In the 1980s the enthusiasm of Mauser Jagdwaffen Gmbh, the small arms division of Mauser, changed. The people who had been the driving force behind the developments of the 1960s and 1970s had left the company, or had passed away.
Period correspondence between Interarms and Mauser shows the struggle the Mauser management had, they seemed to have no set goals, nor a vision towards the future. They were very much aware that the Mauser brand name had a value and were reluctant to license the Mauser name to Interarms who wanted to use it on Mauser inspired products made by themselves, or by other suppliers, like Zastava who made an excellent Mauser 98 action. On some occassions Mauser tried to license it's name to other suppliers with limited success, at the same time frustrating it's largest representative in the US.
Odin stocks, refurbished Mauser rifles, the sale of a few hundred HSc pistols to a gun dealer in Phoenix, AZ, they were hardly worth the efforts.
In the late 1980s things didn't improve. The death of the HSc was postponed twice, first by licensing the design to Renato Gamba in Italy, secondly by having an alarm pistol version of the HSc made under license in Germany. The Parabellum was kept alive by introducing a number of limited edition engraved versions and by introducing a couple of new commemoratives, utilizing available parts from storage.
Mauser then took another step, having other manufacturers producing guns for them, which Mauser sold under their own name. This includes revolvers produced by Renato Gamba and an FN HP-ish pistol produced by FEG in Hungary.
Of the FEG pistol 3 variations were made. The first, dubbed the 80SA, was a single action pistol in 9x19 para. It was succeeded by the 90DA, a double-action version of the same pistol in the early 1990s, followed by a shorter version of the same pistol.
According to Otto Repa, former QA-manager at Mauser Jagdwaffen GmbH, who took over the customer service for Mauser's hand gun division in the 1990s, he got a lot of those pistols in for repairs. In spite of these quality issues, quite some 90DA's were sold, mostly to German hunters.
It was thought that with the dismantling of the small arms production facilities in 1999 and the subsequent sale of the Mauser Jagdwaffen brand to Blaser/SIG/SIG-Sauer, the Mauser pistols would be no more.
SIG-Sauer did revive the Mauser name around 2007, introducing the Mauser M2 pistol in both .40 S&W and .45 ACP calibres.
