8x57J for a Haenel Mannlicher

How to Find Load Data

- Art Merrill

One of the satisfactions in handloading is reproducing an obsolete cartridge to get an old gun shooting again. Sometimes, however, there is absolutely no reliable load data available and I’m left scratching my head on where to safely start.

The duo in question here is a 100-year-old HaenelMannlicher rifle, and the even older 7.9mm Model 88 cartridge, aka the 8x57J. To appreciate the Haenel-Mannlicher rifle and cartridge, handloaders must understand them in the context of their times. The combination made a modern hunter at the turn of the twentieth century, but the roots go back another decade and more.

Germany’s Rifle Testing Commission in Spandau approved the Commission Rifle of 1888, borrowing trigger, safety and firing elements from Peter Paul Mauser’s Model 1871, a box-type magazine from Ferdinand von Mannlicher and a bolt with dual front locking lugs from the French Model 1886. Though this military 1888 Mauser-Mannlicher action was quickly superseded, German arms makers in Suhl, Germany, produced and built commercial guns on it into the 1930s.

Among the better remembered are what we now call Haenel-Mannlicher-style rifles from firms like C.G. Haenel and V.C. Schilling; higher-end examples featured figured-wood stocks with cut checkering, butterknife bolt handles, double-set triggers and engraving. But there were many other Haenel-Mannlichers of more utilitarian bent as well, though these, too, sported aesthetic features like engraving and checkered bolt knobs. A latter example is presented here.