HELP ID 6.5mm

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dan101man

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Not sure if this is in the right thread,
was at a buddies place today and he picked this up,
i see it says 6.5mm on the top of the action ahead of the bolt,
However I don't see any makers markings, it was a brief visit
and i didn't have time to pull the stalk, i may get a chance to own this one
i am unsure of what it is or what it may be worth
also the stalk appears to be 2 pieces screwed together behind the trigger is this right?
any help greatly appreciated
sorry for the low quality pics all i had with me was my camcorder
here is a couple of pictures

http://img692.imageshack.us/i/pic0005v.jpg/

http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/868/pic0003r.jpg

http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/49/pic0001w.jpg

http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/3594/pic0004r.jpg

Thanks for any input...
 
Looks to be a Cooey-Carcano. M1891 Carano rifle sporterized by Cooey for Eatons, in the early '30s. Likely 6.5x54MS caliber, not 6.5x52MC.
 
is ammo/reloading supplies/brass/dies still available?
he wants to shoot it
looks kinda beat up to me
will inspect the bore before we shoot it
but he got it cheap
i figured this was the place to ask
 
if the barrel is stamped 6.5mm it has been converted to 6.5x54 M/S. components are still available but pricey. there are 2 schools of thought on these, some say they are safe to shot, others say they are pipe bombs. have it checked by a competent gunsmith. also it looks like it had double set triggers at one time and the rear one has broken off. since it was re chambering of the original italian barrel, that uses a .268 diameter bullet, i can't how the accuracy will be when loaded with a standard .264 projectile. you will also need to find proper enbloc clip, as the bolt design does not allow single loading of a cartridge.
 
Those actions are plenty strong enough. PO Ackley, tested them extensively and found them to be very strong. Steyr built thousands of them in 8x57. I have one to prove it and in
WHB Smith's "The Book of Rifles", they are mentioned.

Take it to someone that knows what they are doing to have the chamber checked. It's very easily done. Just insert a fired round for each cartridge into the chamber and see if you can close the bolt.

Now, that being said, it may also have been wildcatted to another cartridge. Many were. They were incredibley cheap 50 years ago and bubba was all the rage.

If you look at the trigger guard, you will see the rear trigger is missing. This was a set trigger to lighten the pull on the sear release trigger. Many people took them off. They either couldn't get used to which trigger to pull or had accidental discharges with the extremely light trigger after it was set.

It sure looks like one of the Sears rebuilds. It is most likely in 6.5x54MS as mentioned above. It also needs an enbloc charger to hold the cartridges in the magazine. The charger also works as feed lips, to guide the cartridge into the chamber and allow its rim to fit under the extractor. In it's present state, it's single shot only and ugly to load. The extractor on the bolt won't fit over the cartridge rim, unless it's fed from underneath.

It's worth about $35 in its present state. A box of cartridges for it will cost appx $60.

It's hardly worth the effort.
 
It's a Carcano allright, but the (in)famous Cooey Carcano did not use the original barrel. It used just the chamber. The rifled piece which actually screwed onto the chamber section had Cooey 8-groove rifling with very narrow lands. This is entirely different than the original Italian rifling, which was 4 grooves with wide lands and gain-twist into the bargain.

This is the rifle which very nearly gave ALL 6.5s a black eye in Western Canada. When I got my first Carcano, back in high-school, I was told that I was plain insane for getting a 6.5 at all! Practically everybody, it seemed, had a horror story about somebody getting blown to bits or killed or maimed with a 6.5.

In all fairness to the rifles, though, I only ever met ONE man who actually KNEW the person injured and who actually SAW the rifle. The last rifle he purchased for his own use before his death this Monday past, was a 6.5, one of the Swedish match rifles. Obviously, even he thought that there was more to the tale than had been told.

It IS possible to mess with the Cooey Carcanos in such a fashion that they can become dangerous to the user. I have a couple of rounds of the special Eaton's ammunition for this rifle but, to be perfectly honest, I can't see the difference between it and a regular 6.5 Carcano round. The 6.5 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, on the other hand, already was being manufactured here for the MS rifle. It would be tight in a Carcano chamber (I have done this) and, possibly much more dangerous, the neck of the 54mm MS case would be far too tight in the throat of the 52mm Carcano chamber; this could lead to a very high pressure spike.

The special ammunition for the Cooey Carcanos was packed in 20-round pink boxes and had a very distinctive headstamp. The rifle used a standard Carcano 6-shot Mannlicher CLIP which fell out of the bottom of the magazine when the final round was chambered. These CLIPS are now scarce and expensive, so you save the ones you can get by putting a bit of tape across the slot in the bottom of the magazine.

It would be really nice to know what ammunition the "deadly" Cooey Carcanos were actually used with.

Use it or not, this critter is a whole chapter in Canadian firearms history, all by itself.

I have one.... which needs a trigger, come to think of it!
 
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John, from a PRACTICAL point of view, you're right.

But the Cooey Carcano is SUCH a tale in its own right that it needs a bit of TLC.

I'm sure that you've gone into gun shops and seen a poor old Lee-Enfield, standing lonely in the corner, weeping tiny flakes of rust onto the floor as it cried quietly to itself because nobody loved it..... and you've bought it and taken it home and cleaned it and fed it.... and it has responded by trying to shoot a target, even though the barrel is toast, just from sheer gratitude.

The Cooey Carcano is in that same class, but only if you're
(a) Canadian
(b) certifiably nuts and
(c) a gun collector.

I guess I'm there.

Think of it as a (very) poor man's version of a cut-down .30-40 Krag and you're in the right ballpark.
 
smellie said:
It's a Carcano allright, but the (in)famous Cooey Carcano did not use the original barrel. It used just the chamber. The rifled piece which actually screwed onto the chamber section had Cooey 8-groove rifling with very narrow lands. This is entirely different than the original Italian rifling, which was 4 grooves with wide lands and gain-twist into the bargain.

This is the rifle which very nearly gave ALL 6.5s a black eye in Western Canada. When I got my first Carcano, back in high-school, I was told that I was plain insane for getting a 6.5 at all! Practically everybody, it seemed, had a horror story about somebody getting blown to bits or killed or maimed with a 6.5.

In all fairness to the rifles, though, I only ever met ONE man who actually KNEW the person injured and who actually SAW the rifle. The last rifle he purchased for his own use before his death this Monday past, was a 6.5, one of the Swedish match rifles. Obviously, even he thought that there was more to the tale than had been told.

It IS possible to mess with the Cooey Carcanos in such a fashion that they can become dangerous to the user. I have a couple of rounds of the special Eaton's ammunition for this rifle but, to be perfectly honest, I can't see the difference between it and a regular 6.5 Carcano round. The 6.5 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, on the other hand, already was being manufactured here for the MS rifle. It would be tight in a Carcano chamber (I have done this) and, possibly much more dangerous, the neck of the 54mm MS case would be far too tight in the throat of the 52mm Carcano chamber; this could lead to a very high pressure spike.

The special ammunition for the Cooey Carcanos was packed in 20-round pink boxes and had a very distinctive headstamp. The rifle used a standard Carcano 6-shot Mannlicher CLIP which fell out of the bottom of the magazine when the final round was chambered. These CLIPS are now scarce and expensive, so you save the ones you can get by putting a bit of tape across the slot in the bottom of the magazine.

It would be really nice to know what ammunition the "deadly" Cooey Carcanos were actually used with.

Use it or not, this critter is a whole chapter in Canadian firearms history, all by itself.

I have one.... which needs a trigger, come to think of it!
Click to expand...

That about sums it up. I have owned several (still have a few), and a while back, in response to the warning "they're dangerous", I proof tested one and later disassembled it. It stood up to about 100K psi - see the story here:

http://www.canadiangunnutz.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81823

As for its construction, the barrel is not "pressed in and held in place by a set screw" (as widely reported), it's screwed into a barrel stub (similar to what Savage does these days) and indexed with a set screw. All of my examples have four groove rifling with widths roughly equal to the lands.

Eaton_Carcano_Barrel_Assembly.jpg


The mythology of it being dangerous seems to be attached to the "special ammo" available for it, and various unsubstantiated stories of one blowing up and killing someone. Now we know that any gun will "blow up" if abused, so we need to understand the circumstances to draw any conclusions about inherent safety of this firearm, and that info just doesn't exist, hence my testing.

It could be that the special ammo was made up for as simple a reason as to sell ammo, or that (as suggested) too many boneheads were forcing incorrect ammo into it, pinching the neck and causing unpleasant things to happen. We don't know (and likely never will), but given my testing I can surmise that the action would not likely give, but the gas-handling abilities of the action are "primitive", so sensible ammo use is important.
 
Thanks very much for that, Andy.

The more myths we can dispell among ourselves, the better equipped we will be to handle the Wendys of the world and their publicly-subsidised disinformation system,

The myth of the Cooey Carcano has interested me for many years, and it's good to get some impartial examination at last.

As to the ammo, I do know that this was sold especially for these rifles and I can't tell it from Carcano. It's not the 'extra millimeter' in length of the 6.5MS (actually closer to 2).

I do know that when I started off, I had a Carcano Carbine and no ammo. There was a box of 6.5MS at the hardware store but it was $4.85 and for $6 I could get FIVE boxes of Western Cart Co white-box milspec and I knew it had to be the right stuff because the people selling it called it "6.5 Italian" and my friend who had a copy of Smith & Smith told me that the rifle was Italian.

Gee! This is going all the way back to when I knew NUTHIN'. It was rather like steaming full-speed in a dense fog, with no Decca!

So I skipped the "6,5MS" ammo for the time being but I did get a part-box later on and crammed a few into the Carbine. If you smacked the bolt-handle down hard ENOUGH (hurt my hand, I'll tell you) it would close.... and then the only thing you could do to unload it was pull the trigger.

But the two cartridges ARE close enough that a complete idiot (such as I was back then) could put the MS round into an unaltered Carcano but, once you got it in, you had to fire it in order to get it out again.

I rather think that this could have happened, creating massive pressure spikes. The spikes, combined with "Well, I took it apart and cleaned it, but the cat was playing with that itty-bitty little screw and he lost it, so I put the gun together without it. It din't do nuthin', anyway." COULD have been the problem. And 6.5MS ammo was available, given that you had 2 bucks to buy shells at all (this was the Dirty Thirties when all the fuss erupted; thankfully, I was operating 25 years later).

Today, we have Loctite, we have proper Carcano brass (Tradex has some right now) and the 6.5MS round has become scarce as hen's teeth. The problem likely won't arise again, now that we know a bit more and are equipped to handle it. Just too bad that the carcano got such a black eye out of it. They really are a fine little rifle, just a bit short on the spiffy-finish side. But they are history now and the Cooey variant is one of the most significant, even if for all the wrong reasons.
 
As far as parts are concerned, Dan, ALL of the mechanical parts, excepting the trigger mech, are standard Mannlicher-Carcano parts, Model 1891. Parts from any of the 91-type rifles, Carbines or TS rifles will fit, as will parts from the later Model 38 series.

Should the Cooey barrel happen to terrify you, it can be replaced with an original Carcano barrel and there are some of those around, I know. Original Carcano barrels had 4 grooves, right-hand twist, rather wide lands and they were gain-twist: slow twist at the breech end, accelerating to the muzzle. The Carcano was the ONLY smokeless-powder rifle to use gain-twist rifling, although it had been popular for extremely accurate shooting in match rifles toward the end of the black-powder period. Being that it was felt to be the most accurate rifling possible, the Italians copied it for their Carcanos into the smokeless-powder era and used it until the end of production. The only rifle in the Carcano series NOT to have gain-twist, and to use standard constant-twist rifling instead, was the Model 1941 rifle, a long(er) rifle with a 27-inch barrel as opposed to the 31 inches or so of the older 1891 rifles. The Model 1941 is NOT common but, BOY! can they ever shoot! I have one that was sold to me for the magnificent sum of $56; any time I can get a true 1-MOA rifle for 56 bucks, I'll take it, thankyouverymuch...... and I'm GONE!

But you should have no trouble finding most of the parts. Only trhing that might be a bit of a problem would be that you would have to know which extractor to buy. There were 3 different extractors used on Carcanos and they do not interchange. Fortunately, they stopped playing "let's develop a better rifle" in 1912 and took the old ones out of service as fast as possible. I have a 1917 rifle here which had an older bolt (they did a lot of that, especially with wartime production) and the extractor (missing, mind you) actually passed THROUGH the right-hand locking lug. This extractor has been unavailable since about the start of the Great War, but there well could be a stash of them hiding somewhere.

The one thing you like won't be able to find will be spares for the double-set-trigger mechanism... and this is the one place where I really WISH some were available. I need a trigger for my own Cooey Carcano.... and it might be fun to try set-triggers on the 1941. Right now it shoots as good as I can hold but.....

Good luck in your quest. Nice thing about hunting parts: they are ALWAYS in season!
 
I would suggest that the reason for the way that the Cooey-Carcano is barrelled is the gain twist rifling. The barrel can't be shortened from the muzzle end. So, shorten it from the breech.
Incidentally, the only Carcano I own is a M1941. After the first time I shot it, I realized that all the trash about Carcanos being inferior was just that, trash.
 
well i went back the other day to have another look, the extractor is in place and in good shape, looks like 8 groove rifling as well,
but the top fed clip is missing
cheers, and thanks for the replies,
got some good info,
Dan
 
Saw one last weekend. It's a Carcano as already stated. Never heard the Eatons Cooey angle before. The one I looked at was 6.5x54 according to the owner and had double set triggers.
 
Smellie, you are correct that I have rescued a couple of Bubba jobs
1. Sportyized, No4 that I almost didn't buy UNTIL l looked at the date on the buttsocket (1934) trials rifle converted to T specs. Finding the timber wasn't that hard BUT it took several years to find a No32 Mk1 Scope and a scope mount from Roger Payne in the U.K.

2. NZ contract carbine (1500 made) the IDIOT chopped the forend and threw away the handguard and nosecap. Found a Guy in Canada who made the new timber. What worried me was having to send him the forend and handguard from my other NZ carbine for him to use as a template. If they had been somehow lost in the mail, I would have been doubly screwed!:eek:

BUT neither rifle had any rust flaking off it.

Current piece of junk from IMA. Francotte Martini Henry. Destroyed the buttstock getting it off and had to use a PIPE WRENCH on the rusted in stock bolt. Drilled out the screw holding in the reciever guts.
Got the front barrel band off, but will have to drill out the screw on the mid band. Oddly enough there is still rifling in the barrel.
The "bargain" turned out to be NO bargain. Oh yeah, will have to make a new firing pin as well as the old one is guarenteed to pierce the primers.
 
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