M1886 AUSTRIAN MANNLICHER RIFLE

After a lot of off-and-on effort over the years, I have finally managed to get this rifle to shoot straight -- a sometime challenge with a rifle that won't accept a cartridge loaded with a groove-diameter bullet.

Some years back -- knowing that I would someday own one of these rifles -- I took advantage of an opportunity to lay in a couple hundred original vintage 1888 loaded cartridges packed in their original cardboard boxes -- two loaded five-round clips to a box. These were all in excellent shape, and probably would have fired just fine right out of the box, but I was concerned about ruining the brass by firing the original mercuric primers. I saved a few of the unopened boxes which were in the best shape, and then proceeded to salvage the brass from the others. This turned out to be a fairly time consuming and tedious task. First step: pull the bullets. I used a simple inertial bullet puller (the kind that looks like a hammer), and the paper-patched bullets (which had apparently been dipped in lube after being loaded into the cartridge cases) came out with little effort. These bullets turned out to be smooth-sided, swaged with a cup base, and weighed about 362 grains each. The patching paper was quite thin and fragile, and none of the pulled bullets came out with intact paper. Underneath the bullets were separate fiber and wax wads on top of a heavily caked load of fine black powder (no telling what the powder charge looked like when the cartridges were new).