660 Code 1940 K98k, But What Is It??

[DUV44]

Greetings all,

I'm thinking about letting go of a rifle or two and decided to drag this one out of the safe to take some pictures of it. It's obviously a very salty 660 code K98 made in 1940, but it obviously spent some time in another country. The bolt parts have a "V" and "T" marking that I am not familiar with. There are no markings on the stock that I can see other than the very worn one pictured just forward of the bolt knob cutout. It's nearly a complete mix master other than the trigger guard and floor plate, which match themselves. Any ideas on where this one may have come from? My first thought was a Yugo or Russian capture that never got the refurb treatment. It has a small CAI import mark at the muzzle. Any info is appreciated!

 

[bnz41john]

Most likely imported out of the balkans. These rifles tend to follow a similar pattern to the romainian "captured" k98ks. Except they tend to have the acceptances and fire proofs mostly intact. Sometimes they can be mostly matching with a decent amount of original finish left, but most of the time they look closer to yours here. In this case the "balkans" is obviously a wide range of countries, what I would consider Greece to Croatia or Slovenia. It is of my understanding that alot of these "balkan captures" were some how accumulated by Albania over the years before finally being sold off. So that's where most of these were imported from.

Really cool rifle in my opinion, if one was wanting to study postwar used k98ks I think this would be a interesting one to have!

 

[Stan]

Possible from Albania. CAI imported a lot of Mausers from the Balkans at the time of late 80's and 90's. The speculation at the time was the Romanian rifles were heavily defaced of German proofs and acceptance markings, but the Albanian ones were not. Condition issues are prevalent for both. Often the end users can be hard to pin down second, or third hand! They are mostly mismatched to some degree for both as well.

 

[DUV44]

Thanks for the info guys!