Carcano Rifles

Are they any good? My father collected them and I really wanted to like them, however, all of them shot very high, as in 12"-14" high at 100 yards and there really no way you can bring that down unless you put a front site on that's about 6" tall which would look rediculas.

Are all carcanos like this?

Thanks jim

 

Allegedly it was a Carcano rifle that was used to Assassinate JFKennedy.
If that is the case it cannot be be so bad.

Regards
Tom

 

Jim - the "original" Steyr-Mannlicher was an excellent WWI era "straight pull" bolt action rifle...and the patents for it were given to the Italians as war reparations at the end of the First World War...

...but as manufactured and put into service as the Mannlicher-Carcano by the Italians, sloppier manufacturing standards and materials etc. resulted in a rifle whose performance was inferior to the original Austrian.

Tom - one of the oft-quoted factlets especially beloved of the tinfoil hat brigade is that Lee Harvey Oswald's Carcano was actually damaged. Slight bolt and sights damage meant that...even with Oswald being a trained sniper...it couldn't have been as accurate as it proved to be, nor could it have got off as many aimed, accurate rounds at a moving target as Oswald seems to have achieved

IIRC the Italian Army borrowed the said rifle and performed their own static bench tests a handful of years ago now, and confirmed that it couldn't have fired as rapidly as Oswald managed...

 

Oh, dear God, let us not turn this into a JFK assassination thread. There are enough crispy critter sites like that already.

I have not heard much good about the Carcano. I have an article from Guns & Ammo about it somewhere, I'll try and dig it out. The British captured large numbers of Carcanos in COMPASS and other North African battles, and these were widely issued as second-class arms. Many went to India, some were sent to arm the Karen Levies against the Japs, and from the evidence of one blurry photograph the KAR may have carried them in Madagascar. The garrison of Tobruk during the first siege used some as well, and I think they were also on SOE's shopping list for air-dropping to European resisters. I think some were still banging away in the horn of Africa as recently as the 1980s.

 

I found the Guns and Ammo article, which was written by one Harris Bierman for a 1987 special issue titled Surplus Firearms.

Bierman had some good things to say about the Carcano after a shooting session with several examples. He liked the safety and found it quite effective. Stripping was easy, The six-round Mannlicher clips functioned well, and could be reloaded and sent through again without any distortion; in fact, Bierman found the Mannlicher system superior to Mauser clips, which (he says) are too prone to dumping their rounds. The specialist carbines with the folding bayonets were quite handy. Recoil over all was mild for both rifle and carbine versions, producing 3 to 4 inch groups at 100 yards. (Apparently Bierman didn't try for longer ranges.) At a stretch, Bierman thought Carcanos might be acceptable for deer, but were best used as plinkers.

Though he called the Carcanos he shot "poorly finished" Bierman had no complaints about the general manufacturing or mechanical quality of the weapons, and the accuracy on the examples he used was obviously better than Jim and his old man were getting. So no, not all Carcanos were poor in that regard. The action took some getting used to for a shooter accustomed to Mauser types, but functioned smoothly once it became familiar. If the action had been clumsy or too slow, I am sure Bierman would have noted the fact. He was (is?) an experienced shooter and firearms author.

 

You're a chicken!