Barrel length is 59cm and the rifle length is 1.1m without the bayonet. It was produced in multiple calibers: 7mm Mauser, 8mm Mauser, 7.65 Argentinian. The bolt lever is bent on the kar98 and straight on the vz24. The stock has a sling cut on the kar98 but on the vz24 there is no hole. From closer, there are other differences visible: the upper handguard extends forward only until the second metal ring on the kar98 while on the vz24 it extends all the way to the first ring. They are almost identical in functionality and a lot of parts are interchangeable.įrom a distance the best way to tell them apart is by the hump – on the vz24 the upper handguard extends behind the rear sight while on the kar98 it stops in front of the rear sight. Vz.24 appeared in 1924 while the kar98k appeared in 1935 – more than 10 years later. A lot of people think that the vz.24 is a copy of the kar98k but it’s the other way around. The vz.24 looks a lot like the Karabiner 98 kurz, the standard infantry rifle of the german army in the second world war.

The production quality was high and the majority of the pieces were produced before the war, when the quality control was enforced. The czech made vz.24 rifles are considered among the best mauser rifles. After 1942 ZB stopped producing the vz.24 and started producing the Kar98k model.

After the factory was taken over by the germans when czechoslovakia was invaded in 1939, ZB produced 250.000 more rifles that were used by the wehrmacht under the name G.24(t). The czech army acquired around 750.000, Romania 445.640, USSR ordered 40.000 that were shipped to Spain to the republican faction, Bolivia got 101.000, Brasil 15.000, Lithuania 15.000, Yugoslavia 40.000 and more. A lot of states ordered the rifle from ZB in order to equip their armies. The vz.24 was among the first ones available on the market and it enjoyed great success. It was observed that the long rifles, like the gewehr98, were too heavy and too cumbersome in the trench warfare, so most of the armies in the world started to adopt short rifles. Vz.24 is inspired from the Karabiner98AZ, a short rifle version of the gewehr98 produced during the first world war. Vz comes from the czech word vzor, which means model. In 1923 ZB produced a new model, a short rifle, the vz.23 and vz.23A, and finally settled on the vz.24 pattern in 1924. In 1922 it started producing an updated model, the 98/22 long rifle. In the first few years, the company produced and repaired gewehr 98 mauser rifles.

Vz24 Mauser Serial Numbers