BYF 42 Shooter

[John Sabato]

Originally Posted by sheepherder

Nice looking 42 Mauser! It looks like someone dripped orange juice on the chamber, but that's no biggie!

Actually, there could be a very good reason for those spots. I owned a byf 41 that had a much larger area where the bluing had been removed.

I bought the gun from the vet who brought it back. It had been in his closet for at least 3 decades. He told me that when he found a dead German soldier with the P.08 in his hand, he reached for it, but his foxhole buddy jerked him back and told him the gun or the soldier might be booby-trapped. He was correct. The vet told me that he spent more than an hour defusing the trigger to the explosive so he could claim that Luger. The dead soldier's blood had dripped over the top of the gun. When he finally grabbed the gun, he shoved it in the holster and didn't look at it for days (combat kinda kept him pretty busy).

When he finally had time to look at his war trophy, the blood had removed the bluing on the top of the chamber and the toggle where it had dripped.

+1 on Alanint's explanation on the missing sideplate. My father used to do the same thing when we were small. He used to hide the sideplate. (But I still figured out where he kept it! I just wasn't strong enough to pull back the toggle and open the takedown lever to install it! Good thing Huh!)