Last weekend I took a trip to Brandon with my girlfriend (who's from there) for the big gun show, and also spent a morning at the CFB Shilo artillery museum, which I've wanted to go to for years but never had time in the many times I've been to Shilo for training.
I picked up a WW2 Bulgarian Mannlicher M95/30 carbine in 8 x 56mm Mannlicher. Now these aren't super rare guns, in fact when I first started collecting in what must have been 2002 there was a big import of them and they could be had for a song. I actually bought a M95/30 long rifle back then and to be honest it was never my favorite rifle so I never paid much attention to them.
I bought this one because, unlike the vast majority of Mannlichers on the market, it's an original carbine and not a cut down rifle - you can tell by the short rear sight leaf and the front sight being mounted right on the barrel instead of on a barrel band. I've since realised that since I bought my long rifle there's been a ton of research into M95/30s and we know a lot about them now, and that there's actually quite a lot of interesting variations on them - rebuilt carbines vs cut-down rifles, rebuilt in Austria, Hungary or Bulgaria, originally built for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, Austrian Landwehr, Hungarian Honved or on contract for Bulgaria.... the list goes on.
Mine was built for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army (KUK) in Budapest in 1915, and rebuilt by the Bulgarians and rechambered to 8x56 in the late 30s, then would have been used by the Bulgarian army in the Balkans or the Eastern front in WW2. It's in lovely shape, they're actually nice handy little carbines, and it will kick like an absolute motherf*cker when I take it out shooting.
