After buying a Swiss K31 Schmidt-Rubin straight-pull bolt-action rifle, I decided to make a small collection of that action type. My preferred gunshop, The Frontiersman (at 394 and Louisiana Blvd., in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis), had a Hungarian M1895/M31 on the rack, and so I bought it.
This one has an awful trigger pull, and the front sight is battered loose enough to be useless (in spite of all the awful peening on the dovetail). Probably some apprentice at the arsenal reworked this thing on his first day on the job, back in 1931 when these guns were rebuilt, or else some Bulgarian policeman messed with his rifle, thinking he knew what he was doing. The front sight condition is just sheer incompetence, but the sear over-engagement which gives the heavy trigger pull could be generously chalked up to and end-of-friday job where the worker cut some corners to get this thing off his bench.
As I understand it, the fact that I have an integral sight base instead of a shrunk-on barrelband front-sight (see picture of the bayonet-fitted rifle at the bottom of the page), combined with the fact that it originally had sling swivels on the underside as well as the side of the stock means that it was originally built as a stutzen variant, rather than being a long rifle chopped during the 1931 re-arsenaling.
In spite of my misgivings, I bought it. It's a really light and handy carbine, having about a 19" barrel, and somewhere around a 1 meter overall length. Also, the 1-piece bolt head should in theory be stronger than the Schmidt-Rubin's 2-piece head (non-rotating bolt face), albeit at the cost of harder extraction. The controlled-round feeding of the Mauser-type claw extractor is another plus in favor of its inherent design.
Right side of the gun, showing the serial number stamped into the stock, and the distinctive shape of the magazine.
Note the unusual placement of the lower sling swivel in this view of the left side of the gun. Tends to get in the way of one's fingers, but I'm told this was originally for cavalrymen, where I guess a short length between the sling swivels means the rifle can be snugged up tighter when slung across the back. This is important when riding a galloping horse because it really hurts to be battered by something heavy flopping around on your back.
The finish on the left side of the gun is mostly worn off, presumably from being carried slung. It doesn't show up well in these pictures, but the shellac (?) is thin/gone on this side. I'm going to try touching that up, in order to preserve the wood.
Here's a view of the reciever, bolt handle, safety, and 'cocking piece' of the bolt. The cocking piece is the rod with the knurled flange sticking up from the top of it, and is screwed into the firing pin inside the bolt body. The sear engages a notch or 'hook' in the underside of this, and holds it back until the trigger is pulled. (Pulled really hard, in the case of my rifle). The striated lever on the far side of the bolt handle is the safety. Flip the lever up, and it locks the cocking piece in place, preventing the firing pin from going forward. The cocking piece is knurled so that in theory, you can lower the cocking piece to the 'down' position, where it's not under spring tension, so pulling the trigger won't make the gun go off. In practice, the problem is that the firing pin then rides directly on the primer, and a hard blow to the cocking piece (or dropping the gun butt-first hard enough to bounce the cocking piece and firing pin) could set the gun off. The safety design on this gun allows the safety to be set while the piece is uncocked (see the notch in the cocking piece behind the safety), blocking the firing pin from going forward; but I still wouldn't trust it.
Remember, all guns are always loaded all of the time. Even if you just looked to make sure it's not loaded, treat it as if it's loaded with the safety off.
Also, never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy. This means that if you're lifting it up to look over the sights, point it at a concrete wall or floor if possible.
Last, keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. You see entirely too many people who should know better, doing this. Don't be afraid to tell them. Beware anyone who is cavalier about doing this, they're likely to be cavalier about other things.
You pretty much can't have a life-changing disaster without breaking at least one and likely more of these rules. Obey them, and there will be no accidents, only negligence.
Here's the famed Mannlicher-design magazine, with the well at the bottom that the funky stripper clip gets ejected out of when the gun is empty.
The ball-tipped rod next to the muzzle is the stacking rod. Take three rifles, put the muzzle ends together with the stacking rods passing between the muzzle and stacking rod of another rifle, and they'll hold up in a nice pyramid which keeps them out of the dirt/mud/snow. The dimples in the top of the sight ramp were someone's incompetent attempt to peen the front sight in place to keep it from moving. The problem is that if you get it wrong, you'll just screw up the metal and won't do anything to keep the sight in place.
While attempting to remove the front sight, I discovered another thing wrong with this rifle. The front sight did not want to come off, pushing it from left to right. (The convention is that sights are installed right to left, so you reverse this to remove them). Driving it out right to left removed it easily tho. Examining a good-condition front sight (bought from Tennessee Gun Parts), I found that the left side of the sight dovetail (as seen while facing downrange) is 0.210" in width, while the right side of the dovetail is 0.215" in width. So it's pretty plainly meant to go on from right to left, and whoever screwed up this job included driving the sight on from the wrong direction among his litany of sins.
As I understand it, the front sight dovetail happens to be the same as that of a Mauser 98 rifle; so you can readily use Mauser front sights if you desire. (Such as a higher front sight to fix up the tendency of these guns to shoot high at close range).
There are some serious dings in the stock. By the waffle pattern in the ones on the underside of the stock, I'm guessing that they're the result of some incompetent clamping when the gun was re-arsenaled. Here's the comb (top) of the buttstock.
This is the belly of the buttstock. Note the waffle-like impressions on the dings, just behind the grip, leading me to think this was just clamped into a vise at some point in its history. The oval inlay is probably a filler from the re-arsenaling, when they removed the sling swivels from the underside of the stock and left just the ones on the side. The minor dings on the toe of the stock look like normal wear from carrying the gun around (slung over the shoulder) and having it bang into things.
Here are the parts arranged in roughly the orientation they'd be in, when the bolt is closed and the head rotated to lock it into the reciever for firing. The bolt head is spring-loaded, and so tends to snap into this orientation whenever it's not under tension. If you want to prop the bolt head out (in order to fit it into the action, for example), use a dime or piece of metal of similar width, between the bolt body and head.
I cleaned the bore with some Crud Cutter, just to remind myself what a lousy job that stuff does compared to Hoppe's. After a couple of patches, got the patch coming out reasonably gray instead of dark. Soaked a patch with Hoppe's, and it started coming out dark again. After that came back reasonably clean, I tried some J-B cleaning paste (sort of an abrasive grease-like substance) on a patch, in spite of Gale McMillan's warning never to use the stuff on a good bore. I figured this was a cruddy bore, had lots of fouling and probably rust from corrosive ammunition, but the rifling was still pretty sharp, so there's no harm in polishing it up a bit. Here's the results of a few passes with the J-B paste. Lots of crud being wiped out. Looks great to me.
As a side note, MPro-7 is just as useless as Crud Cutter. If you want to clean something up well, get Hoppe's. (tho I'm told that Hoppe's is little more than brake cleaner that doesn't smell bad, and Ed's Red beats it for price and performance. Haven't tried making a bucket of Ed's Red yet.)
Bolt removed, looking down the bore to see the rifling. (Ya, ya, get that James Bond music out of your head). This is one way to get a rough alignment of the sights. Fix the gun in a vise or rest of some sort, point it at some target a ways away, then align the sights to match where the bore is pointed. This will likely at least get you 'on the paper' at a reasonable range, without firing a shot.
The rear sight is one of the serious flaws of this gun. The notch is tiny and therefore hard to use. The sights are graduated for a minimum distance of 500 Schritt (a 'Schritt' or 'pace' is about 30"), and so bullets strike really high at short range. For the 500 Schritt setting, the 'ladder' sight is left lying down, and the other notch (seen from above in this picture, and so not easily visible) used. For 600 Schritt to 2400 Schritt, flip up the ladder part of the sight, and move the slider (here set at 600 Schritt) to the appropriate distance. This would likely only be done when whole units were commanded to fire in volleys, hoping to hit other masses of troops at those extreme ranges. The bayonets for this rifle had a post sticking up from their crossguard, on the top side of the ring that locked them to the barrel, which was higher than the front sight. This lowered the point of impact and made it a bit more reasonable to use at closer range.
Here's a picture of the front sight on the bayonet muzzle ring. It is not to "compensate for the weight of the bayonet" or any such drivel, as other websites propose. It's just to solve the fact that the main sights are set for too long a range. The reason the sights are set for such a long range is probably because doctrine at the time was that soldiers should shoot for the belt buckle of their target... so with the sights set as they were, no sight adjustment would be needed at any range where the solders wouldn't be firing in volleys on command.
Never mind the fact that by the 1930s, armies had generally stopped standing up in order to allow the enemy to shoot at them. 
