stocks were later changed to walnut and beech laminates too reduce the cost and manufacturing time, and increase strength.

Many thanks for viewing my work, and I hope you liked this one as much as I did.

Next onto a wooden model Enfield No.4 rifle, WWII 1942, so look out for the posts.