quote:

Originally posted by bpesteve:
We live in an era where standardization is taken for granted. Ask a gun-savvy person something like "What are the dimensions of the .308 Winchester cartridge?" for instance, and it's possible to look up the specs and quote them for certainty whether the cartridges or rifles were made in the US, Europe or basically anywhere on the planet.

This has not always been the case (literally). In Germany, since the original post was about the 8x57 cartridge, there were no commonly used standards for commercial cartridges or chambers. Each town, or even each gunmaker, could cobble up what were supposed to be 'typical calibers', like the 9,3x72R or the 8,15x46R for instance, that would have variations in body shape, shoulder angle and even bore dimensions so that ammunition was more or less peculiar to each specific rifle. Obviously not a good situation.

"Normalisation" was a movement that started in Germany in the late 1800s to address this non-interchangeability of ammunition.

Note that this has nothing specifically to do with the I (or J) -vs- S bore 8mm separation! Each version was treated as a separate cartridge. There were other oddities in German proof laws through the years which supposedly mandated one or the other of the two diameters for Sporting rifles.

The best explanation for 'Normalisation' that I have seen is in Brad Dixon's book "European Sporting Cartridges", volume 1 page 126, which I have included below.