These open sights, while perhaps not identical to those on the original military rifle, are nevertheless a close facsimile. The hood over the front sight has two holes for screwdriver access, should you wish to adjust the position of the front blade. The rear sight has micrometer adjustment for both windage and elevation. I guess if you bought this rifle for its military connection then you would most likely do your plinking with the open sights that come as standard on the K98.
However, the safety did its job flawlessly, so I cannot complain about that. There was no resistance, or positivity, to the thumbing of the safety catch to Fire position, which I found a little disconcerting. It must be thumbed forward to enable a shot to be fired. There was only a hint of creep.Ĭocking the rifle activates the automatic safety catch. I measured the weight of pull with my trigger scales and found a consistent 2.6 pounds, or 1.2 kilos.
The manual says that the first stage take-up weight of pull can be varied from 0.66 to 0.84 pounds and the second stage actual trigger release from 0.88 to 1.1 pounds. Access holes in the trigger guard allow the necessary tools to be inserted for adjusting the trigger pull.
The Diana Mauser K98 is fitted with Diana’s T06 adjustable trigger. The bottom of the cylinder, exposed by the opening of the loading port, is slotted and any pellet that drops through the slot will drop into the lever mechanism and prove difficult to retrieve. One issue to be careful of is dropping a pellet when attempting to insert it into the barrel chamber. This lever moves back with the piston as the rifle is cocked and must be pressed to lock the cocked spring in place. There is a small locking lever beside the rear sight. Cocking this powerful springer requires a bit of careful technique and is definitely an adult operation.
The effort to cock this big springer was not made any easier by the relatively slippery butt plate. The cocking lever is below the barrel, as you would expect, and is designed to look like the cleaning rod on the original military rifle. Just cocking the rifle indicated it was gifted with a powerful spring and I was looking forward to what the chronograph would say once I got into the pellet testing. 22 calibre test rifles because they are better suited to pest control and small game hunting and I have a good variety of different pellets I can test.
Also included in the box is a small toolkit containing a wrench and driver set that fits all the screws on the rifle.ĭiana’s Mauser K98 is an under-lever, spring-powered, single-shot air rifle. While I am sure that supervised youngsters will have a lot of fun plinking with this homage to a famous German military rifle, it is going to need an adult to cock and load this hefty, spring-powered air rifle. It is a full-sized rifle with under-lever cocking that requires some effort to set. The length of pull seemed a bit short for me, not much of a problem with open sights, but something to consider when fitting the scope. It is muzzle heavy by nature of the military design and the constraints of fitting an air rifle into that. The rifle was long and relatively heavy, in keeping with the replication of the original rifle. The wood had good grain and was well finished with a nice sheen. My first impressions were of a design faithful to the German army rifle predecessor. The Australian distributor, Nioa, provided the air rifle, along with a Simmons ProTarget 3-12×40 scope, SportsMatch T03C ring mounts and a generous supply of pellets. That stalwart of air-gunning, Diana, has brought out a faithful Mauser 98K lookalike and the SSAA Australian Shooter/Hunter was given the opportunity to review this product. Here is an air rifle that will have enormous appeal to aficionados of military firearms. As easy to set up with a few turns of a screwdriver.Īll you see here, is all wood and metal.This review was first published in the SSAA Hunter edition 66 in October 2018. The Diana TO6 trigger unit is one of the very best I've ever used on an air rifle. It twangs like hell and has a fair bit of recoil to it but, it's settling down into a really nice, sweet shooting rifle. And that's what I'll be using it for, once I get it tuned and smoothed out. 177 air rifle on ticket.īut, as it is now, it has all the accuracy and power you need to make this a really effective, accurate hunter. So this rifle will tune up to FAC level, 16 ft/lbs output. It is,l believe, based on Diana's brilliant 460 Air Magnum underlever. There's no gas ram in it, despite some reviews saying it is, that's crap! The rifle is starting to bed in now and today's shooting produced some lovely raggedy, single hole groups at 30 metres. Here's a few pics of the Diana Mauser K98 in.