Question about RC's

[Anonymous98]

Hello people, I'm new here so I dont know if this is the right place to post this, please excuse me if it isn't.
I was wondering whether or not russian capture kar98ks are more common than other, non "molested" ones.
Are they more common or are American/British/European kar98ks more common?

 

[Muncher 1953]

K98ks made: est 11 million - 14+ million rifles
German soldiers attacking ussr: 3 million & .7 mil Axis allies many K98k equipped

russians systematically collected & “refurbished” captured K98ks & ‘gave’ them as foreign aid to commie client states. as semi & full auto capable rifles became available, countries sold their batches of K98s to people with money (ie in the US)
some western countries used their captured K98ks (Norway, France) but most didn’t, and many, many weps were destroyed to prevent post war insurrections.

some more info here

K98k rifle overview- commonly found on the US market

Back a few years ago 2018, I had a very long post on the now gone forum SRF (Surfpusrifleforum.org) about military surplus K98K rifles commonly found on the us market. In the 2000s there was a flood of surplus Mausers. I wrote a post describing the attributes of each specimen with many research l...

www.treasurebunker.com

 

[Cyrano4747]

I'll self quote from another recent thread:

Looks like a pretty bog standard Russian Captured (RC) K98k.

The Soviets had some pretty significant stockpiles of captured guns after the war, and sometime between then and now they tore them down into their constituent parts, threw out the worn out or broken bits, and re-built working guns out of what remained. Usually zero matching parts. Many (but not all) RC guns have a X mark stamped on the receiver that denotes being a captured weapon. Fewer (again not all) will have the swastikas defaced. The vast majority (again, but not all - my personal hypothesis is that this was a multi-step process and this happened years later) will have the gun refinished with that black finish you see in your pictures, and the stock covered in a thin shellac. Many times (but not always) the bolt was renumbered to match the receiver. Sometimes with an electro pencil, sometimes by having the old number ground off and re-stamped. Looks like yours had the original SN ground off but nothing stamped over. Most of the time (but not always - seeing a pattern?) the stock was numbered to match the gun, as you see on the left side of your stock.

Why go to all this work? The Soviets kept them around as third line weapons. Think the kind of thing you'd hand out on street corners in case of a Barbarossa 2.0: NATO Boogaloo in the 1950s. They were stuck in grease and put into long term storage, which is how they were received by importers in the 90s and 00s. They also gave a bunch of them out as foreign aid. A fair few were captured in Vietnam, for example.

They're not considered as collectable as an original, wartime condition K98k but they are honest rifles with very real history. Personally, I like them. I think they're great starter guns because they avoid a lot of the pitfalls and outright fraud that you can find in more collectable guns. They also tend to make pretty decent shooters, likely because having a shot out barrel was enough to get the receiver tossed during the refurb processes. My favorite shooter is an RC 98k that I use for load development and general screwing around at the range.

edit: oh and the Russians tossed things like the rear sight pin and the front sight. You barrel originally had a front sight, that's what the grooves cut on the side of the FSB are for.

As for if they're more common? That is going to depend a lot on how you define more common. If we're talking raw number of guns? Who knows. You've got all the guns the soviets captured ,but then you also have not only the one brought home by soldiers but also all the non-Russian imports that happened in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc. Remember: fully original 98ks used to be something you bought at the hardware store for $20 to cut up and turn into a cheap deer rifle.

What I can say is that from a collector standpoint post-2000 or so, yeah they're more common. They were being imported in large numbers all through the late 90s and 00s. There was a period when you could go online and get a discount for ordering more than 5 at once. You were kind of getting ripped off if you paid more than ~$150 for one. Meanwhile even by 2000 a lot of the really nice original guns had already disappeared into collections. You weren't going to just log onto AIM Surplus and order a crate of 10 of them to your door for less than the cost of a decent laptop, you were buying off of private sellers or maybe from a gun store that was liquidating a collection.

 

[Firebug90]

On the US market I would say that browsing through Gunbroker and various collector sites I see more RC's than about anything. As Cyrano said, there were oodles and oodles of them imported 20-30 years ago. There are a fair number of Yugo captures out there, too. Vet Bringbacks and pre-'68 imports of relatively unmolested original rifles tend to be a minority (Then you have 80 years of personal owners' "good ideas" for modification but that's another subject). There have been some other small importations of Norwegian, French, Israeli, Ethiopian, etc... K98k's so those are also fairly uncommon but you do see them every now and again.

 

[heavy_mech]

Also those 'Balkan/Romanian' imports. I'd agree with the assessment that what you SEE is RC, especially if including Mitchell's which is what they are. I think it's possible there may actually be more bringback and early unmessed with imports, but most of them remain locked up in collections so the average person doesn't have access to them until the owner (or very often ancestors) decides to finally move them.

Those in the previous category and turds often get seen multiple times in a decade or less as they get passed around. We've seen that here.