The Mauser M12 is a new rifle, an expensive one, and not enough weapons have reached the field for evaluations outside of the wonderful, super duper, gushing, reviews by the print media. All that is out there is material by influencers who will always provide incredibly positive reviews because if
they don't play ball, they will be cast out of the kingdom. That is how the system works. Just look at the low round counts in the articles. These guys will fire 10 three shot groups, make prognostications, and buyers will run screaming to the local gun store to buy a $1200 dollar rifle based on the results of 30 shots. It that extensive reliability testing, thirty rounds? Does that really surface and wring the design faults out of an action?
The Model 70 has been out in the market since the 1930's, it is a well understood, slick and smooth, highly reliable action. For a field rifle I prefer the older trigger, as seen here. FN decided to replace this mechanism with one better suited to bench shooting, because this design was required too much hand fitting to have a reliable sub 2 pound trigger. I have handled customized pre64 M70 triggers that some gunsmith spent hours making into a 1 to 1.5 trigger with no creep and were not over ridden by rapidly closing the bolt.
The problem with the trigger FN used, is that there are plenty of accounts of hunters who had water condense in these closed housing trigger mechanism, as typified by the M722, and then freeze! The open old style M70 trigger is much less sensitive to dirt, water, as the open architecture allows the material to fall out.
Perhaps a M12 will shoot as well as my first production year M70
but it will take a long while till anyone can report whether the M12 Mauser is as good as the brand name. There have been a bunch of Mauser branded actions that were not M98's, and I invite anyone to create a list. They did not have staying power, not like the M98. The best overall action ever built, in my opinion, was the Mauser M98
and the M12 is not a M98.
