by WARREN PAGE
The new mid-lugged, low-lift 60-degree Steyr-Mannlicher action-with a mere nod to herr Schoenauer-comes in five basic lengths, derives much of its excellence and strength from engineer Horst Wesp and a tough plastic called Makrolon. Field&Stream’s editor wrings out several of the new fifles, both on the range and in the Austrian gebirge for red deer and chamois.
THE TOWN OF STEYR is located in Austria where join the Enns and the Steyr rivers, at the confluence of the greatest brown trout stream and the best water for the pike-like huchen in all of Europe. The people of Steyr seldom yodel on street corners, but lederhosen are as common as ordinary pants and wearing one of those Tyrolean-style hats rivals brandishing a beer mug as a local occupation. Steyr should be a tourist town, but it isn’t really. What Steyr is famous for is a great works, where iron and streel, swords and plow-shares, have been pounded out since the early Mikkle Ages, where firearms have been made for the past 105 years. It’s all very well for the local Chamber of Commerce to point out that the industrial combine of Steyr-Daimler-Puch makes jillions of trucks and tractors or more jillions of motorcycles, but that gets no more tumble than do the trout in the beautiful Enns, What everybody does know is that Steyr is the home of the Mannlicher rifle.
Ferdiand Ritter von Mannlicher—the “von” indicates that he was a nobleman—has perhaps never been so glorified as Paul Mauser in the field of bolt-action rifle development, possible because his designs were primarily produced only at Steyr and, Mannlicher being a complete patriot, chiefly for Austrian army use. His first repeating bolt action, an 11mm Austrian or.433 " is datede 1880. In that same year Mauser had about perfected the famous 1871-'84 repeater with which the Prussians overwhelmed the French. It could be argued that Mannlicher’s rifle was the better, though more complex to manufacture, since in one version its magazine held 20 rounds!
As far as I know the two great designers never foined forces, but Mannlicher dreamed up as many significant ideas as did Mauser, including, for example, feeicient straight-pull designs like the Model 1895 Austrian which we still see floating around, While he did not go as far into the automatic pistol field, like Mauser he ended up designing automatic rifles, Regardless of the country of usage, ass of these were produced at Steyr.
But of all the military items, the model to become best known among sportsmen was the 1900 Greek Mannlicher-Schoenauer, on which engineer Schoenauer had collaborated to work up the spring-driven spool magazine, a device that has guaranteed smooth feeding for Mannlichers ever since. It is this 1900 version, with its complex multiple-piece bolt and mid-point hadle, which was sporterized in carbine form, weighing only 6 pounds 9 ounces in 6.5x53 with a slim, fulllength stock, with close-lying or spoonshaped bolt handle. These packets of graceful potency earned the respect, even the love, of our fathers and their fathers before them, The light, slick, handy Mannlicher, in either rifle or carbine form, imported into this country then as now by Stoeger, attracted scads of would-be- owners.
The name Mannlicher has honestly earned its luster in sporting circles. Karamoja Bell hunted ivory with a 6.5, slew hundreds of bull elephants with it. The 6.5 carbine went with early north-country hunters like Sheldon and piled up Yukon game amazingly, the long 160-gr bullet doing well even at mild velocities. I recall seeing my first Mannlicher-Schoenauer when I was about eleven, the prized possession of one of the oldtimers who introuuced me to the outdoor world. He had never killed anything larger than a whitetail deer with it, but from the way he handled it, he very evidently would never have swapped that carbine for an 8-cylinder Wills SteClaire and a pretty new wife!
The traditional Mannlicher-Schoenauer, despite its two grave drawbacks—the midway positioning of the bolt handle gardly helps repeat-shot speed and the split-bridge receiver provides major scope-mounting limitations—is still desired by tradition-minded European hunters. They now have available calibers like 7x64 and 8x60, more potent than the original 6.5x53, 7x57 and 8x56 combinations of the early 1900s. So the Steyr plant is still turning them out, in very limited numbers. For a while, anyway.
What is really coming off the machining lines in quantity is a New Steyr-Manlicher, and I mean new—or neue, as we say in Austria—New, because the design is not only new to Steyr after some 70 years but is new in its approach to several basic design problems common among sporting rifles.
photo by zastava-arm.rs