8x56R Hungarian Mannlicher: Handloader's worst article in years

8x56R Hungarian Mannlicher by Gil Sengel is the worst article I've ever read in Handloader magazine. For a periodical that is usually noted for excellent content, sloppy editing and lazy disinterested writing is very disappointing. Perhaps Sengel was assigned to write an article on a subject he knew and cared nothing about, or maybe he was just checking the minimum boxes in order to receive his pay, but this article is even worse than the .50-70 Government drivel he penned years ago.

Beginning with the error in the Table of Contents, this article should never have been published. Sengel eats up over half of his allotted space droning on about historical background on other cartridges, and even when he claims to get around to address the title subject, he ends up talking about the 8x50R and .33 Winchester. It appears that he didn't even fire the actual cartridge he was supposed to be covering, and there certainly wasn't any load data presented in a magazine titled, Handloader. This is seriously substandard work.

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Originally Posted by muskeg13

8x56R Hungarian Mannlicher by Gil Sengel is the worst article I've ever read in Handloader magazine. For a periodical that is usually noted for excellent content, sloppy editing and lazy disinterested writing is very disappointing. Perhaps Sengel was assigned to write an article on a subject he knew and cared nothing about, or maybe he was just checking the minimum boxes in order to receive his pay, but this article is even worse than the .50-70 Government drivel he penned years ago.

Beginning with the error in the Table of Contents, this article should never have been published. Sengel eats up over half of his allotted space droning on about historical background on other cartridges, and even when he claims to get around to address the title subject, he ends up talking about the 8x50R and .33 Winchester. It appears that he didn't even fire the actual cartridge he was supposed to be covering, and there certainly wasn't any load data presented in a magazine titled, Handloader. This is seriously substandard work.

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muskeg13,

Excellent post! I suggest you forward your thoughtful article to the Editor of Handloader magazine. I have Hungarian rifles in 8x50MM and 8x56MM and understand your logical concerns.

Be well.

Adam

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Originally Posted by Adam Helmer

muskeg13,

Excellent post! I suggest you forward your thoughtful article to the Editor of Handloader magazine. I have Hungarian rifles in 8x50MM and 8x56MM and understand your logical concerns.

Be well.

Adam

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Done! I've been a print subscriber to Rifle and Handloader for 30 years, and have special ordered many of the back issues going back another 10 years. The days of Waters, Scovill and Miller are long gone. I understand that writers and editors age, retire and pass away, and new blood has to take charge. Jerimiah Polacek, an energetic and interesting writer on his own, is a welcome addition as a writer, but needs to grow into the editor's position. It can't be easy for the new guy to have to tell an old established writer that their effort wasn't up to publication standards. Sengel took the easy way out and phoned-in his latest installment.

Handloader is still my favorite gun magazine out of the seven I subscribe to. Articles by Brian Pearce and Terry Wieland, on any subject, are worth the subscription price.

I too finally gave up my Handloader subscription. Just couldn’t justify the cost for the very few articles of interest. The golden days of print gun magazines died a while ago. I used to wait for Shooting Times with Skeeter, Milek,etc.

I just renewed Handloader, Rifle and BP Cartridge News. For the reasons listed (Weiland, Pearce & Garbe). Surprisingly, Guns and Ammo and Shooting Times have had a complete staff makeover, and are much better these days. They have real articles now, not just advertising fluff.

The article would have been better placed in Rifle magazine. There was little technical information about the cartridge, nothing about case capacity for instance.

Also, a pet hobby horse of mine, he kept referring to the bolt locking and unlocking was achieved via a spiral slot in the bolt body. I don't think so! IT'S A HELIX!! Spiral and helix are completely different geometric forms.

I'm a long-time subscriber to Handloader, and was also very disappointed with the article. He apparently did little research, and made disparaging comments about straight-pulls that I thought were ill-informed. Too bad his editor didn't review it before it was published.
HL uses only a few gun writers for all their copy, some with apparently limited experience, which is a shame when there's so much more knowledge around reloading and shooting even obscure firearms compared to several years ago.

I got a nice response back from the editor, Jerimiah Polacek. He apologized and agreed the article wasn't up to par and said he'd "have a conversation with Gil about this article and set stricter guidelines for him." He went on to say, "We do strive for a well-edited and well-put-together magazine while still allowing the writers to have their own “voice”, but it is not easy to find good writers these days most of them are burnt out and phoning in articles so to speak. Others are simply not capable of writing to the expectations or even the basic needs of the magazines we publish. We strive to be technical and informative."

I feel a bit sorry for Jeremiah, and feel I may have been too harsh. He seems to be trying to do a good job editing and writing at the same time. I guess the sad conclusion is that most of us involved in much of the shooting sports, particularly casting and handloading, are really getting old and there are few younger replacements. The interest isn't there. The few older writers still involved in the business are rightfully tired. The few current "hot" writers may be in jeopardy of being tasked too much. Well, we had it good when it was good. Time moves on.

Rifle and Handloader used to be interesting because they allowed a lot of amateur experimenters to send in articles for publication. (Sort of like what’s done in forums On Line now.) Under Scovill, this was done away with, and the majority (if not all; I seem to recall a single short piece called “Reader Research” each issue) of the articles from then on were done by a staff of professional gun writers.

These people are not necessarily hacks or “Not Good But Wednesday” writers, but the problem (as Jack O’Connor pointed out in his The Last Book) is that eventually any individual will run out of ideas, whereas the deadline is there forever. As Jack described it, their articles, reviewed over time, resemble circus lemonade where you put one lemon in a barrel of water and keep adding water as the lemonade sells. It begins to taste a little “thin” after a while.

I’m impressed by Mr. Polacek’s candor and ability to spot the problem, rather than make excuses. One of the things O’Connor said made the old magazines great was not necessarily their writers but their editors. Good ones would evaluate any submission from anyone, recognize the merit and interest level it might generate in the readership, and polish the crude and ungrammatical draft into a fine piece of gunwriting, easy to read and with the writer’s “voice,” original ideas and premises intact.

This is not an easy job, by the way. Dragging yourself through pages of illiterate spew and reworking it to make it readable is not a job for the weak or those of marginal sanity. Don’t ask me how I know this.

Of course, editors like that don’t exist any more. Who needs them, now that we have Spellcheck and Grammarcheck? But I do think this is much of the reason that many articles any more are phoned-in, or infomercials, or both.

Shooting Times must be desperate. They offered a year’s worth of magazines to me for $8.
I’ll give them another try for the price of a McDouble.


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Yeah, I am NOT an owner of an 8x56R M95 straight-pull, not really even a great interest, casually interest in all firearms, but that was a poorly written, poorly presented piece of work about the Hungarian Mannlicher. No useful information on performance, shooting or reloading for the 8x56R that I could discern. A waste of my time and Handloader's pages. I do expect better from Handloader magazine. Blessed/Cursed with a very good memory, after over 60 years of gun magazines, most gun writing does sound repetitive in some way, but that piece was annoying in its lack of content. I get offers on many magazines, but most lack content that sounds new, wasting my time because I've heard the story. How many deer shot with a 6/6.5/7mm/30/35 cal bullet need to die to prove a 100-200 grain bullet going 1500 to 3000 fps will kill a deer from 50 yards to 600 yards.

Another former Wolfe Publishing addict whose interest vanished along with Waters, Seyfried, Sitton, Miller, et al. It is clear that some of these guys are paid by the column inch and so we are treated/mistreated to the same repetitive background intro that we have all read a dozen times and could recite in our sleep before we get to the meat -- if there is any. And let's not even talk about fudging on actual field experience. Some of these people apparently shoot 30 or 40 animals per day, 365 days a year -- at 100 yards or much farther, with revolvers. [smilie=1:

There is nothing about handloading in the whole article! Very disappointing. He could have just printed links to Wikis or collectors' webpages, but then, he wouldn't have been paid for "writing" an article. It's just got no meat like the old guys put in.
I've gone from being excited to get a new copy of Handloader or Rifle to only looking to see if it's worth filling in time while waiting to give blood.

i go back far enough that i have handloader #1,3,5. bought by my father. i also have a collection of those that i saved over the first 20 years (those that had interesting articles) after that i have saved almost nothing. i did not renew my rifle subscription, and may not renew handloader

In case anyone reading this is new to Castboolits or collecting M95s and /or shooting the 8x56R Steyr/Hungarian, Google or Bing search the topics and then come back to the Castboolits links. There is a wealth of interesting and useful info on the topic archived on this website (that unfortunately has a known weak search function). Member Buckshot contributed a lot of good stuff.

Cartridges of the World gives superficial info, but Mike Venturino did a proper and excellent write up in his "Shooting World War II Small Arms."

Contrary to what the author of Handloader article says, there are thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of M95 8x56R owners/shooters who have rifles (carbines) with very nice smooth operating actions and bores. Also contrary to the authors ill-informed guess, many thousand M95 long rifles were cut to carbine length, rechambered, rebored, re-rifled and resighted to .330 and 8x56R.

Handloader was the only magazine I've bought for nearly the past 2 decades. I don't even bother anymore. It has gotten very "thin" and there really isn't anything that interests me in it anymore.