And you thought your hunting equipment was old!
Almost every hunter owns an aging piece of hunting gear that they continue to use season after season Whether by tradition or simply for the challenge, there is something rewarding about using an older piece of gear to find success.
However, some gear is older than others. Youtuber capandball has a rifle that probably makes everything in your gun cabinet look like a baby by comparison. Today he is hunting with a converted flintlock-to-percussion 16mm rifle Germanic Jäger hunting rifle from the 18th century. Yes, you read that correctly. This rifle is over 200 years old!
Watch as he takes to the forests of Hungary looking for a wild boar with this old rifle and eventually finds success.
What a cool hunt. It is awesome to see such a historic firearm still being used in the field in 2021. It makes us wonder what the rifle's original builder would think if they knew their gun was still being used to hunt nearly 200 years later. As you saw from this video, there's still some serious knockdown power in the old girl. That boar dropped in its tracks instantly. It never knew what hit it.
He gives a little more history of this rifle on his related webpage. He notes that it was probably converted sometime in the 19th century from flintlock to percussion. He also traced this gun back to the original builder who lived in Austria. While it's hard to state exactly when it was made, he was able to narrow down the exact city of origin. This helps establish this gun's date of manufacture between 1726 and 1758. That means at a MINIMUM it is 262 years old and possibly older. This gun is older than the United States!
While stuff like this is cool to see in a museum, we loved watching this old gun hunt, the way it was meant to be used. This is one of those instances we wished an inanimate object could talk. We're sure there would be plenty of stories to tell from this old rifle!
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
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