doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com 8x60 Normal

I'm looking at a German rifle which I'm told is chambered in 8x60 Normal. Now, as I recall, there were two bullet sizes for this calibre--.318 and .323.

Which is Normal?

Thank you,

Jim Kilday

In Germany is .318 normal. And.323 is little later and in all Husqvarna rifles for ex. .318I or J is normal,.323JS is the modern ammo in repetergun.

Reards Lennart

I had this exact dilemma with an Oberndorf sporting mauser I own.
Mine was marked 80 N or 8x57 normal, but I was unsure what was normal pre WW1.
The 8x60 as I understand it was only made from 1919 - 1930's due to restrictions on 8x57 manufacture, but was also made in either J or JS bore.
If yours is a sporting mauser there will actually be some numbers underneath the barrel which give the bore and groove diameter of that gun.

The common advice is get the bore measured to determine which bore it has.
HOWEVER, this is not entirely correct,as both J and JS bore can be around .321.
The advice I received from a well known guru on mausers is that the CHAMBER NECK is actually the critical dimension.
In the J bore it was naturally smaller and firing JS ammo in it can build pressure due to lack of room for the neck to expand.

Mine turned out to be a J bore ,however as was common the neck had been reamed out early in the rifles life to convert it to fire JS ammo.

I am picking yours is J bore.
Get it slugged to be sure and in particular have the chamber neck checked.

If you want I can send you a copy of his posting,

GDU

There's a pretty decent write-up of the "Normalization" process that occurred in the German sporting ammunition industry in Dixon's "European Sporting Cartridges" vol 1, page 126. The first line is a good summary:

"A major problem with the number of companies producing cartridges in Germany was that many introduced their own types similar but apparently non-interchangeable with those of other companies."

The luxury of well-defined and fixed dimensions of cartridges as we have presently in the US just didn't exist in Germany before 1900 and the German ammo industry struggled to address this even through the post-WWII years, various cartridges being "Normalized", or set to standard dimensions, at different dates. According to Dixon the 8x60 was done sometime before 1923. The question of "J" -vs- "S" bore 8mms is separate from this as both needed standardized dimensions.

All this aside, GDU has it exactly right in that only a chamber cast and bore slug can tell you about any particular rifle. Thank goodness that's easy to do and there's brass available for just about anything these days!