The rifle is a real pleasant shooter with mild recoil and is considerably easier to load quickly than the Krag. I'm not sure what stained the wood on the left side of the stock, but something obviously did. The Spanish Military frequently stored bolts separately from the rifles in the armories, so it's a rare bird if you were to get a rifle where the bolt matches everything else. All of the numbers are matching to include the stock and handguard, with the exception of the bolt. There were very few, if any, changes made to the design up until this point, so it does make a nice example. Nope, this wasn't used in the Spanish-American war, so I suppose there's the possibility of it being used in the Spanish Civil War, if it saw combat at all. The rifle was manufactured in Spain at the government arsenal in Oviedo in 1928 and there are no import marks. It's always nice when something arrives and is in better condition than you thought. I was actually very pleased with what I received.
The pictures that the previous owner took and the description provided were less than stellar, but the opening bid (which I won it for) was pretty righteous and I thought that I would take a chance with it. I set about finding a good example that I could break out and shoot from time to time and ended up picking the below rifle up off of Gunbroker. Not only was the rifle easier and faster to load, but there was nearly a 25% ballistic advantage over the ammunition that we were using in our own rifles. To think that we fought a war that we won pretty handily and noted that the rifles that the enemy had was a significant improvement over what we carried into battle.
Now that I am a recent US Krag owner, I've given some thought to the idea that you can't really tell the story of the US Krag without the 1893 Spanish Mauser, just as you can't really tell the story of the 1903 Springfield without a US Krag variant. A good example is how when you go to the CMP stores, everybody is looking for something from WW2 when in reality, the 1950's rifles are usually in nicer condition and more correct since they haven't been through nearly as many depot rebuilds. I usually can find them for a good bit cheaper than those with actual history and I can shoot them as much as I want. My collection standards aren't nearly as rigid as the standards of others, simply because I'm ok with a nice representative examples more than I am a museum piece. It shows a timeline of WW2 from when the getting was good to when things were more dire. A "last ditch" Type 99 Arisaka or a Kriegsmodell Mauser go very well with earlier T99's or 98K's. One of the things that I particularly enjoy about collecting old/military firearms is to make sure that I have those that help tell a story, or the history of other rifles in my collection.
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