FN Model 1924 Long Rifle Ethiopian Contract
- Thread starter The_Red_Rabbit
- Start date
Back in the late sixties, Alan Lever received a shipment of firearms/curios from Ethiopia. It was a mixed bag of everything Ethiopia had ever owned.
There were cross bows, swords, daggers, flint locks, Jazeels, wheel locks, about twenty different types of military bolt action rifles, cannon, at least a dozen different medium to heavy machine gun types and a few types of submachineguns from Italy, Germany, Russia, France and UK.
They ranged from Junk, barely functional or parts units to brand new in crates, which were very few.
There was a complete setup for about 50 palace guards, including, uniforms, swords, bayonets, and Mauser rifles. These were the most interesting to me at the time, because they were all unserviceable and had been made that way from the factory. None of the Mausers had chambers reamed in their barrels. The swords all had round cutting edges, but could be utilized as clubs and the daggers couldn't be pulled from the scabbards. The bayos were pinned to the rifles and blunted.
Every bit of metal on these items was hard chromed, although some of it was peeling.
I guess whoever was in the palace, maybe the Italians ????? were afraid to give any of the guards functional weapons. Ceremonial purposes only.
I watch videos on YouTube of some of the big US importers bringing in pallets and crates of surplus from around the world (lots from Ethiopia recently it seems). I would love to just walk through a warehouse and see it all in person. I don't blame Canadian importers for not bringing stuff in based on a whole shipment could get confiscated if one wrong item was in the crates.... and with the small Canadian market for surplus, it'd be a big investment with slow returns likely
