Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at another version of the Carcano.
So thanks to Inter Ordnance, or Royal Tiger Imports,
we have two to take a look at here today.
These are a different version of carbine. Last time
we looked at the Moschetto 1891, which is the
version that has the fixed under-folding bayonet.
Today we are looking at the Moschetto 1891 per Truppe Speciali,
for special troops. Now this doesn't mean "special forces"
the way we might think of it today, this was basically, "Who are our non-standard troops that
don't need a full-length rifle, but they also don't need that special permanently attached bayonet, they can use a regular bayonet.
And perhaps more substantially, who are the guys who are going to be carrying rifles over the shoulder instead of across the back?"
Those are the troops who would be referred to as the "special troops". So this includes
artillery crewmen, engineers, some alpine troops, naval troops. If you think about, you know,
large naval vessels typically have small companies of, we would consider them in the United States, marines.
But they need a contingent of small arms. And if you're running around ... inside a large ship
you don't want to be hauling around one of those huge long 1891 long rifles,
you get the little carbine. But you also don't need a permanent bayonet on it.
So these would be ... by the end of World War One actually these were very popular as like the trench raider rifle,
because it's short, it's handy, got a 6 round magazine to it.
Personally, I think they're the coolest of all the Carcano variations, but.
So that's the Moschetto TS, Truppe Speciali, here.
And then we also have an 1891/24, which is slightly different but integral to this story.
And that's why I have both of these here in the same video.
Now, ... what we talk about today is also going to apply to the Model 91/38 TS, because - Italy,
but I don't have an example of that here to show you.
These ... actually went into production in 1898,
so this is the third and kind of final variation of the Carcano to actually enter service.
In 1892 you had the long rifles, in 1893 they added the Moschetto, ... the folding bayonet version,
and then in 1898 they start making these, and they're formally adopted actually not until 1900.
They would produce about 590,000 of them by the end of World War One, so more than the regular Moschetto.
And they are otherwise kind of basically the same. It's the same action. We have the same bent bolt.
We have the same rear sight graduated out to 1,500 metres.
The big difference is we have a different handguard and bayonet assembly.
So, let's take a look at that, and then we're gonna come back to this guy.
Now with the 91 TS the Italians do something kind of different and creative, and kind of cool.
(By the way, this should have a cleaning rod in it, but this one doesn't.)
What they do is they go to a bayonet lug that is perpendicular to the barrel.
So bayonet lugs are pretty much always parallel to the barrel,
like this. You slide the bayonet on from the front, it locks over the lug, and you're done.
Well, they decided that that wasn't necessarily secure enough and, frankly, having had the experience
more than once of having recoil force actually launch a bayonet off of a rifle, I can understand why they did it.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
What they did was instead of cut the groove for the bayonet lug this way, they cut it crosswise.
And so the 91 TS bayonet has a cut there, and it actually has a push button on the back instead of the side.
And what you would do is pop it onto the muzzle like this. You'll notice that there are two lugs here on the barrel.
That's so that you can't pull this thing back too far, because your positioning front to back is critical.
So you put it on there, and then you would just rotate it onto this bayonet lug, and it would snap in place.
And the recoil from a light carbine bouncing back and forth is never going to pop ... that kind of bayonet off that style of lug.
So in that way it is actually pretty cool. Unfortunately I don't have an example of
the TS bayonet here to show you, but I think you get the idea.
Beyond that, the gun's pretty much identical to the regular 91 Moschetto.
We have the exact same rear sight because we have the same barrel length.
So it's a 300 metre zero with this forward, it's a 450 metre zero with this backward,
and then you've got range adjustments here from 600 up to 1,500.
We have serial number, manufacturer, in this case Brescia,
and date, this is another 1918 production gun.
We have a bent bolt handle there. The bolt mechanism, the magazine, all that's identical.
It is worth pointing out that the sling swivels here are on the bottom, both on the stock,
and here on the front end. And that's because these special troops
were guys who are going to be carrying rifles over their shoulders, not across the back.
OK, so that's the Moschetto 1891 TS. Now ... at the end of World War One everyone realises,
"Wow, these carbines are cool and handy, and maybe we should be giving them to a lot more people."
But they didn't actually start making more of them. Instead they looked at,
"Well, we've got that weird bayonet thing and let's come up with some plans (in 1920) to adapt regular bayonets to these."
So they design a new front barrel band that will take a standard bayonet.
and by 1923 they have rules in place of,
"We've now run out of these fancy bayonets. So if ... you need one, take the gun, retrofit it to use a standard bayonet."
But they're still not making them, these actually don't go back into production until 1928.
And the reason is they look at their stocks of rifles and go,
"Well, we've got a ton of these long rifles and we don't want them long, we want carbines.
So why don't we, in order to fill the need for more of these,
(which is growing as they continue to adventure in colonial Africa),
in order to fill that need, why don't we just take long rifles and cut them down?"
And that is where we get the 91/24, which is this model.
So this is basically identical in configuration.
It has the exact same barrel length, which is by the way 455mm, or 17.9 inches.
The ... one obvious distinguishing feature about these is that they have a rifle rear sight base.
So this has a very long rear sight, where this guy has a short one.
They do actually regraduate it down to 1,500 as well, but we'll look at that up close in a moment.
... Basically they take the long guns and they just cut them down, and this works great for about 4 years.
By 1928 they've run out of long guns that they really want to cut down,
and so they'd start manufacturing new M91 TS Moschettos, carbines.
And they do it using the ... front end hardware that they've adapted for the 91/24s.
So, let me show you those details up close.
So here's our main distinctive difference, and that is the long rear sight base.
However, you can see that the top end of that sight adjustment is still 15.
So they took the original markings on the rifle rear sight bases, ground them off,
and remarked them to fit the ballistics of this shorter barrel.
You'll notice that the rear sight here is no longer at the end of the leaf. It's been moved to right there.
So 300, 450, well 450 like that, and then our adjustments out to 1,500.
The unique mark that you will find on the 91/24s is this oval marking, and it'll be stamped over the original date.
So this was originally an 1897 production gun,
and then we have a mark from the Terni Arsenal because they did all of these conversions.
And right in the middle there you'll see a 27, that indicates that this rifle was converted in 1927.
The rifle it was converted from was made at Torre Annunziata.
In theory, you'll find 91/24s from all the different arsenals that produced M91s.
These were just rifles basically converted at random,
taken from stocks of guns that were particularly worn and needed to be serviced anyway.
Now in order to reuse hardware from the rifles, mainly the nose cap and the barrel band here,
instead of going in and making a new nose cap like this,
they modified the stock and set it up to reuse this existing hardware.
So these all came with a bayonet lug that would fit the standard M91 bayonet.
Just like so.
And because they came from long rifles, they had bottom mounted sling swivels.
However, over the course of these conversions and their issue and use,
they realised that some of the guys who were getting these did actually really want to carry them over the back.
And so they modified a lot of these guns, or changed their sling hardware, to include side mounts as well as bottom mounts.
So there's the barrel band,
and then on this particular one we have the original bottom mounted sling swivel,
and then we have a sling bar that has been added as well.
So if you're really a stickler for detail, this is a fairly confusing rifle. There's a lot to take in with this one.
You start with the early style of nose cap assembly,
you then go to the one that takes the standard bayonet,
you then go to the 91/24s that have a barrel band and a nose cap separately.
And then after they run out of rifles to convert, they go back to manufacturing 91s, but they do it with this assembly.
And then that'll last until 1938.
And then starting in 1938 they transition to the Model 38 TS, which is again,
it is basically identical to this, except instead of having a rifle sight, because it wasn't converted from a rifle,
they will have the standard Model 38 fixed rear sight.
And again, we'll talk about the Model 38 in its own video.
They'll do the Model 38 TS in 7.35 for about two years, and then in 1940
they abandon the 7.35, they go back to 6.5, and they do the Model 38 TS in 6.5 as well.
So we have like five different versions that are all effectively the same,
they all have exactly the same length, the same bolt, the same magazine, same clip, same handling.
Basically the sight configuration and the nose cap configuration changes.
Hopefully this has made things a little bit clearer, I hope that that makes some sense
to help you be able to distinguish what you're looking at with these Italian 91 and 91/38 carbines.
So thank you again to Inter Ordnance/Royal Tiger Imports for providing these two carbines
for me to show to you guys. You can check out their selection of Carcanos,
and a whole bunch of other cool stuff that they imported out of Ethiopia on their website.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]