I have a carbine sporter built on a Romanian M93 (Steyr) in it's original 6.5x53R caliber. Original barrel used w/ 1/4 rib added, 2 leaf sight, DST, full length stock & and some engraving that's hard to see in my pics. Nice light weight carbine. Just started case forming and loading. Using 303 British (Greek Military HXP 'cause I have a bunch of it) and 6.5x54 M/S dies. A bit of work but I finally worked out a few bugs and got it to shoot. I've only fired it with my starting load of 30gr of IMR 4350, CCI primer, 160gr Hornady SP bullets. 3 shots touching but 4" high at 25yrds (my only range available on Sunday AM as skeet shooting interfere with the 50 & 100 yrd ranges (lead rain). Some rear sight filing looks to be in order at some point. The load comes from an article by Ken Waters in Handloader Magazine "256 Mannlicher-Pet Loads". His load was 37gr, I backed off to 30gr to start and haven't bothered to play around with anything else yet. Haven't had time. A couple of pics of the carbine and the loading table.
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I've read others state that loading data for the 6.5 Italian Carcano is a good starting point for this caliber due to the similarities of the cases and that the Italian round being a bit smaller in length (51mm) gives a margin of safety. Sounds reasonable. I haven't dug up any data on the Carcano round to compare with the above to see if they do in fact have any relationship. I suspect they do but I try to avoid 'wildcatting' especially when sitting behind a 100 year old rifle with custom formed cases. I also had in storage from years ago a large (2000+) supply of pulled military 6.5cal FMJ 160gr bullets. I bought them for something like $1 per box of 200pcs. Squirreled away waiting for the day I knew would come when I could freely load them and shoot something I would own for nearly nothing. Unfortunately, they are pulled Carcano bullets of .268" diameter and they stick in the seater die of my Redding die set. They would have to make them so precise. The groove dia. of the carbine above is actually .268" as are alot of the Euro military 6.5 rifles of that period, but I'll have to size them down .004" to use them I guess. With the price of bullets, It'll be worth it. Good stuff for my 1903 M/S too.
