The K31 has better sights (100 meter battle sight) with a longer sight radius and a longer barrel, leading to better overall long-range accuracy. The K31 also has an arguably smoother action. The K11 is a really good rifle and will perform better than most average people need them to (compensating for the 300 meter battle sight take some getting use to). The schmidt rubin 1911 mechanism is really cool, and they are beautiful rifles. The swiss straight pull rifles are like engineering works of art. But if i could only own one, it would be the k31. But id like to have one of every model as long as they are in good condition they are all great shooters
@@GreatNorthwestWeaponry agree they are wonderful to shoot, I fell down the rabbit whole and picked up a few of those lately, we can can get the follow up rifle (SIG 510 / StgW57) for as little as 250.-. Im a little bit jealous that ppl outside Switzerland can buy the surplus ammo much easier tho, we basically have to re-import them or buy commercially available ones. At the club itself tho we can buy the ammo (surplus) at cost, just not for home usage. Keep up the great work!
It would be interesting to test the K31 against the G11 or 96/11 at longer distances. And if recharging it could be interesting to use slow powder and magnum primers for the latter with their 31" barrels (with a Chrony...) if you can get Boxer cartridges.
The sound of the rifles firing could also been heard effected by the density of the air. The colder it gets the denser the air gets. Living in Arizona, I have the opposite problem. This knowledge comes from building racing engines, and then Dyno testing them. To compare one engine to another the ambient temperature where the Dyno is housed must be the same. Also it may be that the velocity of each round has something to do with the inconsistency of the noise.Hope that helps a bit!
One thing that the K11 has over the K31 is that it's easier to reload for, due to having a much larger chamber than the K31. You can do cast in the pre-K31's.
@@GreatNorthwestWeaponry K31 can shoot cast too but it's more difficult due to the super tight chamber. From my experience the previous rifles like IG11 and of course the 1889 are better at cast shooting.
One design goal for the K31 to reduce the size of the G11 to K11 but keep the accuracy. The action of the K31 is shorter, allowing for a longer barrel and sight radius. And as noted, the sights of the K31 start at 100m vs 300m on the K11. You can get 100m sightposts for the G11.
Getting all scintificle, if the air is cold , it is very dense, so the speed of sound, will be lower, a deeper sound, and the muzzle will also be lower. also the snow is anachoic, so no echo.
@@GreatNorthwestWeaponry Funny enough it is a 'US' officer' in the film Ice Station Zebra describing the loss of muzzle velocity on an AR15 to a newbie. that's how I knew (But did check to see if it was correct) 🙂
The barrel weights are approximately the same. And the overall weight is identical. The K31 is inherently more accurate because despite being the same overall length, the K31's barrel is longer by 2.35". That's significant enough to make a difference in avg. velocity and accuracy.
Just replying to myself here: I think people mix this "barrel weight" thing up because before the K31 was created, the Swiss did experiment with 200 heavy barrelled K11's, and that did help accuracy. But they calculated it wasn't worth the added cost. So they set out to create something: No longer than the K11, a straight-pull action, more accurate than the K11 and as accurate as the G11 (long rifle), and finally cheaper to produce than the previous G11/K11 series. The K31 fit all those requirements, and had many other added benefits so it was adopted into service March 17, 1932. Every rifle the Swiss made was an excellent weapon (for it's time). The K31 just happens to be the apex of all their straight-pull bolt-action engineering efforts before auto-loading rifles became unavoidable.
Swiss rifles are quite good. Got to give the German and Italian gunmakers a big run for their money. Swiss arms are just good for that purpose. Fine leather gloves made of kid skin leather will give you the right grip.
At a 100 yards or so there should be very little difference in accuracy between these K's. Providing of course that both are properly sighted in. One important difference between them that needs to be considered is that the K31 was designed around the GP11 projectile shape and has a very short chamber throat. The K11 has a longer more conventional throat- what this means is that K11 is easy to handload for and the K31 is not- something that is going to be an issue in future with the GP11 ammo drying up!
