9mm Rifles

[miroflex]

9.3x62 ammo is available, 9x57 ammo is pretty much impossible to source. In fact, just a few months ago a friend was offered a 9x57 Mauser for just INR 25,000/-.... I advised him against picking up what would just be an expensive paperweight/ wall hanger!

Cheers!
Abhijeet

Hi,

I would love to hear from someone who could guide me to a 9x57 mm rifle or for that matter any rifle at those kind of prices.

Regards.

[miroflex]

The 9mm Mauser was a very good cartridge developed from the original 8mm Mauser military round. This made it very suitable to take medium to large game in short to medium range which is ideal as the cartridge was aimed at the African Safari market. The recoil is also mind when one considers that this can take down big game. This is largely because there is not a lot of powder burning behind a comparatively heavy bullet.

However its popularity was affected as the magnum craze was fast catching on in the 1st quarter 20th Century led by such cartridges as the venerable 375 H&H Mag.

I will not like to speculate on prices but I can confirm that they will be on the cheaper side largely owing to lack of ammunition.

Interestingly I have also come across a lot of these rifles in the Chambal belt.

Hi Bowman,

Do you have any idea where they get their ammunition from? Do they reload their own ammunition? Factory loaded ammunition seems to have dried up completely.

Regards.

[miroflex]

Unfortunately, both the 9x57 Mauser, and all the Mannlicher-Schoenauer cartridges, 8x56, 9x56, 9.5x57, are pretty much obsolete. Norma has loaded the 9x57 Mauser sporadically, as it was a fairly popular cartridge in Sweden, also for F.N. in Belgium, but probably has ceased. So it has become an (easy) handloading proposition. Or expensive custom loaded ammo. None of the big players load any of it.

Hi Two Rivers,

What could be the reasons for these cartridges, which were once so popular throughout the world, having become obsolete? Could it be the advent of newer cartridges like the .358 Winchester which gained in popularity at the expense of the older, well established ones? It does not seem so because the .358 Win also seems to be headed for obsolescence.

Will we ever see a revival of the classic M-S calibres?

Regards.

[TwoRivers]

Not likely. Only two of them, the 6.5 and 9.5mm, offered anything unique, the 8 and 9mm being nothing but slightly weaker clones of their Mauser counterparts. You can still get a 6.5x54 M-S custom rifle from a gunsmith in Austria, who acquired Steyr's tooling after they dropped production. Only the 6.5mm was chambered by Steyr after WWII. The other three were dropped.
Good as the 9mm/.35s are, they never really caught on any place, being replaced by smaller or larger caliber cartridges, despite having a small group of dedicated followers. The .400/.350 Rigby and .350 Magnum were great cartridges, popular in Africa, yet were displaced by the .375 H&H Magnum. The 9x57 couldn't do a thing the 8x57 couldn't do, being loaded to lower pressure, and only survived in countries were the 8mm was prohibited for civilians as a military cartridge, or was thought needed because of larger game animals. In the US the story has been the same, there is a small band of followers, but with exception of the little .35 Remington, none of the others have succeded. The .358 WCF, .356 WCF, .35 Whelen, .350 Remington Magnum, all have failed to become popular. Sometimes the rifles they were offered in may have had something to do with that. The .358 Norma Magnum still has its share of followers in Sweden, and is quite popular in Canada's Yukon Territory. But that is pretty much it.
I think people see them as "woods" cartridges, i.e. short range, and as such more powerful than needed, and shy away from them.

[miroflex]

Not likely. Only two of them, the 6.5 and 9.5mm, offered anything unique, ...

Perhaps that is why Kynoch is loading ammuntion for these two calibres.

Regards.