#Obrez

No this isn’t an edition of Austin’s Hot Gat or Fudd Crap series and I don’t think it was Bubba which got to this particular Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield. No, this Obrez SMLE is probably a little more legitimate. I came across this rifle in a UK MoD collection and it was too unusual not to take a look at.

I recently came across the work of Marcel Thalmann, a Swiss gunsmith, who has been crafting pistols from worn out K31 rifles. As many readers will know the K31 has a reputation for being a beautifully made service rifle used in Swiss service for over 40 years. The K31 is was a refined version of the earlier Schmidt-Rubin Models 1889 and 1911. The straight pull rifles are also renowned for their excellent accuracy so when I saw what is essentially an Obrez K31 I was taken by surprise.

Jim Fuller of Rifle Dynamics recently shared this photograph of a cut down 91/30 Mosin Nagant that was recently taken to his shop by an officer of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who needed some help identifying it. Apparently, the weapon was confiscated from a local criminal in the Las Vegas area.

The pictures are a couple of years old (prior 2009), but interesting nonetheless. Apparently it is a picture from a seized weapons cache in Iraq, later in the war due to the ACU helmet cover on the kevlar laying on the floor. The gas tube is completely removed so I’m pretty sure it is a bolt action. Still, it’s an SKS pistol! The guns in the crate seem to also be of varying designs, some conventional such as the PKM with polymer stock and various AK rifles as well. I can’t tell right off the bat what the compensator is, but it certainly isn’t AR based, the birdcage goes all around, and it tapers from the bottom up. I haven’t included AK modified (Peshawar or otherwise) pistols in this post because they are far too numerous to mention and are a different operating system.