Hey Gun Doc. You’re not wrong at all. Rare is certainly relative and a .358 is not at all common. There are a lot of model 70s in the scarce and highly collectible category, which are not so rare (and valuable) that they are tempting for counterfeiters to fake. Nobody is faking National Match rifles, of which 1,971 were made. But we’ve seen fake Super Grade Featherweight rifles, of which 906 (I think) were made. The reason is that National Match rifles only fetch around $2,000, while the SG Fwt will be worth 2.5x that amount. Mostly, fakes in this price range are pretty unsophisticated,often just a collections of correct parts which were never together from the factory. However, when people begin faking pre-war carbines with fraudulent sub-200 serial numbers, or rare straight taper configurations in oddball calibers, these rifles can fetch $10,000 - $25,000 at auction, and this seems to be where the fake gun market been has mostly focused.
