It was 1955, and I was a 12-year-old kid hunting deer in Minnesota’s heavy timber northwest angle with my dad. The years after World War II had the USA awash with surplus military rifles of every kind. As such, my rifle, as assigned by dad in those days, was a German Model 98 Mauser chambered in the German military standard 8mm. That was my first rifle, and on the hunt resulted in my first harvested whitetail.
During the years that followed, the Mauser brand in German surplus rifles, and also a few lookalikes in additional brand names, were a major part of my total experience when it came to learning the craft of using a rifle. Model 95s in 7mm, make-over rifles chambered in 30-06 and even .45-70 (large ring) took up their share of space in the old-school-style basement gun room. Even today, far too many years later, I still carry a blue-printed receiver Mark X Mauser that mounts to a custom barrel and is chambered in .224 Valkyrie. Old habits die hard.
With a call from one of my brand contacts in July of this year, I became quickly involved with the introduction of a totally new Mauser, German built and engineered from the
