Home Forums Lever Action Central Lever Actions - General Marlin 1893 and sight questions

No prefix or Suffix, 253XXX, no bulls-eye in stock, "Marlin Firearms Co." Special Smokeless Steel, 25-36. 26" barrel

The front sight is a "ring" or open hole, with a small post on the top, and the rear has a notch that can slide and the slide is held in place by a screw.
Are these an add-on, or were they a option from Marlin?

Rifling sucks, dark and small & shallow pitting throughout, but the rifle is in fine mechanical shape, not over worn. No case colors left other than some "silver" spots showing through the patina, not much blue other than the loading gate:-). the odd scratch and pit as a well used rifle will have.

Kind of funny, none of the screws are buggered...

Butt has old (and old style) repair to one side of the wrist.

Reline or rebarrel & restock project, or leave alone?

No answers or opinions?
Is that type of front sight an add-on or a factory option?

The .25-36 Marlin is supposed to be close enough to the .25-35 Winchester that you can use ammunition for the latter. The guy from whom I bought mine told me that it was a .25-35, but the barrel was marked .25-36 Marlin, like yours. I tried factory .25-35 Winchester ammo in mine, but the chamber was irregular, like someone had tried to alter it very crudely. I had my gunsmith rechamber the original barrel using a .25-35 reamer and it shoots quite well.

Here are the factory sights on mine (sort of). After I mounted a Williams receiver sight, the front sight was too low to get the rifle to zero. I ordered an aftermarket sight with a gold bead from Brownells of the correct height. The buckhorn sight appears to be original. There was no receiver sight on the rifle when I bought it.

Hope this helps.

Thanks mudhen. Here are some photos of the sights.
And the bore is not cleaning up as good as I hoped :-(
So a re-bore or rebarrel is in the future, as I want to shoot it. 30-30, 38-55, 7mm Waters???

It might be worth your time to goto the Marlin firearms collector site to post and get an answer. I checked my book by Brophy and couldn't find anything like that, however, some of the guys over there can give you page numbers off the top of there heads to give you proper reference either way. They are also very polite and will answer your question, and have for me (and mine was knot-headed compared to yours). Good luck.

Coltfan

http://www.marlin-collectors.com/

I'd go .38-55, but that's just me. I have wanted one for years, but I have never run across one in good shape that I could afford to buy at the time...

Thanks guys, I posted to the Marlin group, and I am thinking of 38-55, with 7mm Waters running a distant second.