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Here's an interesting little bit that I found on the 'net regarding loads for the M1910:

The Cast Bullet Association, Inc.

The follow appeared in the May/June 2003, #232 issue of the Fouling Shot.

(Editors note: We recently came into possession of some of Frank Marshalls old notebooks with his writings that had not seen the light of day. We have not had a chance to take a complete inventory of them but it looks like there is a couple years worth of material there. Enjoy!)

When I wound up with the 9.5x57 Tyrolean mountain style Mannlicher Schoenauer with the 20 barrel, it made a good pair with my scoped, 25 barreled M96 Swedish Mauser, also in the 9.5x57 unique big bore concept. My loading tools were suited to either one, including the 50¢310 tool bullet size die converted to a taper tool to form cast bullets for a match grade fit in the taper throats. The only bullet I couldnt use through the Mannlicher Schoenauers spool magazine (without the base being below the neck) was the long 330 grain bullet, due to its 1.2 length, which fit and fed fine from the M96s stagger Mauser magazine when seated to the base of the neck, including a lubed felt base wad. This was the old 38-55 target bullet #375166, a plain base, which at 1400 muzzle velocity from the 12 twist was a windy day winner. However, due to the very similar taper throat in both rifles I could use that very accurate bullet form single loaded in the M.S. chamber, #375166 after tapering the front band.

The idea of leaving the M96 Swede always scoped was much easier now, as frequent off and on didnt do those claw and spring lock high mounts any favors. Slight impact changes were usually evident after putting the scope back on, but they were very stable when left alone. I hoped I could keep the M.S. carbine sighted in with an all-around North woods load with the two leaf open rear sights.The landed gentry dude that had had the 9.5 M.S. for his brief cast load enthusiastic fling, before he let me have it for a song with all the reload tools, components, etc., had altered the open sights to a wide V British style, tuned to his standard cast woods load. This load con-sisted of the great 38-55 cast bullet #375296 gas check, .380 diameter from the mould and tapered on two front bands to fit the taper throat. (I have found over the #375296 years the cast bullet tapered to fit the European normal throat taper was a positive favor for lead loads.) The low leaf was dead on at 50 yards, with the high leaf dead center at 125 yards. With this bullet doing about 1600 m.v., this load about duplicated the 38-55 famous cast load, about equal to the factory high velocity load with a 255 grain jacketed bullet, but the heavier cast load did it better.

For hunting, this heavier cast bullet, by 25 grains, was responsible for the 38-55s high repute. Invariably at turkey shoots I had seen that load in a 38-55 stiff pipe long-tom Winchester or Marlin outshoot the factory jack-eted bullet and reloaded jacketed bullets, if the cast loader knew what he was doing. At the hunt camps it was the same story plus cleaner kills quite notably.

From the handy hiker 9.5 mm Carbine this same load was adequate, more accurate and very comfortable to shoot, in addition the standard M.S. stock length of 14 from the single trigger suiting me much better than the standard American stock length of 13 plus a little.

As Will the Wizard put it, Duke, you got yourself a glorified H.V. 38-55 slick shooting handy ridge runner there and a real class act to boot. I says smugly, That was the whole idea.

Except for refining the landed gentrys standard load a little via orientation, etc., I also was very pleased to use that load as my standard load for hunting, but I thought I could do better.

I had had lots of luck with the .380 old 38-55 standard 255 grain plain base bullet #375248 and the 38-72 plain base #375167 of 275 grains, both doing very good in the 1100 to 1400 f.p.s. area from 12 twist foreign forms of barrels.

#375166

#375296

#375248

#375167

I did a batch of the 38-72 round nose bullets since in the M.S. spool magazine I didnt have to go with a flat nose as in the tube magazine. To run through a spool magazine, this round nose bullet worked perfect with a felt wad or a heavy card wad stuck to the base with old Lyman black magic lube. Seated to the base of the neck and with the front band tapered, half of which blended with the nose ogive, I was ready to bet on 1400 m.v., hoping the long range leaf would suit this load at 50 yards.

I was ready at the coops with tools and components in hand to work it out right now with the turkey shoot that same afternoon my goal as the final proof. (Editors note: The coops was an old chicken coop that Franks Uncle Will had turned into a private indoor range.) To show how a round nose shoots a heluva lot flatter than a flat nose, it came out that the 125 yard sight hit too high and the 50 yard sight was almost right and just a little more velocity, or near 1400 m.v. allowed my favored center hold good on game or bulls eyes. The vibrations seemed more favorable since the groups then seemed slightly rounder for five.

So here I was, unexpectedly now, with a load right about on at 50 that the faster flat nose standard load also matched for on at 50, even though quite a bit more powerful. The barrel node and vibration factor seemed to be quite significant also but this condition remained quite uniformly favorable from that stiff pipe full stock Mannlicher Schoenauer.

By the time I got over to the shoot, wolfed down a couple grilled dogs and a cold cider, the third round of 20 shooters was about over and looking at the targets that cool October day. I knew some hot shots were present and every one was in the pot and on the big bird both. Right away I was wondering whyunhel I hadnt brought the Match Rifle sweet Swede with such nice pots being won. The old rolled Indian blanket over a log, on which you laid the back of your hand, in which you held the rifle, was the way Id sighted in, so no alibi there. By the time I was out six bucks the sun was sliding fast behind the hill behind us with the target now in deep shade, and the last round had 26 last hope shooters.

I drew ticket #26, with two shooters shooting at a time on two targets. Most were shooting in a hurry, so I waited for my pair-up man to shoot first. The guy with the spot scope says, Wow! very loudly. The shooter says, Where is it? The spot scope guy says, A fat ten, and might go an X. The Shooter says, We eat turkey tomor-row, by gorra! The spot guy says, Yah, and you can pay me back that 10-spot you owe me.

About then my careful squeeze as the bead sight pic-ture looked perfect broke, and I says to myself, If this shot goes where it should, Im in business. Although I knew that if the other guy was in for an X, Id have to be lucky as hell as usual.

The spot scope guy was very quiet, but when I got up he says, What un-Goshen is that kind of gun? And youre the last shooter. Well, Ill be. Both of us were sat-isfied it was a tie nipper X, but it was by then too dark to shoot it off, so we took 13 bucks apiece and since the shoot sponsors had done so good that day they gave us each a nice dressed bird. They ate turkey, by gorra, the spot scope guy got his 10 bucks back and the little Mannlicher Schoenauer made money and meat the first match. The others said, What dumb luck, shooting in the dark. That mill town Duke kid is spooky.

For the rest of the dressed turkey season, (the only kind up north at that time) the little M.S. with the medium load, just a little more powerful than a standard 38-55 original load, held its own, about matching the high Swedish 9.5x57 previous years score to put me well ahead using the 38-72 round nose bullet, tapered to fit the throat. This load was actually just about equal to the old 38-72 which never was given the H.V. boost for the original black powder M95 Winchester, although they did put out a smokeless load with a jacketed 275 grain bullet.

When that load didnt draw flies in that depressed period, nor had the 38-72 been very popular from the first day, I managed to pick up a stash of the very nice .377 jacketed 275 grain round soft nose bullets in case I got into a frequent lazy spell or caught at a time to go huntin and nothing yet cast and had to load up in a hurry.

Among the fellows stuff that came with the M.S. I found the original open rear sight with two leaves marked 100 and 200 meters and so I got hot to try a full fireworks factory duplicate load, or close using the 275 grain jack-eted bullet.

The 9.5x57, 20 barrel Austrian alpine classic was touted primarily as a medium bore Africa/India (or European boar) handy piece and was respected to the degree that all the European ammo plants made the one standard load of a 270 grain soft nose and a solid at a muzzle velocity of 2150 f.p.s. for quite a load from such a relatively light carbine, as rifles went at that time. (This cartridge and rifle was held as 80% of a 375 H&H Mag. at 30% of the price, 50% handier, and you had to get 20% closer.) The Brits called it the 375 x 2-1/4 Nitro. The metric was called the 9.5x56 and/or 9.5x57, all one and the same unique cartridge.

Brought out in 1910, the case body is one of the least tapered of any bottleneck case with only .005 on a side or from .470 diameter at the base to .460 at the shoulder, which was a fairly steep angle to the neck diameter of .400. This was the Steyr solution to use the Mauser case head size for a fair diameter bullet with adequate headspace bearing on the shoulder angle. Although quite a radical case design, it fed flawlessly from the slick spool magazine, also a feature of the precision made Mannlicher Schoenauer rifles. Boxer 30-06 cases are easily sized back and necked up to fire-form to 9.5x57.

The case volume at easy pressure is very favorable to a first rate heavy bullet woods load. Over the years I have used loads in this case ranging from a round ball indoor plinker or outdoors for rodents or small game, up to the 375 H&H 300 grain jacketed slug at 2000 m.v. using post WWII components. This case apparently is quite efficient. The advantage of using 30-06 brass is that the shoulder can be located to exactly suit the head-space in your individual rifle for easy openers.

The 275 grain old 38-72 jacketed soft round nose is designed for woods use at 1300 impact velocity. At 2000 m.v. it was a woods bomb. The original 275 grain swaged lead round nose bullet at 1425 m.v. from a 26 M95 Winchester barrel with black powder reflects that the Big Red W (Winchester) was not what youd callup with the progress in the worlds small arms race. Be that as it was, Uncle Will had also come by a pile of boththe swaged lead nice round nose bullets and also the jacketed 275 grain soft nose bullets. (I had also acquireda stash of the 38-72 jacketed bullets.) The 38-72 Winchester M95 tuned to black powder was one spin in22. In the 12 twist of the 9.5x57 with normal .006 deep grooves we got near 1500 m.v. using fast bump-up #80,or good old lots of loads to a can Unique with these .378 swaged soft bullets for better accuracy than revealed by the M95, 26 barrel. (We tapered the front bands of this factory lead bullet to suit our taper throats.) Using the jacketed .377 bullet in the 12 twist revealed much better accuracy than from a M95 shot at original 1425 m.v. with its 22 twist. The 38-72 jackets were thin compared to the 375 H&H 270 grain jacketed bullet of .375 diameter.

This Mannlicher Schoenauer with a .378 groove diameter was more accurate with the .378 38-72 jacket-ed bullet than with the .375 270 grain bullet and the .378 38-72 jacketed bullets came free, which didnt encourage me to cast when the shop shelves then were sagging under the weight of those pretty 38-72 precision jacketed jolters.

With the original open sights back in place and my bench work reload tools on location to do it up quick withthe 38-72 jacketed loads, I soon had a 2000 m.v. load that liked the 275 grain bullet and was on at 100 with that leaf and a real impressive whumper in the tough oak log butts. At the 50 yard turkey shoot range I had to see a little black over the front bead to center the group on the 100 yard bull using the low 100 meter rear sight. Using the 200 meter sight at 100 yards, the impact was five inches high which is a very flat trajectory for a short range rifle when you consider it from a practical utility viewpoint. This trajectory would indicate close to 2000m.v. using iron sights. Impact velocity at 200 yards would be about 1500 f.p.s., or about equal to the 38-55H.V. jacketed loads muzzle velocity, and this with a 20 grain heavier 38-72 jacketed bullet. While probably notan ideal brown bear load, or even for polar bear out at 200 yards, up close such a load would not be the worstto be caught short with and in the North-East area of my concern, you wouldnt have to back away from anything known.

Using 270 grain 375 H&H bullets which were not as blunt nosed as the 275 grain 38-72 round nose bullets, with the same charge put the group higher at all ranges. British factory 270 grain loads that came with the rifle, shot against my handloads, were about on at 100 yards with the 100 meter sight but not as accurate. I was convinced that I had a very good 38-72 275 grain jacketed bullet woods load. (Often I would use jacketed bullets if invited to a camp that scorned cast.)

Having satisfied myself that I had a heluva jolting choice of jacked loads for this little rifle from the 300 grain Holland & Holland solid on down to the 255 grain 38-55 jacketed bullets, all hard to get in those days, when the factories, buy a long shot, didnt encourage reloading, I got back to that cozy, comfortable 275 grain nice round nose form 38-72 plain base bullet at 1400 m.v. in a moderate alloy. Tapered on the two front bands with the rear end a full .380 diameter I had a match grade taper neck and throat fit both, not to mention an exact bore ride nose favor. When orient indexing all steps from mould to loading into chamber and using all dies involved free floating for self centering, I actually enjoyed the full accuracy potential of this pure sporting form of fusil, tested indoors. Some top coops opiners were quick to point out, Who the hell would ever believe such a gun could do that?

I then used that same load in the classic Sweet Swede 9.5x57 and got the same results and reaction from the coops counselors. Needless to say, I stayed lucky with that little M.S. 9.5x57.

As ever, Frank Marshall Jr.

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