Hi Bryan!
Thanks for showing us your new baby. Seems to need a little bit of work and care. But each hour you spend on it will it be worth!
Nice old Martini. I love the old Martini rifles, I own also an real old one, from Salzburg/Austria.
Couldn't find a pic in your photo-bucket gallery with the name on it. So I needed longer to figure out, that you asked about
KÖHNKE and not
KOHNKE. That's a big difference...
I checked my gunsmith-archives, and I found some information of such a Prussian gunsmith!
He is mentioned between 1859 and 1888 and was at the German Bundesschießen in Vienna and 1881 at the Bundesschießen in Munich. He manufactured hunting rifles and target rifles.
And I found an entry in an old address directory of Bremen from 1860, there is a gunsmith mentioned named
Heinrich Wilhelm Köhnke. He was in 1860 at the age of 30 years.
So one can say, if your rifle is manufactured before 1890, it was one of his late workpieces.
The north German rifles from Prussia were not so much engraved and fancy, like our south German rifles from Bavaria and Austria. But your rifle has an impressive butt-plate, very peppy.
Biggi.