Cartridge Board

The Austro-Hungarian army’s first cartridge gun was a muzzleloader conversion known as the “Waenzl” (or Wanzel or Wanzl) of 1867. It was a “trapdoor” affair like the American Allin conversion. The cartridge fired was the 14.5x32.5mm rimfire. The thin-walled rimfire case quickly proved unacceptable for military use so a centerfire version was created. Hard use showed the Waenzl to be a bit fragile so the Werndl design was adopted in 1868. Its large rotary breechblock was pivoted on an equally large pin. An improvement? Perhaps.

Other designs were tried, but what the army really wanted was a repeater. This quick-firing idea was strange at a time in history when most military officers were resisting the transition from muzzleloaders to cartridge single shots simply because the new guns allowed soldiers to fire more quickly.

Meanwhile, Ferdinand Mannlicher had been working as a design engineer for the Austrian Imperial Northern Railroad. In 1876, he visited the World Exposition in Philadelphia, where he became enamored with repeating firearms designs. In 1877, he left the railroad and took some of his firearm ideas to the great arms manufacturer Steyr who hired him immediately.

Mannlicher went right to work designing a repeating rifle for the Austrian army. He soon had one, a bolt action of sorts having a tubular magazine in the buttstock. It was too slow to load. More designs followed until an 1884 rifle used a five-round magazine protruding out of the top of the receiver. It was absurd, but another factor grabbed the testing commission’s attention.

While the rifle appeared to be a conventional bolt action, the bolt was non-rotating. The action was opened by pulling the bolt handle straight back. Stripping a round from the magazine and cocking the striker was accomplished by pushing straight forward. The action is locked via two lugs located at the rear of the two-piece bolt. Lugs were forced to rotate by spiral grooves cut into the main bolt body. The army thought it was too complex.

The next year, Mannlicher was back with a new straight pull locked by a pivoting “wedge” that dropped down out of the two-piece bolt. It was adequate for black-powder cartridges. The design also introduced what Mannlicher called the five-shot “packet” (en bloc clip) loading magazine. It could fire faster and be reloaded quicker than any other military rifle. The adoption as the M86 rifle took place on June 20, 1886.

The chambering of the new rifle was 11x58mmR, the then-current Austrian military round. The bullet used was a 320-grain paper-patched 11mm (433 caliber) pushed by a compressed pellet of black powder to 1,610 feet per second (fps). It was almost identical to the 11x60mmR (11mm Mauser) of 1871. This was about to change.

Production of Mannlicher’s new rifle had just begun when the French shocked the world’s militaries with the announcement of the production of the first smokeless powder, along with a smallbore cartridge and repeating rifle to fire it. The French had done it again! It was shades of Napoleon and the conquest of Europe!

The manufacture of the M86 rifle was suspended until the Austrian government could decide what to do. The Mannlicher was deemed superior to the Lebel. The new cartridge was something else. Everyone was certain, however, that the secret of smokeless powder manufacture would not remain secret for very long.

Thus, the Georg Roth ammunition factory and Wien (Vienna) Armory quickly created a new cartridge. It combined (copied) the Lebels case length, caliber, bullet, rimmed case and bottlenecked shape with a compressed pellet of black powder weighing 62 grains. The result was the 8x50mmR Mannlicher. The bullet was a 244-grain roundnose while the velocity was 1,750 fps and the year was 1888.

Austria soon found a source of semi-smokeless (a mixture of smokeless and black) powder. In charges of 43 grains behind the 244-grain bullet, muzzle velocity increased to 1,950 fps. Strangely, the neck of this cartridge was lengthened to 2mm (.079 inch). The reason? The year was 1890.

It was soon determined that the new loading was too hot for the wedge-locking straight pull action. Mannlicher quickly modified the two-piece bolt to have conventional front-locking lugs on the inner portion. They were rotated by spiral grooves when the bolt was moved straight forward and back, like the earlier rejected design. This action was as strong as any one-piece turning bolt. It was adopted on December 23, 1890, as the M90.

By 1892, Austria had developed a truly smokeless powder, which led to a higher-pressure military loading. It used the same 244-grain bullet, but driven to 2,035 fps. The case length was also now reduced 2mm back to the original 50mm.

A few small changes were made to the new action over the years and it was officially approved in November 1896, as the M95. Rifles and carbines were made by the millions prior to World War I. One reference stated that by the end of that conflict, more Mannlicher straight pull arms had been produced than Mauser 98s, Lee-Enfields and Springfield 1903s combined! The straight pull continued to be made and exported around the world.

Now we come to the cartridge that is the title of this column. It was picked because a short history of the Mannlicher straight-pull rifle is far more interesting than the 8x56mmR cartridge, whose only notoriety is being mistaken for the 8x56mm Mannlicher-Shoenauer.

At any rate, about 1925, the Austrian army decided to replace the 8x50mmR and its roundnose bullet with something a bit more modern. Hirtenbeerger and Roth ammunition companies developed the 8x56mmR. The case has a long sloping shoulder making it look like a shortened, beltless 300 H&H. The base and rim dimensions are the same as the 8x50mmR. A 208-grain full jacket spitzer bullet achieved 2,395 fps. However, the so-called 8mm bullet measured .330 inch in diameter instead of the 8x50mm diameter of .323 inch. Some references mention “a larger bullet” while others say nothing. The ammunition shown in the photos has .330-inch bullets. 8x50mmR chambers were said to be simply reamed out to accept the new round, then stamped with either the letter “S” or “H” over the chamber to indicate conversion. It doesn’t look like a good idea to me. I have never seen a rifle chambering either cartridge with a bore good enough to slug for dimensions.

Straight-pull rifles are seldom seen except in collections. There are no sporting rifles. Thus, there is no loading data, though it could be worked up from 8mm Lebel or 33 Winchester data using cases formed from 7.62x54mmR brass and a chronograph.

Nevertheless, the straight-pull action holds a certain fascination by simply being different. Thus, the sporting-style rifle shown in the photos was built on an M95 action. It is chambered for the 33 Winchester with the rim reduced to .555-inch in diameter to fit the bolt face. Unfortunately, the 33’s shoulder diameter is a bit too small for it to position correctly in the clip. The rifle is usually fired as a single shot. It is far more accurate than any 33 WCF levergun with cast bullets.

The action is very hard to open or close, worse yet if a magazine is inserted. There is no camming action to seat a cartridge or primary extraction to loosen a stuck case. If anything, the straight pull quickly creates an appreciation for all turn bolts – even Enfields! The old action and its last cartridge are gone and nobody misses them.