I'd love to hear back from any of you if you have anything to add! Check out my photos of this awesome gun! Thanks everyone!ĮDIT: Not sure why I can't attach my photos! Not sure how my Grandfather acquired it (He's gone now.) but I am am interested in cleaning it up and shooting it because it is in fine condition. I presume this was either recommissioned or from someone's personal collection from the Great War and modified. The rifle looks to have been sporterized at some point and has a nice glossy epoxy and uniquely has two Nazi coins glued to the stock where the circular bolt disassembly pieces used to be (Some handy work btw WW1 + WW2 I'm guessing). So I was gifted a Gew 98 from my Grandfather that brought it home from a tour in France and Germany during WWII, it is a Spandau 1916 with quite a few different markings, some which I have identified as possibly Prussian markings but there are also markings that I could not identify including the "s/42" with what looks like 2 small eagle marks on the receiver below the flat sights. Hi there found this thread via a Google search and seeking some help from anyone in hopes that someone can help me identify my Mauser Gew 98 with the flat sights (This is what brought me here!!) Super interesting reading all of this thread so I figured I would reply just by chance someone might be able to help me. If these old guns could talk, the stories they could tell. I have also read that in Europe it was not uncommon to store rifles and bolts separately so that should the rifles fall into the hands of enemies foreign or domestic they were useless. So I have to assume that sometime somewhere a bunch of rifles and their proper bent bolts were separated from each other, and then the rifles re-issued with available straight handled bolts, and the one I have may have been one of them. Then, years later, I was reading about WW II and how German support troops were often issued K98k rifles with straight bolt handles. He did a great job and it can't be distinguished from one that was originally made as a bent handle. He dug through his parts drawers and found one, but I had him bend the one that came in the rifle as I was worried about headspace-just something I had read but didn't know much about. There weren't that many gun books or gun magazines around in those days, so I consulted my local gunsmith and he confirmed that it should be bent. didn't match the receiver's number, but I didn't know much about them at the time, and it took about a year for me to realize that the dished out area in the stock below the bolt handle's knob was probably a relief for knuckles, in which case the bolt would have to be bent. My first K98k came when I was about age 15, and it had a straight bolt. Now there's an interesting point for speculation, straight vs. Yours looks much like mine, except mine has a turned down bolt like Scharfs', back up in post #13. Verrry Interesting, as Artie Shaw used to say.