The decision was made, I bought the magazine just for the ad, wrote to Hilton Gun Wholesale and commenced the process of getting my Mannlicher. Browsing through it my eyeballs widened as I came across an advertisement by the Hilton Gun Wholesale Company what was pictured in the ad was a Mannlicher Schönauer M72 and it looked just as gorgeous as the rifles I’d seen in London. One day as I was heading home from work in the city I happened to stop in at a newsagent and noticed a British shooting magazine on the rack. The The Mannlicher Schönauer M72 as you can see is a graceful blending of blued steel and walnut: the Steyr Mannlicher is a blend of blued steel, walnut and plastic that becomes one of the ugliest sporting rifles in existence. Top rifle is a The Mannlicher Schönauer M72, lower rifle is a Steyr-Mannlicher of the seventies with its plastic fittings. So I assumed my only chance of getting a real Mannlicher-Schönauer would be to find a second hand one. They had a plastic magazine, plastic trigger guard and were just about as plain ugly as you could make a rifle. I’d seen the new model Steyr-Mannlicher a few years earlier when I was in a gun shop in Jakarta in 1975. Mind you, at that stage I didn’t even know if one could still buy a Mannlicher-Schönauer like the ones I’d seen in Bland’s shop in London.
But there came a moment when I thought “I haven’t bought my Mannlicher-Schönauer yet.” and I decided that, if I didn’t get one before our first child was born then just maybe the responsibilities of children and a mortgage might put paid to any chances I might have had of getting one. This was fantastic news and we were both blissfully happy. I got involved in the shooting sports seriously, then I got married, and a couple of years after my lovely wife and I tied the knot she told me she was expecting. Rifles chambered for the 8 X 56R are stamped with a large ‘S’ on the top of the chamber, except that some, not all, Hungarians are stamped H instead.The family moved away from Britain to Australia and that Bland’s catalog came with me and stayed with me for another decade or so. Cut down rifle barrels have the front sight on a barrel band, and the rear is usually the longer rifle sight.
Rifles are much less common than carbines or stutzens since most of the rifles were cut down to stutzen length. Base and rim were the same as the 8 X 50, so no change was needed in the bolt head or extractor. spitzer boat tail bullet at 2280 fps from the rifle length barrel. Hungary followed in 1931, calling the cartridge the M1931 and the rifle the 31M. In 1930 Austria re-chambered the rifles for a more powerful cartridge, the 8 X 56 M30. By 1918 when production ceased, Austria was pretty much on the ropes.Īfter the war, the small Austrian and Hungarian armies continued to use the M95. Most rifles seem to be dated 17, as production reached its zenith at that point in the war. The military acceptance marks show the date of manufacture: they consist of the letters Wn for Wien (Vienna), the Austro-Hungarian double eagle and a two digit date or Bp for Budapest, the Hungarian crest and a date. About 25%-35% of the total production was made at Budapest.
For the Hungarian Army the rifle was produced by Budapest, marked BUDAPEST M 95 on the receiver. The rifle was produced by Steyr for the Austrian Army, marked STEYR M 95 on the receiver. An estimated 3,500,000 were made and large numbers have reached the US. The M1895 was the Austro-Hungarian main battle rifle during World War I, and for some time afterwards.
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