Mitchell’s Mausers are overpriced fantasy pieces that are heavily humped and dinked for those with a flavour for pimpshining (pretty and bling bling) and that new car smell.
That's exactly what Mitchell's offerings are. However, many of the pieces they offer just aren't available without a lot of searching. I've seen a couple of MMs and IMHO they were very pretty representatives of the TYPE. I could swear some of the K98s were Yugo made and later stamped to look like they were German. I saw a couple of the Mauser pistols and Lugers they offered. They were all heavily polished to remove pits etc. The Lugers at least had been rebarreled. The C96 Mausers had 75% bores.
For the price, which IMHO was to high, you get a completely refinished firearm, likely with post period replacement parts of dubious quality that is to the untrained eye, very pretty and a decent, shootable representative piece that won't gain in value.
IMHO the East German Police reworks are much more collectible. All were remanufactured to as new condition, while retaining as many matching parts as possible. Great pains were taken to keep all serviceable parts together.
I had one of those. I was told it was a capture. I was duped and through my own lack of knowledge, I likely had a rifle that came out of a damaged warehouse that had suffered from the elements then was refinished. All of it's parts matched, including the capture screws but the wing safety had an electropenciled number. Otherwise it looked like a pristine BYF44, k98, almost fresh from the factory.
I was later informed by an importer I knew that the rifle I had was indeed an East German Police rifle, as a very knowledgeable CGNer had called it when I sent him pics.
I should have known better. I have stripped, cleaned, replaced parts on thousands of K98s when I worked at Lever Arms. They came in from all over the world, of course mostly through import/distributors and often were brought in by Alan himself for resale to those importer/distributors. Looking back, Alan would have laughed at my lack of knowledge. I made the same mistake a lot of people make that repair items. I knew the components inside out and what their relationship was to every other component and when it could go wrong but I had neglected to research the history.
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