Range Day...with the Classics

Let's face it--AR's, though practical, are a dime-a-dozen these days. I wanted to shoot something a bit different yesterday, so I went a bit farther back into the gun vault and found this wonderful Italian Mannlicher Carcano rifle, Model 1891.

Yep. This was the one for the day. Took it, along with a couple of boxes of 6.5x52 ammunition and a few clips (this rifle uses clips) and off to the range I went.

This one left the arsenal at Torre Annunziata in 1897. And she's original and un-messed-with.

The stock still has the remains of the cartouche from the Terni arsenal, where it was re-worked smetime in it's service life..

Those clips I mentioned:

This one holds six rounds of 6.5 ammunition. The clips insert into the rifle from the top, and when the last round fires, the clip drops out the bottom. The rounds are elongated and tumble when they hit. The old rifle has a 30 inch barrel and "twist gain" rifling that increases the twist over the length of the barrel.(It starts at 1:19.25 at the breech and is 1:8.25 at the muzzle.) This was done for increased accuracy and it worked, but it was tie-consuming and expensive so it was dropped in later production rifles. This one still has it though, and you can actually look down the bore and see it in the right light.

Here's a loaded clip in place. The rifle's ready to go.

Using the battle sight, it was dead on at 50 yards. (The 100 yard line was otherwise occupied by some boring AR guys.) With just a bit of hold-under, it was shattering sporting clays on the berm with every shot. I was more than happy, to say the least.

The sights begin at 600 yards and go out to 2000.

Like most countries adopting smokeless powder cartridges at the turn of the century, they were a bit optimistic. And of course, volley fire was the game of the day, machine guns not really being on line yet.

It shot straight and true, even though the trigger was so worn that it broke clean at about a pound or a pound and a half with no staging or other indicator that it was going to fire. Just tough the trigger and move it half an inch and...BANG! But it hit where it was aimed, and once I got used to that trigger, it was a dream to shoot.

My only issue with it was that it gets so hot so fast. By the time I was half way through the second box of ammo (fired at a rather sedate pace as I had to load clips), most of the metal and even some of the wood was too hot to touch. But as a fighting rifle? Heck, come the Revolution, if nothing else is available, I'll have no problem handing this one out to a friend or using it myself once I've burned through my stocks of NATO ammunition and worked back through all of the World War Two arms in the safes. But then again, it's always been my hope that I'll last long enough to fight my Trapdoor and Martini-Henrys, and if I have to go down, let it be in a bayonet charge after all ammunition in the Lair has been expended.
If that day comes as I fear it might, this rifle will likely give a good accounting for itself in such a fight, of that I'm sure.

The Revenge of the Bench-Resters

So I was rummaging through one of the ammo closets in my gun room last night (I have two such closets--one for pistol ammo and one for rifle ammo) and I happened to find a couple of boxed of Prvi Partisan 6.5x52mm ammunition. Carcano food! I really did not even know that was in there, but there it was, shoehorned in next to the 7.5 French rounds. I really need to inventory those closets one of these days.

So with that stuff in hand, I grabbed up the new Carcano and a couple of pistols and headed back out to the range.

I got out there and joy, oh joy, I had the place to myself! So I set my targets and spotting scope up, got the Carcano out, and loaded some of the ammo into those neat six-round clips that the rifle needs in order to function. And it does need them, as I found out. I tried to single-load a round by pushing it into the chamber and closing the bolt only to find that the extractor will not ride over the base of a cartridge that is already in the chamber. The bolt has to pick the cartridge up as it comes up off the follower, and the only way that the round will stay in position for that is if it's in one of those clips. This is not exactly an engineering point in the rifle's favor as it means that soldiers in the field were dependent on these flimsy clips to be able to load and fire even one round.

But the bolt operated so smoothly that you'd think that it was on rollers. It's not on rollers--it's just well-worn, smoothed out by what was probably considerable military use in one if not two world wars and whatever else it did in it's 113 years of existence. Likewise, the trigger is light and smooth and breaks with no indication at all that it's about to fire. I'm used to a two-stage trigger where you feel a bit of resistance or back-pressure before the rifle actually fires, but this rifle, like a couple of other that I have, is completely smooth. It actually makes for a good "surprise break" and once I got used to it, I started to really enjoy it. That 6.5 cartridge is very mild to shoot compared to the 8mm, .303 and .30-06 that I'm used to. And while I wouldn't exactly call the pattern downrange a "group", it was at least fairly consistent in where it put the rounds and after a bit of experimentation I was at least able to keep most of the shots on the paper plates that I use as targets.

The rifle's biggest problem at this range is it's sights. It has the old-style "humpback" sight and the gradations go from 600 meters to 2000 meters.Yes, the sight starts at 600 meters. Optimistic in 1897, weren't they? And with the sight parked in the 600M position, it was hitting a bit over a foot high at 100 yards.

So I flipped the sight to the "battle sight" position, which should have been sufficient for 100M-400M body hits, and to my surprise, it actually worked quite well on the 100-yard plates with a six o'clock hold. Brilliant!Here's the battle sight. The rear blade flips up and all the way over into a notch in the front handguard, and the shooter is left with this fixed rear blade that was beneath it.

So with that figured out, I settled in and began firing aimed shot at the plates, one shot every ten seconds or so, with a check of the spotting scope in between each shot. And I was killing those plates--this rifle is no match rifle and I don't see myself keeping it loaded by the bed to deter late-night home invaders, but it was well worth $40.00.

And then, after I finished and went down to retrieve my targets, upon my return I saw the range care-taker come strolling up.

"Hi", I say.

"I got a complaint that you're shooting too fast down here," he said.

"Seriously?"

"Yes, seriously," he says. "And you know that you shoot fast. I've talked to you about it before."

"Yes you have," I admitted. "And it's always been for sustained, well-aimed fire, with every round on target. You know that I'm not out here bump-firing like an asshole or putting rounds over the berms."

"I know," he replied. "But a couple of other members complained and I have to come talk to you when they do."

"Dude, I'm shooting a bolt-action Carcano."

"A what?"

"Car-CAY-no. Italian World War One rifle. Bolt-action, holds six rounds. It's not exactly a machine gun. And I'm checking the target with my scope after every shot, so it's not like I'm making with the rat-a-tat-tat here."

He looked over my rifle, and even used my scope to check my target at my invitation. I wanted him to see and count the holes and know that I was putting a bit of care into actually aiming the rifle. Satisfied, he decided that nothing warranted any official club complaint. But when I asked him who complained, he wouldn't tell me. Not that he had to, because by then I'd seen the trucks parked behind the bench-rest clubhouse. They must have come in while I was downrange or otherwise occupied and they apparently decided to lodge a complaint because some non-bench-rester was daring to shoot on "their" firing line. And then they wonder why the rest of us shooter hate them.

Well I was done on the rifle line anyway, so I packed the rifle back up and headed over to the pistol line. The purpose today was to burn up some of the remaining test rounds from my new 9mm load I'd worked up, and also to try out my Browning Hi-Power now that I've got it's new ambidextrous safety installed. The safety, made by Cylinder and Slide, allows lefties like me to use the thumb safety, a must for condition-one carry.

And yeah, about that...I found out now why Cylinder and Slide charges so much to install this piece on your pistol. It's because there was a lot of fitting required, and all of it involved removing metal from their parts and substituting a roll pin that actually fit for the one that they included. That stuff was WAY out of spec, and it took me and a competent smith quite a while to actually get it to fit together. (Thanks, Mike!)

But it works, and it works well. So I shot this pistol and my Beretta 92, just because I'd been using the 92 as a test platform for the new round and had a couple of loaded magazines for it ready to go.

You know, I'm really starting to enjoy shooting this Beretta. It actually is a nice shooter, and if I can get over my tendency to thumb the decocker down, mistaking it for a thumb safety, I could really get to like it as something more than a wall-hanger. This one is an ex-New Orleans Police Department pistol, and it's marked as such. It's noteworthy as an example of blatant hypocrisy for the time that the City of New Orleans under then-Mayor Marc Morial filed the first lawsuit against gun manufacturers--including Beretta--claiming that the manufacturers had irresponsibly flooded the city with guns that criminals were using to shoot themselves and other people with. It did not take long for one of the defendant gun companies to produce a Beretta much like my own and point out that the City of New Orleans had a long history of selling both seized firearms and surplus city-owned firearms to the same wholesale distributors that the companies being sued sold their products to.

Pot, meet Kettle. And quit calling him black.

Anyway, I've never been a fan of the Beretta, but the more I shoot this one, the more it grows on me. And this ex-Commonwealth military Hi-Power has been a favorite of mine since the day that I got it. Until now, the only thing keeping me from carrying it has been the lack of an ambi-safety like my 1911s all have. But now it has one. Woot! And here the two of them are together. The Hi-Power (top) and NOPD Beretta 92 (bottom).I've never really been a 9mm fan, despite the fact that it's been the cartridge of choice for police and military use in Europe for over a hundred years now. My figuring is that 9mm is ok for shooting Europeans, but if you want to put an American bad guy in the dirt, you need a .45.

Still, they just keep making so many wonderful pistols in 9mm. Darn it!

But now I'm home with Murphy, and we're going to sit out on the deck and clean these firearms just as soon as I get all the yogurt out of his fur.

Yeah, I accidentally dropped a container of yogurt on him when he was pestering me in the kitchen. Serves him right, but now I'm the one stuck cleaning him up.

Wait a minute...it's starting to rain. Maybe I can just put him out in the rain for a while. That ought to do it!

A rifle a day keeps the doctor away?

Last week it was Murphy's turn, this time it was mine. I was in at the doctor's office for a check-up, and while he found nothing wrong, he kept saying things like "You're getting to the age when..." and "People our age need to start..."

Look, Doc. I like you, but you keep up with that "old" stuff and I'm gonna beat you with your own cane. Seriously.

So this afternoon, just because he pissed me off, I got my bicycle out and rode around town for an hour. Honestly, this leg issue really put me off my workout regimen and I do need to step the cardio up again.

And as I finished the ride, I stopped in at a local store that I pop into once in a blue moon and saw an old rifle for sale behind the counter. Now I'm a sucker for the old stuff, so just to make conversation, I asked to see it. The store owner didn't know what it was and was just selling it for another customer. Apparently it had been sitting there for about six months. I recognized it as a Italian Model 1891 Carcano, but that was all I knew about it. Looking it over though, it looked pretty good. Everything was there, nothing was messed with, and it even had it's cleaning rod. It wasn't import marked, either, which is always a plus with me. The price tag read $80.00, but the shop owner said that he'd take whatever he could get for it. When I offered $40 just on a whim, he took it.

So here it is...my new Carcano. (click on the pictures to enlarge them.)It's a little shopworn, but all in all, it looks pretty good for it's age. The receiver bore a date of 1897.

I'd just thought that this was a garden-variety 1891/41, the basic World War Two long rifle, but when I got it home and looked up it's arsenal, Torre Annunziata, I discovered that it definitely was an 1897-produced rifle. Torre Annunziata was shut down in 1900.

I already have one Carcano. It's this cherry M38 cavalry carbine. I bought this one from an old World War Two vet back in the mid-1990's when he brought it into a gun show where I was working an information table. He said that he brought it back from the war and now wanted to sell it and buy an M-1 carbine. It looked like the archetype for all of those "never fired, only dropped once" jokes--it was pristine. His asking price: $50. Considering that the importers were selling really crappy Carcanos for $40-$60 at that time, I bought this nice non-import-marked one from him. I later saw him walking out with a carbine and a big grin on his face so both of us went home happy. I shot it a bit--and somewhere around here I still have a video of a much-younger me making a bayonet charge with it against an old sofa in a dump--but ammo was hard to find and pricey, and it was never a smooth or accurate shooter, so I retired it to the wall rack.

This new one though...the bolt's a lot smoother, and the barrel's surprisingly clean, with pretty good rifling. I think it'll shoot, so I'm going to grab some reloading dies and make use of the empty Boxer-primed 6.5 brass that I've been saving for about 25 years.

Here are my two Carcanos together.Note the folding bayonet beneath the barrel of the little M38.

I honestly don't know what this rifle's worth, but from my preliminary research, it's one of the scarcer models and I probably didn't get hurt too badly at all for $40. And I'm going to have at least $40 worth of fun with it before I clean it up and rack it above the carbine.

Both rifles shoot this 6.5mm round from a six-round clip. The odd shape was to ensure that it tumbled on impact, causing a much more devastating wound that regular bullets.The whole affair feeds into the rifle from the top, and when the sixth round is fired, the empty clip drops free from the bottom of the rifle.

Here's the carbine with it's bayonet extended.I'm thinking that it'll make a great Murphy prodder.

Or not."Go ahead...poke me with that again and see what happens. I dare ya."