The rear sight gets hot, too since it’s mounted on the barrel through a slot in the upper handguard. Maybe not a big deal, but the barrel gets damned hot after a few rounds and that extra protection is nice when handling the weapon after putting it through its paces. The upper handguard on the M48 covers the barrel all the way back to the receiver, while the K98k only goes back to the front edge of the rear sights. Several features of the rifles are different too. According to my scale, my M48B comes in at 8.2 pounds unloaded.Īn attitude of gratitude is never a bad thing. The M48 is in the same range, with 8.6 pounds being the standard. The listed weight for the K98k is 8.2 to 9 pounds. The weight of both rifles can vary by a few ounces either way. The M48 is not quite an inch shorter in overall length, measuring 42.75 inches, with a 23.25-inch barrel compared to 23.62 inches for the K98k.

The M48 was not a carbon copy of the K98k, though there are similarities. Preduzece 44 was later known as the “Red Banner” plant. Even though the bolt action infantry rifle was pretty much obsolete by then, the Yugoslavians set up the Preduzece 44 facility (part of Zastava) to manufacture what became the M48 Mauser variant. The KAR 98 was the standard-issue infantry rifle for the Wehrmacht right through the end of the war. As part of the reparations Germany had to pay after World War II, Yugoslavia received tooling and equipment to make the Mauser 98, specifically the Karabiner 98 kurz (K98k or KAR 98) version. One of the best examples of the Mauser series was not manufactured in Germany, but in Yugoslavia in the late 1940s and 1950s. This article originally ran in March of 2017.

Yugoslavian m48 mauser parts