The Finnish Mosin Dilemma: What is 7.62x53r?

Howdy Folks this is Big Sam today we're going to be doing one of our most highly requested videos of all time that's right y'all have been asking for it for ages there have been countless Reddit and random internet Forum posts throughout the ages about this topic that's right we're going to be talking today about the legendary and very mysterious 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge so let's get into it folks now first off some of y'all who aren't familiar with this cartridge probably thought I misspoke you might say big Sam I know there's a 762 by 54 rimmed cartridge what is 762 by 53 rimmed cartridge though and this is where things get really interesting because we all know or most of us know that Finland used mosin's very heavily from The Finnish civil war going on from 1918 all the way up through the end of the continuation and Lapland War uh in the mid-1940s so they have a very rich history of the mozenegot rifle and with that comes a plethora of interesting variants like this uh M24 civil guard rifle uh whom's Barrel was actually produced by uh Sig which is pretty cool but um one of the things we need to talk about is the whole process of how Finland went about deciding how they were going to use mozenegot rifles and what capacity and in what ways they were actually able to so after the finished Civil War Finland had a lot of mosins in their armories they had a ton of mosins from armories that were kind of left over from the whole of the old Russian Empire because Finland before 1918 was actually part of the Russian Empire the Tsar actually acted acted as the Grand Duke of Finland it was kind of this weird relationship but anyway what's the finished Civil War was over in the The Finnish White had successfully won and declared their independence um they had a lot of mosins laying around from the old Russian Empire but also they had a lot of mosins that were gifted to them by the Germans around 1918. a lot of those bosens were of course ones that the Germans had captured from the Russians uh in the first several years of the war the Great War so you ended up having this weird scenario where you have all these interesting different Moses kind of funneling into this new Nordic newly formed Nordic country which was Finland at the time um there was a problem though there are actually a couple problems one a lot of these guns were really beat up um they really weren't taken super good care of most of them um so a lot of those had the barrels on these things were pretty dubious at best they were kind of shot out um they had a lot of pitting they weren't stored super well and in general they were just warned they had seen better days they'd seen a lot of field use and they had a lot of rounds put through them and and so what you had was this sort of nightmare scenario for Finland because they also had a problem of not really having a whole lot of money to do anything about it um they didn't have a huge budget I mean Finland was still mostly agrarian society so when they started thinking about okay how are we going to consolidate our arms into you know some standardized new infantry weapon uh they ran into some problems and some disagreements along the way as you might imagine so obviously the solution here on all of these guns I mean I've read reports that you know up to maybe a hundred thousand or even more at least close to that um needed new barrels which is not good if you don't have the funds to do anything like that and we talked about this a little bit going back into our video we did on the P Series so if you're not interested in the P series we did like a whole hour documentary on that thing uh so I'd encourage you to take a look at that for a little bit more info but essentially what it boiled down to was Finland using a couple different techniques tried to re-barrel at least some of their rifles the ones that like really needed it the most at least right I mean that's the one you start out with if you can't re-barrel them all start out with the absolute worst of the worst ones that basically you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with or you had no confidence issuing to any type of troops that that type of thing essentially maybe even ones that had damage to the barrel uh maybe there was a bulge in it or it was you know shot or something who knows but a lot of these a lot of these types of guns were obviously the first candidates for guinea pigs now Finland also didn't have a lot of workshops for Mass producing new barrels and they didn't have a lot of money to do it and so one of the first things they ended up trying was of course as I mentioned previously the P series which was uh basically using the old Italian Salerno method developed by Giuseppe Salerno which was originally designed to take a rifle with a larger diameter like the 10 millimeter veterally rifle and put a sleeve in it so that it could accept a smaller diameter cartridge the 6-5 Carcano cartridge um Finland then decided well we're going to try to do that but we're going to instead um take that principle and use it to realign an existing barrel for the same caliber kind of kind of the same caliber you can probably see where this is going this is one of the things that they tried ultimately you've probably heard of the tikkakowski Factory The tikkakowski Factory was actually really the first successful Factory at Mass producing Barrels in Finland on any scale they really started right about the tail end of 1925 and from then on the rest is history as we know and go went on to produce a lot of barrels and ultimately after them they would have they would be followed by the Sacco Factory and the vkt factory who would start producing barrels as well uh as the budget really allowed obviously Finland wasn't able to re-barrel as many Moses as they liked so it's really easy to go find a Finnish Mosin um like one of these that's just really worn I mean ironically this one's really really worn and it was re-barreled by Finland so these things had a lot of use but what about the cartridges right we talked a lot about their history so far but what about the cartridges well you see as Finland was developing this whole process of relining or and making new barrels essentially the same thing from the bullets point of views it's a new Barrel whether it's a new Barrel or it's Reliant um one of the big problems with the Russian uh Mosin gaunts was that the um the board diameters weren't always uh consistent let's just be nice and put it that way um now this is probably due to a few reasons one um let's face it the tolerances on Moses in general not just the barrel but in general have always been a little bit on the lenient side let's just put it that way um some things were considered a little bit more acceptable in Russia than other countries from A weapons tolerance standpoint um in certain aspects I mean generally they were totally safe to shoot but when we talk about tolerances of maybe bore diameters for instance they tended to vary probably a lot more than some other countries infantry rifles did and so um this would actually remain true up until you know World War II so really any Russian Mosin up into World War II you could have you know you could look at it and the bore diameter could be you know anywhere from like 3 10 to 3 14 maybe even more I mean that's that's quite a significant deviation there's a lot of variance now why is this important well one other thing Finland was really focused on much more so than probably most countries was accuracy and if you wanted good accurate rifle you need two things you need a good bullet okay and then you need a rifle to put said bullet in now you can spend you know tens or hundreds of thousands of of dollars or whatever currency you have to develop a really optimal bullet but the problem is if you have a bunch of rifles that have different bore diameters uh it's kind of a waste because a lot of those bore diameters are probably going to end up being either too small for the thing uh which can cause issues or it could be too large for the thing which also can cause many issues different issues either way and so this was kind of what Finland found is in the 1920s they really started developing a new cartridge called 762 by 53 because they were interested in their own ammunition that they had better control of the tolerances of and something that would shoot better in rifles and so what is the 762 by 53 rimmed cartridge that's a good question uh and I appreciate you bearing with me so far so if you take a look at this picture over here you'll see there's two different comparisons uh that you'll see a cartridge on the left and a cartridge on the right now the cartridge on the left is the 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge and the cartridge on the right next to it is the 762 by 54 millimeter rimmed cartridge and right away you're going to notice there's a difference one of the difference is the neck length of the 54 millimeter cartridge is longer than the neck length of the 53 millimeter cartridge why is that important well if your neck length is shorter and the 53 cartridge there's a very good chance that assuming you really did your chamber reaming correctly and depending on you know the throat and everything else and how everything else is done you might not even be able to chamber a 54 millimeter cartridge you might not be able to I think you can see how this is going to be a fun problem the other interesting thing about this though is that the 53 millimeter rimmed cartridge was actually utilizing a 308 diameter projectile that's right whereas the 54 tended to use a little bit heavier or a little bit bigger wider I guess I should say um generally we're talking about 3 11 to 3 12 is it'll depend on the bullet but that's generally where I would say it averages about 311 or 312 diameter so a little bit smaller in diameter bullet this is going to get fun folks so Finland said that's the cartridge we're going to standardize on uh and so as you would start seeing uh barrels produced in Finland uh generally speaking you would expect them to actually be chambered for this the 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge probably um again this is the idea I'm not saying every single one in the 1920s and 30s every single barrel that they produced was chambered in this but it's probably most likely to um so for instance this rifle here which is a Finnish M24 civil guard rifle had a barrel produced by the Sig Factory which we're not going to get into all the specifics of all the different moves and variants today that this video is already going to be too long as it is folks but this guy is most likely in that 762 by 53 millimeter category with a 308 diameter board although uh it's going to get a little bit interesting because I have actually shot standard commercial um 762 by 54 through this gun we're going to get into that more a little bit later though and because I know one of the questions that I get a lot is can I shoot 762 by 54 millimeter cartridges in Finnish Moses that have a 308 diameter bore interchapered in 762 by 53 we're going to get into that folks Okay so Finland starts out with this new caliber right and the problem is they it from my perspective as a historian immediately backed themselves into a corner doing this why well one of the reasons one of the big reasons is remember I was talking about the budget okay what we do know is that Finland didn't re-barrel nearly all of their uh certainly their m91 rifles and these are rifles that have already gone through two or three Wars at least over you know 30 40 years even up to half a century on some of them by the time the winter war came around yeah and the continuation worse so these guys were beat up and here's the problem if you have these old guns that you didn't read Barrel that maybe started out in life with like a 313 diameter uh bore and then went through like 30 40 Years of wars and wasn't stored super well um you probably see where this is going it your your Barrel is probably going to be uh opened up a little bit more through all that wear and use and so you have what you started out was a with a three you know what we say 14 diameter bore which is probably no longer that by now probably a little bit more shot out and coupled with the fact that now you're standardizing on a 308 diameter bullet in a situation where you had to use that particular bullet in that particular gun what's going to happen well it's probably not even going to stabilize in many guns and you're going to get tumbling uh now that's not really good especially if you're looking for accuracy however some people probably didn't mind this especially during the winter War at you know if you're shooting at close range because well if if you're in attacking Russian in the winter War you probably don't want to get hit by a tumbling 308 projectile going at some 2000 odd feet per second that's going to mess you up very bad so really that just ended up being bad for everybody all around um now that being said I have read reports that after the Finnish Civil War Finland probably had over oh I think it was a hundred million car it was either 10 or 100 million I forget it was as many many millions of captured essentially 762 by 54 millimeter ammunition or 762 by 54 millimeter ammunition produced by a dwm in Germany so they certainly had a lot of that old ammo that they could use in those guns um so maybe it wasn't the end of the world but at the very least this is already going to complicate your ammunition Supply um yeah it's just I I don't really I don't really see the point in doing this from this aspect now when we talk about being able to standardize on you know all your barrels are the like really finely tuned to the same diameter and you're all standardized on the same bullet and the bullets optimized for all your guns that's good that's really good um but you have to look at the pitfalls in the drawbacks of doing that and we're gonna see there's some there's some drawbacks um one of the other problems though is when I mentioned about chambering um seems like some of these finished mosins that were chambered for 762 by 53 millimeter a lot of them probably couldn't even at least when they were new Foley chamber Uh Russian ammunition that's 54 762 by 54 millimeter ammunition some of them probably could and it seems some of them maybe couldn't that's that's further going to complicate your ammunition Supply if you can't even chamber the thing uh so off the bat to me that's kind of a a non-starter that's kind of a big problem right and one of the reasons for that again is probably due to that uh neck length is shorter and so you might have to remount that the uh chamber a little bit more in order to actually be able to fully chamber a cartridge a standard you know Russian cartridge maybe again there's some variants here and this one interestingly enough uh is should be and it's an original configuration but I can chamber uh 762 by 54 millimeter ammo just fine in this gun so every mozen even finished mozen uh they all tend to be a little bit different okay we'll get into this a little bit more so there's a lot of complications and a lot of potential issues that we're going to see around this cartridge right because you've got Finland with these new barrels and then the old stuff and essentially we're dealing now with two different calibers you have 762 by 53 and 762 by 54. um so as we go along we're going to see more finished variants come along so we have the M24 then we also have the Finish m28 rifle which is really the successor to this rifle that the Civil guard adopted then you'd have the M27 rifle which was really the Finish Army's first attempt at modernizing the moziniga rifle and really any meaningful capacity um which was minorly successful I guess it had some issues but I think it was a better gun than a lot of people at least at the time gave it credit for and then you have the Finnish m2830 rifle and so you have all of these different rifles but it seems like probably all of them were going to be chambered from the factory in 762 by 53 with a 308 diameter bore probably so there's still some variance here and there's enough questions to for me to really be able to tell you that um if you want to know what caliber your finished Mosin is in the really only good way to do it is to have a competent gunsmith take a look at it and you or you can do what's called slugging your bore I always recommend having a gunsmith do it because they have to do these types of things all the time and they are professionals they have much better opinions than somebody like me but a gunsmith can definitely tell you what caliber and what bore diameter your Mosin is in and remember how I was talking earlier about how Russian Moses would have uh large deviations and bore diameters same thing there if you have a Russian Mosin the best way to figure out what what bore diameter you have is to have a gunsmith take a look at it and they can tell you they can actually do some measurements to see what your bore diameter is and why is that important well the Mosin unfortunately has gotten kind of a bad reputation over the years for being an inaccurate rifle which is I mean it's a lie generally speaking but every lie starts with a very small nugget of truth and the Nugget of truth is there are some things that can cause Moses to be inaccurate one of them's bedding which we're not going to talk about today but if your Stock's not bedded well obviously you can have accuracy problems the other one is bore diameter deviation if you're trying to shoot a say 311 diameter projectile through your Mosin Nagant rifle however there is deviation enough to where when it was produced your bore diameter was actually 313 or 314 you're trying to shoot a projectile that's just too small to be really accurate in your rifle and what's going to happen well it's not going to be that accurate again even if you don't have a finished Mosin and you especially if you want to hand load for your rifle it's always a good idea to go to a gunsmith because they can tell you what is the optimal bullet diameter for your rifle and they can tell you if your rifle is safe to shoot we'll get into that question a little bit later but I'll tell you what spoiler alert uh I cannot ever tell you if your gun is safe to shoot um only a gunsmith can do that but we'll get into the safety question about these just generally speaking a little bit later okay so what ends up happening here well around 1936 Finland decided to actually change their cartridge up a little bit the 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge how did they do that well in order to understand that we need a we need to take a look at another rifle this is the Finish M39 rifle affectionately nicknamed after the old Finnish president who was part of the Civil guard that would be another story again for another day why is this rifle important well in 1936 Finland decided they needed a bit of a different cartridge at least the Finnish Army did and so what they came up with was a bit of a a wider diameter bullet you might have heard of this cartridge before it utilized the very famous Lapua d166 projectile now this would be uh about a 310 diameter projectile which was a little bit wider than the 762 by 53 diameter the the projectiles for those can I've read conflicting reports it seems like they could very anywhere from 308 to 309 diameter with the d166 was a 310 diameter projectile and it was an extremely long long bullet okay this immediately caused some problems because in 1936 pretty much all of the finished Moses that that at least Finland had re-barreled were all chambered for the 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge as best I can tell and one of the issues is probably most of those guns could not even chamber the new 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge that utilized the d166 projectile because it was so so this caused more problems uh and so what ended up happening was uh this cartridge got delayed for a while because remember in 1936 this rifle hadn't actually come around yet The Finnish Army was still accepting new uh M27 rifles which again we'll have to talk about another day but this kept getting delayed and then by the time the winter war came around um I think this really helped kind of push this whole project with the M39 because the M39 was really designed as the replacement for the M27 and they decided to use the best parts of the 2830 again topic for another video but they used its rear sight for starters and kind of the whole front sight where you can adjust it with a screw for windage which is really handy and cool um so they Design This around that d166 projectile though a cartridge that utilized that rather this was really the first finish rifle design from the ground up to use that and so of course that means that this rifle the M39 actually has a slightly larger bore diameter than the earlier finish Moses where those had 308 diameter bores probably have your gunsmith take a look at it this guy had a 310 diameter bore so a little bit wider and that's good because then you can really well accommodate that new cartridge so uh this guy was kind of delayed and then ultimately you wouldn't really see any of these getting delivered until you know probably early 1941. so it's kind of funny you have the 1936 cartridge utilized first in the M39 rifle and neither of them were even used together until really 1941. um so it got delayed except when it when it did come around this caused well a lot more problems um in addition to the previous uh you know complications let's say in the ammunition Supply situation between the 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge and the 762 by 54 millimeter ammunition they had laying around plus the stuff that they were capturing from the continuation were kind of caused some issues um see it seems to me like some of this ammo probably could be chambered in some rifles but probably not all of them as far as I can tell uh and a car obviously that's going to cause some issues however when we see the d166 cartridge come around this would get a lot more complicated because uh pretty much all the Finnish civil guard rifles and in fact all of the Finnish armies mozenegot rifles that had new barrels couldn't even really chamber this cartridge um now that's a problem because since this is you know during the continuation War it's not like you can have your front line troops just pull their rifles send them off to a Depot to have them uh they have their chamber reamed out so you can actually chamber the new accepted military cartridge it was sort of done um as they were able to so as rifles we're going into Depots for repairs or upgrades one of the things they would typically do is while I was there uh it would just have its uh the chamber adjusted a little bit so it could accept that new d166 cartridge and when they did that they would stamp a d on the chamber so whenever you look at a finished Mosin and you see a d on the barrel that means that it was at a finished Depot at some point and it had its chamber adjusted to accept the very long 762 by 53 millimeter cartridge that utilized the d166 projectile okay now what about all of our older mosens though well it seems like this further complicated things because not only were the uh the Moses re-barreled by Finland not able to accept the d166 cartridge it seems like a lot of Russian barreled mosins couldn't accept it either because you will see tons of Russian made Finnish mosins whether it was a something like a 9130 that Finland captured or an older m91 that Finland sort of inherent inherited if you want to put it that way after uh The Finnish Civil War you'll see the D marking on tons of these rifles so it seems that all of these rifles probably couldn't accept that cartridge either and they had to be modified so it does beg the question of why even bother right and that's not really a question I am really capable of answering because obviously this caused a lot of issues I think Finland was so focused though on the pluses of this cartridge um that they obviously were willing to accept the drawbacks and so if they were able to accommodate it as it kind of seems they were because Finland is still around it's its own independent nation still um I guess it kind of worked for them so that's good now the d166 cartridge is a legendary cartridge let's say that in this rifle the M39 rifle it is a massively terrifying round to go up against um you can shoot these things out to like 800 yards with iron sights no problem with that cartridge uh it really expands the rifle's capabilities in conjunction with the sights to something that a standard Mosin you'd have a hard hard time with um but obviously there are a lot of drawbacks so that kind of helps round out the entire history of 762 by 54 millimeter cartridge and the seven six two by fifty three millimeter cartridge which started out using a three anywhere from a 308 to a 309 diameter projectile and then ultimately with the d166 utilized a 310 diameter projectile again just to recap pretty much all the finished moves and barrels before the M39 were probably around 308 diameter bore and then the m39s were around a 310 diameter bore with all of the Russian stuff being probably anywhere from 311 to 3 13 maybe even a little bit more than that there's some deviation there so let's now talk about compatibility can I shoot um 762 by 54 for instance in let's say a Finnish m2830 rifle which has the 762 by 53 millimeter original chambering with a 308 diameter board um maybe maybe you could but we have to answer a couple questions here first of all is it safe to now I can never answer a question is your gun safe to shoot only a gunsmith canister that now I can speak to it from a plausibility standpoint right is it likely that it's going to be a safety hazard to shoot it well from everything I've studied it's very unlikely that there's going to be some sort of safety hazard from shooting commercial ammo ammo through a 2830 um if you're gonna do it again it's a gunsmith run run this idea by a gunsmith first but you obviously want to you want to find the smallest diameter projectiles you could um and even the best thing to do would just be to hand load your own 54 cartridges assuming that net length isn't going to cause issues it helps to see if you can actually chamber a 54 millimeter cartridge first before you try to hand load it but if you can find Sim 308 diameter bullets to reload in your 54 millimeter cartridges that's going to probably be your best bet now Finland it probably almost certainly at times had troops utilizing captured Russian 762 by 54 millimeter ammo through some of their barrels that had a 308 diameter it seems like this was only recommended to do an emergency situations though um they were always told whatever ammo you have on hand always utilize your 762 by 53 first and then only try to use 762 by 54 in your rifles in an emergency situation I.E if you have no other ammo so obviously Finland permitted it so it probably didn't pose any imminent danger probably um but they also didn't recommend doing it um now what are going to be some of the pitfalls of doing this well when we're talking about shooting let's say a 3 11 or 312 diameter bullet through a 308 diameter bore you're going to cause some over-pressuring and over pressuring is never a good thing it's also going to cause excess wear and accelerate the wear on the rifling so there's really from an aspect of today there's really no good reason to do that and that's my perspective as a historian I I just don't see the need to take one of these really cool old finish rifles and shoot a bunch of commercial ammo now some of them I have like that M24 I mentioned earlier that one's already really really worn and honestly the bores probably opened up anyway so that one worked and it is what it is but you know I wanted this in really nice shape there's really no need to and if you want to shoot if you really want to shoot it which I'm a historian I don't generally shoot the rifles as much as a lot of other people do that watch these channels who are into that type of thing um just hand load hand load get some get some reloading dies and try to get some 308 diameter projectiles there's a lot of info on doing this on the internet and you should be set but again I can never tell you that your particular gun is safe to shoot because every gun's a little bit different and that's why again always have a gunsmith take a look at your rifle they can tell you if the safety of shooting your rifle and they can tell you the optimal what size to use for reloading so it's really handy and uh well got we need more gunsmiths and we need to support them so go support your local gunsmith with your mozen project uh okay so it probably doesn't pose a safety a imminent safety concern likely given what what I know as a historian but um there's one other thing we need to talk about from a safety perspective because uh I can't tell you how many times I've heard I've heard this once or twice um someone say this is basically gun show lore oh the Mosin nagance a split breech receiver and it's not as strong as a Mauser receiver I'm like okay well in theory I guess that kind of makes sense right it you don't have a piece back here connecting your receiver together so technically it's an inherently weaker design if we're going to talk about the weakness of the action though uh we need a little bit more context um generally speaking I would say that Mosin Nagant is not a weak action in the slightest um again every gun's different though go yeah I'm gonna go back to check where your local gunsmith again but but this gets interesting because what I recommend you do is go watch um one of IV 88 88's old like 10 year old um Mosin torture test videos where he takes a Mosin and shoots a cartridge re-hand loaded with uh ranged trash powder now what that is is a bunch of random unburnt Rifle and Pistol powder picked up from a range and he basically filled as I recall the entire this is not a good idea the entire cartridge basically did the top with this range trash and then put a bullet on top of it and then fired it and the gun didn't explode it didn't explode um it was basically unusable because there was so much pressure that um the the bolt handle actually got sort of bent back and overcame the lug on the bolt so there was actually no way to unlock the receiver or unlock the action I guess is a better way to say that uh so the gun was basically worthless but it held like it didn't explode and after I saw that I realized you know that was a wartime prayer maybe a pre-war but you know 1930s 1940s 91 30 looked like a round receiver which you know I've also heard that story that round receivers aren't as strong as hex receivers it's like well okay I mean maybe theoretically but in what meaningful context can we actually put that and I can't really find one if that gun didn't explode using range trash now I'm not saying do that don't do that and also not saying that it's wise to shoot 762 by 54 through a Mosin with a 308 diameter bore um it's not really wise um but there's also one other really weird interesting thing from history that we need to look at for reference so let's do that now this is well another Mosin however this isn't just any Mosin this is probably one of the uh sketchiest mozen's military mosins certainly not any Mosin but sketchiest military Mosin that probably has maybe ever existed uh what we have here is an m91 from World War one this one was made by the Egypts Factory in 1909 except it's a little bit different and harbor is a very strange and dark secret you see um it's got this weird splicing up here this one was actually uh adjusted in Romania probably during the Cold War so this guy has been places um however what's interesting about this rifle and the reason that I'm showing it to you today is well it kind of takes what we were talking about to the extreme you see this rifle was actually captured by the austro-hungarians in World War one and was then subsequently sent to oew G steyer in Austria and oew G sire re-chambered this rifle for the 8 by 50 millimeter rimmed Austrian cartridge and so you might say well that's interesting but how does this really pertain to our conversation today well remember there's this harboring a dark secret the dark secret is that in the austro-hungarian's infinite wisdom they decided that they didn't need to re-rifle these guns many of them this one included and so what we actually have here is well nothing short of an atrocity this is a 762 by 54 millimeter gun chambered in an eight millimeter cartridge so the more diameter is still the same and it's actually it's I don't know it seems pretty decent actually it's kind of terrifying um four diameter ends probably somewhere between 311 to 314 when it was new uh could have opened up a little bit by now uh seems like this gun probably hasn't been shot that much and I could I could understand why um however the bullet that this is chambered for is actually it depends on who you talk to it seems like it was anywhere from a 0.321 to a 0.323 diameter projectile and oew G steyer did that yeah apparently the auster hungarians through their testing realized that the mozen action was strong enough to where you could shoot a 0.321 ish bullet 3.31 two or three ish bore fine again I mean I'm not a gunsmith I'm a historian but I can look at this and say um this seems a little bit more sketchy than trying to shoot 762 by 54 through a 308 diameter or in a finished Mosin neither of these things is really a great idea um but again I can only show you history what was done and it seemed like it worked I guess although I don't know how much these things are actually shot um I'm not shooting this gun that I can tell you in fact I don't know how this managed to get past the Romanian armories through the Cold War um it's still it's still it'll chamber it's 8 by 50 Rim cartridge just fine so they didn't they didn't re-chamber this or anything I don't know how this got past them but I suspect perhaps alcohol and drugs maybe were involved I don't really know this thing's kind of a unicorn and it's kind of scary but I wanted to bring this out to show y'all just some of the weird stuff that was done historically so I can tell you in theory um you know it it's probably okay in theory as a historian if I was a gunsmith though which I'm not I may have a whole nother story to tell you but I can't tell you trying to shoot larger diameter bullets through significantly smaller diameter bores it's just not really a good idea um so I don't think anything more needs to be said there so I really hope this video was helpful to some of y'all in understanding what is 762 by 53 millimeter rimmed uh and a lot of people may not have even realized that finished motions are technically in chambered for a different caliber altogether than 54R and hopefully a lot of y'all maybe all this technical talk about bullets and board diameters and stuff maybe it'll get some of y'all especially some of the younger crowd interested in reloading that is always a big plus because we need more uh Reloaders and hand loaders in our younger generations for sure um I'm not much of a hand loader myself but if you have questions I can try to find someone I can link you to that has much better info than me on those topics and you can search YouTube there's plenty of good info on hand loaders especially for Moses people have been doing that for years thankfully so moral of the story is Finnish mosins are pretty cool and if you want a really good shooter and you want to shoot commercial ammo 3 finish Mosin your best bet is going to probably be one of those m39s we were looking at although remember the M39 at a 310 diameter bore still has a slightly smaller bore diameter than even a Russian commercial ammo so keep that in mind as well moral of the story I guess is finish mosens if you really want to shoot them hand loading is by far going to be your best way to get the best accuracy and reduce the amount of pressure and wear on your gun all right so thank you guys for watching I really hope you uh learned something and enjoyed this uh Deep dive into cartridges and all the interesting gory details if you want to look at some of the neat rifles we've taken a look at today you can see some of them on mosinmuseum.com under our models page we're constantly working on that website adding stuff there's not a whole lot of content yet but we are constantly working to add a lot more stuff and I appreciate y'all's suggestions and feedback let me know if you guys have any prayer requests and we'll see you next time

Channel: Mosin Museum

Views: 15,665

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Id: cVyJ6TCKgAE

Length: 47min 31sec (2851 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023