Last gun of 2016

Just before New Year, I scored this little gem--a true blast from the past.

It's a .30-30 rifle. Old top-ejector. I got it cheap despite it being in fantastic "safe queen" condition because someone long ago cut it's stock down for that thick butt pad.

It's a Winchester Model 1894, post-1964 bust still in damned fine shape. I figured that a replacement walnut stock shouldn't be too expensive or hard to find. Turns out I may be half right...they're out there, but not as cheap as one would expect for a rifle that's been in production for as long as these have.

Note the lack of a cross-bolt or other safety catch. That's right--it's got the clean lines that a classic lever-gun should have and used to have before the lawyers got involved. It's safe enough with the external hammer and half-cock position if you're halfway cognizant about what you're doing. I won't have a lever-gun with an external safety, personally, and if you're one of those people who can't safely handle a lever-gun without a push-button safety or some other add-on "anti-idiot device", well then maybe gun ownership without adult supervision isn't your thing.

This rifle is not just your ordinary Winchester '94 though. I bought this one specifically for these markings

Yep--Made by Winchester for the Sears, Roebuck and company back when they sold firearms through their stores and mail-order catalogs. Marketed as the Sears Model 100, it was and is nonetheless a Winchester.

And if you think that doesn't happen today, note that the countless AR-15 rifles out there had their receivers come out of one of a small handful of plants that can actually forge them--most smaller AR-15
"manufacturers" just pay a bit extra to get their name and logo stamped onto that receiver when they buy it from the real manufacturer...just like Sears and JC Penney and Montgomery Ward all used to do back in the good old days.

But this isn't just any old Sears gun. Sears had various grades of firearms that they offered, from bargain-basement no-frills guns to their top-of-the-line models. And the best ones were marketed through an endorsement by this guy:

Ted Williams. Williams, for those too young to remember, was a serious baseball player for the Boston Red Sox, 1939-1960. He was good--so good that I think that he'd have beaten Babe Ruth out for career home runs except for tho incidents that interrupted his baseball career: World War Two and the Korean War.

Drafted first in 1942, he fought for a deferment and the American public and some of his sponsors got pretty hot about it. He finally went into the Naval Reserve in 1943. And instead of fighting for an easy slot, he signed up for training as a Naval Aviator and he was considered an exemplary pilot by those who few with him. After the war, he resumed his baseball career with the Red Sox and his playing took the nation by storm. Then in 1950, he broke his arm during an All-Star game and his 1950 and 1951 seasons pretty much sucked as he tried to rehab his arm. Then in 1952, just as he was getting back into the swing of things, the US Marines, short on pilots in Korea, tapped him on the shoulder and recalled him just six games into the season. Williams wasn't happy at all, but he was an American and a Marine so he put his ball career on hold again and went to Korea, again as a pilot who was respected by his professional flying peers.

But for his time away from baseball to fight twice, he might well have topped Babe Ruth's 714 home run record. As it was, Williams retired in 1960 with 521.

Williams went on to manage the Washington Senators from 1969-1972, and he also had this deal with Sears to endorse their premium-grade sporting goods, including rifles and shotguns. But he didn't just sell his name; the deal was that Williams got to inspect everything that was going to carry his name and if he thought it could be better or needed changing, it got changed. Ted Williams held Sears to a promise that no second-rate goods would roll out with his name on it and he was active in policing what they sold under his brand. If you saw his name on something, you knew you were getting quality.

Ted Williams is gone now, and Sears, Roebuck and company is now just Sears and they stopped selling guns a long time ago. But little bits of American nostalgia like this one are still out there, and when I saw this one, I remembered the days of shopping in the stores with my father and seeing these, and I had to have this one. Now it's here in the gun room, on the rack right below it's pre-'64 older brother Model 94. Yeah, there are minor but noticeable differences between the two, but I think that could be a blog post in itself so I'll leave it alone for now. I'm just glad to have them both and really glad that I loaded up some 800 rounds of .30-30 cartridges before I broke down the presses and moved here. It's a great round, and the '94 is a great rifle. Now bring on those little Louisiana deer that I've been hearing so much about!

A Fall Sunday well spent

What a beautiful day.

After church this morning (Yep, Pop...I went.) I stopped by the range to test out some new loads I'm working on for my Winchester Model 94 .30-30.

It's an old pre-'64 that I found broken on some auction site maybe ten years ago. I fixed it but it's been a rack rifle pretty much since then. Well that changed when I was rooting around in my reloading area and found a .50 cal. ammo can chock full of primed .30-30 brass that I prepped back in the early '90s and forgot about. Almost eight hundred cases, trimmed, primed and ready for loading. (What was I thinking way back then?) So now I'm going to work up a couple of loads, one for 150gr. bullets and one for 170gr., and load them all up. Then I'll shoot them empty and repeat the process.

Here's my target with the upper left being preliminary sighting-in, and the other three representing various powder weights.

It looks like 32.5 gr. or Winchester 748 under 150gr. Remington SP bullets is going to work for me. (Lower left target). The flyer on the lower right came about because by the time I got to that target, the rifle was smoking hot and my finger touched the barrel as I was sighting. (I also shot that one standing off-hand so the group kinds sucks.)I didn't exactly flinch when I touched it, but I did rush the shot to stop the burning. Funny how you never see John Wayne or Gary Cooper having that problem with their old lever guns.

Then, after shooting the breeze with all of my range friends for a while, I went down to the river with my newest toy: a 12 foot Pelican Pulse 120 kayak that I bought yesterday, fairly-well used, from the local kayak rental place.

Once a year they sell their rental boats, and while I missed out last year, I managed to get there in time this year and got one.

Today I spent a couple of hours playing on the Shenandoah river and breaking my new boat in, just paddling up and down and enjoying the warm, sunny day. The water sure was cold, though. Still, on a day like this, who can complain?

And just so Murphy wouldn't feel all neglected, I stopped at the store and bought him a marrow bone, fresh from the meat department.

You're, like, the best human ever...I love you, man!


Then it was into the kitchen to cook up a beef stroganoff that was worthy even of a distinguished chef like Brigid.

Now I'm drinking beer and getting ready to clean the Winchester on my deck as the sun sets. Life, as they say, is good.

Classic Lever Guns

This excellent post from Brigid got me thinking lever guns.


So here are my three: Top to bottom, a Winchester Model 94 in .30-30 (pre-1964, of course), a Marlin 1894 in .357 which has been mentioned here all too often before, and a Henry .22 that I've also boasted about.

The Winchester was once that I found in a shop some years back, in such bad shape that the owner was about to break it up for parts. I got it cheap and spent the time and effort to find the appropriate replacement parts and it cleaned up good and returned to action suitably reliably enough that I now consider it one of my backpacking rifles, carrying it afield for enjoyment and self-defense. Now it's been joined in that role by the Marlin, which has the advantage of my also having pistols in .357 Magnum, which allow me to carry a common cartridge for both while benefiting from the size of the pistol and the range and increased power of the rifle. I always backpack camp with a rifle and these days I lean towards the lever guns as they don't scare the wanna-be druid eco-freaks and assorted bunny-huggers that one meets on the trails. They see a black rifle and they get all upset, but a wood-stocked lever gun? Few people have an issue with those, even though they hit just as hard and shoot just as fast as an AR-15.

The Henry's just a fun little plinker that I enjoy playing with. I also used it to teach my nephew The Spud to shoot, and it was worth buying it for that alone. Like the other two rifles, it was defective when I bought it on impulse at a local pawn shop, but a simple phone call to the company got it a trip back to the factory for a complete rebuild at no cost to me, even though it was just a used .22. I'll tout Henry Repeating Arms' customer service every chance I get.

I like my lever guns. They're light, feel good in the hand and at the shoulder, and they balance well. Also, a good shooter can keep topping off the mag tube while firing, often preventing the rifle from ever running empty. They also evoke memories of the old-school movie heroes, men like John Wayne, James Stewart, Richard Widmark, and Randolph Scott. Even real heroes like Audie Murphy and Ronald Reagan toted these rifles across the silver screen at times. Lever guns have an aura of class and history that few other firearms can claim, and that's why even though I have my choice of modern semi-auto rifles, I prefer a lever gun on my hikes afield; they're what real men carry.

Why I carry guns when I hike and camp

It was many years ago, probably around this time of year, when two friends and I decided to go camping at a remote National Forest campsite up in the Great North Woods. For whatever reason, We had it all to ourselves. No one else was there.

We'd had a good day hiking and fishing and as night fell, we'd just built a fire on which to cook dinner when three men walked into the campsite. They came right up to the fire and told us that we were on their land and had to leave. They were also armed, each having either a pistol or a long gun.

Of course we were nice, friendly city guys, so we politely told them that they were mistaken, as this was a National Forest site in a National Forest. And when one of the men repeated that this was their area, my friend even offered to get the map out and show them the no-doubt inadvertent error of their thinking.

That's when one of the men put his hand on his pistol and said that he didn't care what any map or campsite sign said, this was their territory, and it we weren't gone in half an hour, we wouldn't be leaving at all. With that pronouncement, the three of them turned and left.

We mulled that threat over for about seven seconds, then we doused the fire, loaded our gear back on the truck, and abandoned the campsite. After all, they had real guns and our only armament consisted of an old .22 rifle that one friend had brought along for casual plinking.

We ran into town and stopped at the local sheriff's office. Coincidentally, a deputy and the state DNR officer were both there. We told them what had just happened, and they looked none too surprised. This had apparently happened before. They told us that we'd likely run into either poachers or dope growers, that there were both in the area, and that we'd done the right thing by leaving quickly. We suggested that they go up and catch these guys, since we knew roughly where they were, and the officers told us--no doubt accurately--that they'd never be able to find those guys in the dark forest. They also told us that we were lucky that the bad guys had only decided to scare us off.

We drove all the way back home that night, aware of the fact that we were only alive because those three rednecks had decided not to kill us. And we swore "never again".

Immediately thereafter, I began carrying my Springfield Armory 1911 into the field with me. It gave me a bit more comfort, especially when camping alone at night, but it lacked range to engage targets a bit further out, and the seven-round magazines weren't exactly what I considered to be optimum at that time. So I did exactly what the US Army did in World War Two--I supplemented (or sometimes replaced) the 1911 with this M1 carbine made by General Motors' Inland Division.This little carbine gave me a bit more firepower and range, and at only 5.5 lbs., it wasn't much of a weight penalty on a backpacking trip. Of course back when I bought this little critter, they were only about $129.00 and you could get them at stores like Woolworth's. Yes, that was the good old days, pre-Bill Clinton. And I loved to hike the back country with that little carbine. I always carried plenty of ammo and had a lot of fun plinking at targets of opportunity in areas where I could legally fire it and when it was safe to do so.

Eventually the M1 carbine was itself replaced, this time by a lightweight Bushmaster AR-15 rifle that I personally built with a collapsible stock and 16" barrel. This was a custom job back then, as the M-4 rifle hadn't been adopted by the US military back then and the short carbines really hadn't caught on with law enforcement or civilian shooters yet. I carted this around for a bit, fully confident in it's ability to handle whatever needed handling, but never entirely comfortable with the image that it projected to others that I met on the trails. Firepower is nice, but I wasn't going to war. So eventually I switched again, this time to a lever-action .357 Magnum rifle, usually paired up with my Smith and Wesson .357 Model 66 revolver. I spent a whole summer hiking the Rockies in Colorado carrying this pair, and it was nice knowing that the compatibility between them allowed my to cheaply plink or shoot to save my life with either gun without having to worry about which rounds went to which one. The pistol was good for closer in, and the rifle's longer barrel gave me increased range, accuracy and knock-down power if and when I needed it.

I stupidly sold the rifle a few years back when I needed the money--and I've regretted it ever since--but I still have the revolver and it will never be sold. This one accompanies me on hikes regularly these days, or sometimes just into town when I have to go to the store. I know that I can trust it, and it packs sufficient punch to end almost any problem. And now when I go afield with a pack, I tend to tote a rather shopworn but trusty Winchester Model 94 .30-30...pre 1964, or course. It's light, compact, and reaches out just as well as any of the more modern-looking rifles, but without the "assault rifle" or "Rambo" image. This is a working rifle but one that non-gun people tend to associate with cowboys like John Wayne, Henry Fonda or Chuck Connors--it doesn't alarm people or make them uncomfortable. It's also a lot cheaper than an AR-15 is these days even though it fulfills the same role comparably. Like I said, I'm not looking to take on a whole band of terrorists--I'm more concerned these days with wild animals like mountain lions or bear. Of course if Bubba and his banjo-picking cousins want a go, or Juan and his illegal-alien dope-grower crew take issue with my presence, they're quite liable to learn that it's not the rifle that matters as much as it is the rifleman. I don't look for trouble when I hike the back country, but if it finds me, it'll find me ready and capable and equipped with the tools I need to do the job.

And of course Lagniappe says: "Don't forget your best hiking friend!"