It’s not about how many guns you have.  It’s more about how much ammo you’ve got. (Part 2)

I don’t want to bore you and rehash the intro from Part 1, so I’d advise reading that post first.

Let’s further explore the ammo of Curio and Relic firearms around the world that somehow found me and how we became friends. Specifically, time to focus our attention on rifles.

.22 LR

Ah, the workhorse of the rimfire world. Many don’t know that the humble .22 not only comes in Long Rifle, but short and magnum as well. By and far LR is the most common and I’ve got a pretty good assortment. Both 38 and 40 gain solid, a bunch of hollow points, and some massive 60-grain for the big ground squirrels. Of course a couple of boxes for sub-sonic for when you don’t want to alarm the neighbors when you have to put that rabbit down in the back yard because he/she/X refused to enter the trap. Don’t get me wrong, sub-sonic still makes noise. But by staying just under 1000 feet per second threshold, there is no sonic boom to turn heads.

I never had a .22 rife as most rural kids did when I was in middle school, so I had to make up for it in my 40s. This ammo feeds my Marlin 600 carbine (Big 5 branded Model 60 clone and my gateway firearm).  This one got me into learning some gun smithing when the firing pin and trigger broke. I love exploded schematic drawings and can fix anything from them. And the rest is history.

I was given a wonderful 1948 Remington bolt action TargetMaster. With a 24″ barrel and an equally vintage all steel-cased Weaver x4 scope, I can drive every bullet from an entire clip thru the same hole in the target at 150′. Some young pre-teen post-war kids must have had parents that loved them. What a FANTASTIC bolt action rifle (with no kick).

I’m also the custodian of my father’s 1954 Stevens/Savage Model 85 gill gun. I tore it down and had the entire thing professionally hot re-blued, replaced missing parts, and put 20+ hand-rubbed coats of tung oil on the wonderful walnut stock with baby butt soft 1600 grit sandpaper. It looks almost too good to shoot, but my kids and their kids will appreciate it long after I am gone. Bonus: you feel like a kid when you shoot it.

In the vein of weird things, I did purchase (new in the box) a 2017 US Henry version of the venerable AR-7 takedown rifle. These were developed for the Air Force as a survival weapon for pilots where space was limited and you needed to make stuff happen. The barrel unscrews and stores in the stock, keeping the entire package at 16″ long. Pretty fun and cool.

Lest I forget I do have one of the rare Polish WZ22 Mosin Nagant bolt action training rifles. When the Russians forced conscripts into service, they weren’t going to have them waste real ammo during drills. So they made an exact M38 clone in length and weight. What you end up with is a single shot (no magazine – finger feed one by one) massive and awkward eight-pound rifle. Fits with all of my other Mosins, and it will take you many hours to fire 250 rounds so very economical. I smile when I think of shooting this relic of the Cold War. Mine was made in Poland.

7.62×39

Nothing screams COLD WAR like this intermediary range round, produced out of Soviet necessity starting in 1943. It fed the world-famous AK-47 (model 1947 if you don’t get the firearms nomenclature) and its millions of clones ever since.

I don’t own an AK47 (Avtomat Kalashnikov 1947). But instead, have an SKS (Samozaryadnyj Karabin Simonova 1945). The SKS was obsolete within two years of the AK47 coming out and moved to back lines. Why didn’t it fade into history? Bigger, bulking, move moving parts, and only a 10-round integral magazine fed with stripper clips? EXACTLY. It fits a specific world firearm need. A great cheap export, and if your Cold War allies turned on you, they only had ten rounds. Total win/win for an arms manufacturer/exporter.

The SKSs I have are model M59/66 Yugoslavian. I won’t get into details here, but they are of fantastic quality with all-milled construction (no stamped metal like the Chinese ones that sold for $99 bucks everywhere before Clinton and the easily navigated assault rifle ban in 1994). Plus I love the NATO spec grenade launcher on the muzzle brake (again, most were made for export to anyone who could pay – democratic and communist money spends the same way). Yugoslavia made these thru 1990, and I’ve got a great original and a couple with some fun mods done to them. This ammo is so common my SKSs will be well-fed in my lifetime and beyond. Great pieces of history. Hard to believe as late as 2009 you could pick them up for $250 each UNISSUED and never shot.

7.62x54R

This is the round that sends down the rabbit holes of collecting firearms. There are millions of Mosin Nagants that consume this caliber from the 1930s thru the current day. That includes the M91/30 (long rife, originally introduced in 1891 with minimal upgrades in 1930). Then the M38, a behind-the-front-lines carbine for support soldiers. Finally the M44, a last-ditch carbine late in WWII came with a non-removable folding bayonet. Things were so bad at the end of the war, the barrel harmonics on the M44 were such that if you didn’t shoot with the bayonet extended it throws you off the target. I have examples of each, and each tells a different story.

There is a lot of variation in 7.62x54R ammo as well. From the steel-cased Bulgarian stuff of the 1950s to the smooth finish of the Romanian rounds of the 1960s. Yugoslavia even offered a heavy ball (180 grain, ouch), and I’ve got some boxes of M76 sniper with sealed primers and anneal brass with a mirror finish. My favorite oddity is the 100-grain Czech hollow rounds. For training, and good to 200 yards. Why so light for training? Because if you shoot more than five rounds outside of the heat of battle your shoulder will be numb (as well as your soul). That’s when most forced-into-service conscripts throw down the gun and run the other way.

7.5×55

This singular round fits the Swiss Schmidt-Rubin K31 and that’s about it. First introduced in 1889, it’s the longest-running military caliber in the world. And what a rifle this is. Must be my favorite one to shoot. All of my ammo I have is genuine GP11 Swiss surplus. It is match grade and of the finest quality I’ve ever seen. Even better than new commercial production. It’s amazing how the Swiss haven’t fought a war in 400 years but they sure put a lot of money and a lot of quality into stuff they never use. It is the gold standard of military surplus. This rifle will be a fun post (or two). So many crazy features, like a double-pull trigger and a large trigger guard, so you can shoot with gloves.

8x56R

A odd bird. This round was obsolete starting in the mid-1940s. I’m pretty sure it didn’t make it into any kind of production in the 1950s. It fits only one rifle and it is the Steyr Mannlicher M95. That’s right, model 1895. This is a carbine as it was made to be fired from horseback so the barrel had to be shorter. This baby packs a 230-grain projectile. The straight-pull bolt action saw a lot of turn-of-the-century trench time in World War I. In preparing for WWII a lot of ammo was made as these would be behind-the-line arms for support servicemen. Most of what I have is in the original boxes from the 1930s. Lots and lots of German markings from ammunition works in Austria and Hungary. The history of this rifle is simply staggering and beyond words. And it hurts to shoot.

7.92×57

When you hear the word Mauser you can only think of WWII. I have both a long rifle Mauser from 1939 made under the German contract to Persia which is a thing of beauty. With the Persian Lion Crest and all the markings in Farsi, it truly takes you to the Middle East. Standing 48 inches tall from stock butt to barrel tip, just add the bayonet and it is taller than me. These rifles were made at the famed Zbrojovka Brno factory, a German state-run facility in the Czech Republic making the BEST firearms of the time in quality and craftsmanship. I also have a Yugo M48 Mauser which was never issued. Again, built on German machinery with great craftsmanship. You can see the hours it took to mill these tools of war. But as tools, they are like holding a piece of history.

7.62×63

That number just sounds so wrong in metric. To us, it’s good old school 30-06 (caliber 30, the year 1906). You probably know this caliber for its use in the M1 Grande, the true workhorse for U.S. forces in WWII and beyond. After the US changed standard military calibers in the early 70s, they still kept producing this ammo for all of our NATO buddies that we surplused our old rifles to.

I have only one piece that shoots this, the M58 Madsen. This is a gun you will never see or hear about. Madsen is a Danish company that cut its teeth on making THE BEST machine guns in WWI. Remember all those war films with a giant barrel because they had a water-cooling sleeve? Yep, that was a Madsen. Post WWII they made a carbine built from the ground up that would fit a small man of short stature and offered it under contract to mainly South American and Southeast Asia governments. I guess they didn’t think of the literally MILLIONS of bolt-action firearms that were picked up in the late 40s and re-arsenaled from the European battlefields of WWII.

Only the Colombians put in an order for them at about 5000. They never took possession of the contract, and most of them ended up in foreign countries as surplus. Mine has no import markings, so it came into the US before 1968. It may have been shot once or twice but it is truly like holding something that fell out of a time capsule. It’s great fun. Good thing I’m a man of short stature. And my last name is Wing. Which means……. that is why I like rice? Yeah, I don’t know where to go with this.

Here is a little video so you can put images to some of these rounds.

Hope you enjoyed this little journey down ammo lane with me. My mind has a LOT of lanes. Most are dead ends, but you know me by now so reading my post is a personal choice and all on you. 🙂