11.15x51R Kurz

It is admittedly a compulsion but, methinks, a reasonably admirable one: When an old gun comes my way, I don’t sleep peacefully until I have it shooting again. Over the years, this has led me down some very strange paths, but nothing stranger than the one that began with a whimsical bid on an ancient German Schützen rifle at Rock Island in February.

Like most German Schützens, it looked like something from Brothers Grimm, hanging over the witch’s fireplace as she roasts Hansel on a spit. I picked it up off the rack where it was standing forlornly, absent-mindedly rotated a lever on the tang – Gee, I wonder what this does…? – and found myself holding the rifle in one hand and the entire trigger group in the other. I had to seek help to get it back together, so when it came up in the auction later and the bidding stalled, guilt compelled me to jump in.

Only when I got it home did I look at it really closely. It’s built on an early Martini action probably dating from about 1880. The bore, what I could see of it, looked to be about .44 caliber. The buttplate was loose, it was missing the adjustment screw for the double-set trigger, and from all appearances it had not been cleaned in a century. Getting the initial repairs took me to Lee Shaver’s shop in Lamar, Missouri; for information on German Schützens, he referred me to Bill Loos in New York, one of the authors of Alte Scheibenwaffen, a three-volume, 1,198-page, 14-pound tome on the entire

German Schützen culture dating back 800 years.

Most of the historical information found here originated with those books. Like Alice following the white rabbit down its hole, I had no idea what I was getting into. The rifle is a true Martini, which is significant because the Germans made several dozen variations on it in the period between 1880 and 1935. The only name is “A. Gesinger, Bremen” on the barrel, but he was most likely the retailer, not the maker, and there was no suggestion of what the caliber or chambering might be. It’s quite plain by Schützen standards, but (as can be seen) very photogenic and extremely well made.

There are more such rifles in the U.S. today than anywhere except Germany itself, most of them brought back by returning soldiers in 1945. Because traditionally the detachable sights were stored separately, many of these rifles lack them altogether; and because the sights were usually custom to the rifle, finding replacements is not as easy as checking on eBay. This rifle, fortunately, had the tang (diopter) sight and a

front sight, although whether they were original to the rifle is anyone’s guess. Lee Shaver believes the diopter was fitted afterward. That left the mid-barrel open sight, the main piece of sighting equipment, missing.

Apparently, German target shooters used all three simultaneously, with the diopter serving not as an aperture sight but as an optical aid to sharpen the sight picture of the mid-barrel and front sights. Bill Loos found an old sight in his collection that could be made to fit, however. Lee made the alteration and the rifle was fully sighted and ready to go. This sounds quick but it took several months altogether.

That left only (!) the ammunition question. The first step was to slug the bore; the second was to make a chamber cast. Under the grime, the bore proved to be .440 caliber or, in European parlance, 11.15mm. The chamber cast was less conclusive. As

with most Schützens, the gunmaker omitted to put a step in the chamber for the mouth of the case, simply tapering it gradually to meet the rifling. The base was similar to the old German .43 (11mm) Mauser cartridge, which provided an existing case to start from. How long it was supposed to be, however, will remain a mystery.

Bertram in Australia makes .43 Mauser brass, imported by Huntington Die Specialties. Having obtained a supply, I began cutting it down until I got a workable case that did not stick in the chamber.

Bullets, oddly, were no real problem: Bob Hayley has a mould he had custom-made some years ago to duplicate the original U.M.C. bullet for the .43 Mauser, .43 Spanish and similar cartridges. It’s a roundnose with a hollow base, weighing 370 grains. Redding volunteered to make dies if I could provide some fired cases

to work from. This is easier said than done when you have no dies to make cartridges in the first place.

The base of the .43 Mauser case is oddly shaped by modern standards. It has a rim, but the base itself is convex, so it fits no standard shell holder. Having determined that 2 inches was a good length, I cut some cases, trimmed the mouths and seated primers using a vise. The first time, I crushed the case mouth before the primer was fully seated, so I used a piece of steel rod in the vise to push against the web from inside rather than exerting pressure on the thin brass of the case mouth. This was slow, but it worked fine.

Ron Reiber at Hodgdon advised that a reasonable starting load would be 28 to 30 grains of 4198, either Hodgdon or IMR. With 30 grains, the cases were sticky, so I backed off to 28 grains. By using bits and pieces of other die sets, I managed to cobble together three shootable rounds and sent the cases off to Redding. A month later, a set of dies

arrived bearing the name I had given my makeshift cartridge: 11.15x51R Kurz. I threw in the “Kurz” because it sounded suitably Teutonic, and it is shorter than the .43 Mauser. Whether there was formally such a cartridge in Germany in the 1880s is anyone’s guess.

According to Alte Scheibenwaffen, there were literally dozens of different but very similar cartridges extant during the 1880s and ’90s with, it seemed, every gunsmith offering his own variation on a theme. Since Schützen shooters would obtain a supply of brass, then load their own at each match, a continuing supply of factory ammunition was not a big concern. The diameter (11.15mm) helped to pinpoint its likely year of origin. Just as American target shooters progressed from .44 to .40 to .38 to .32 from the 1880s to 1900, Germans went from 11.15mm down to 10.4, then 9.5 and finally settling on the 8.15 after 1893. My rifle being an 11.15, I figured it was made around 1880, and that fits with its Martini action as well.

To make the cases, I cut off about a quarter-inch using a Dremel tool and thin cutting blade in a bench fixture, then trim to length on a case trimmer, true up the mouth, bevel it inside and out and run the case into the Redding sizing die. The Redding die set included a custom shell holder and a die to bell the case mouth so it does not shave lead or crumple when seating a bullet.

Like many German Martinis, the rifle was built to allow easy take-down without tools – although, as I found out, this does not necessarily translate to easy reassembly. To dismantle it you ease the lever down to take pressure off the main spring, remove the pivot pin holding the breechblock in place and lift it out the top of the action. The entire lower section, including the trigger group, can then be removed by pivoting a lever on the tang 90 degrees. It must be done in that order, and the lower section must be replaced before the breechblock. Even then, there’s a trick to it. Once you get it down, however, it’s remarkably easy.

The trigger is a three-part double-set trigger, standard on high-quality rifles of the time, but some gunmakers provided triggers with up to seven leaves to achieve an almost supernatural degree of sensitivity.

The stechermachermeister (master trigger maker) was a recognized specialty in the German gun trade, and these specialists worked on their own, providing custom trigger groups to gunmakers large and small. The triggers were beautifully made of the finest materials available, and they work astonishingly well. Both Frank de Haas (Single Shot Rifles and Actions) and James J. Grant (Single-Shot Rifles) stated categorically that German set triggers were the best in the

world. In Alte Scheibenwaffen, author Jesse Thompson writes that in more than 30 years of dealing with German set triggers, he never encountered one that was non-functional, except for a few that had been bodgered, to use the English term.

The bore of the rifle was a mess, but repeated applications of lead remover, Hoppe’s No. 9 and finally ultra-fine valve-grinding compound revealed a bore with clean, sharp rifling, although there is some visible roughness.

Since it was originally intended for black powder, I tried a variety (see table) with decidedly mixed results. A straight load of Schuetzen Fg gave remarkable consistency but low velocity. Duplex loads gave higher velocity but wild variations. Given the results, there seemed little point in pursuing duplex loads. A greater compressed load of Schuetzen Fg accomplished little. Swiss Fg and Olde Eynsford 1½ Fg both gave higher velocities, but with more variation.

As the barrel fouled – which it did alarmingly quickly – accuracy dropped off to nothing, by which

I mean, one shot would be near the center of a two-foot square sheet at 200 yards, and the next would miss the paper altogether. At the time, I was also trying to adjust the sights, which is a long way from easy with both the mid-barrel sight and the diopter to regulate, and no real consistency to where the bullets are going. Cleaning the bore after every session was also a chore. Finally, I reverted to H-4198 in an effort to keep the bore clean enough through 10 to 20 shots to get the sights aligned.

The twist rate is 1:20, and the bullet is 1.1 inches long, so even at a velocity as low as 1,050 fps, it should be fully stable. When the bullets did hit the paper, as far out as 200 yards, there was no suggestion of keyholing. My conclusion was that the roughness of the bore combined with severe fouling to deform the bullets enough to throw them off course. As soon as the bore was clean, the bullets began to fly true once again. Incidentally, I noticed no difference in the level of fouling whether I was using straight black powder or the duplex loads. It was all bad.

The 370-grain bullet has a hollow base, allowing it to expand to grip the rifling similar to a Minié ball, so it is not dependent on black-powder ignition to bump it up to bore diameter. However, the fouling could have been tearing at the bullet’s skirt, which would not help.

Whatever the cause, it will require considerably more experimentation to find out what delivers real accuracy, always assuming that anything will. There are just too many question marks with such an old rifle to be confident of ever getting accuracy such as it was presumably capable of originally. These Schützen rifles were extremely accurate even by today’s standards, but they were also temperamental. Everything had to be exactly right. With no idea what the original ammunition consisted of, searching for an accurate combination is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

But (and to me it’s a very big “but”) the old rifle is fully functional, fitted with proper sights with all its little ills corrected and shooting reliably once again. It is also attracting admiring (or at least curious) glances from everyone who sees it. We should all do so well when we hit 140.