I just looked thru my file of older Remington catalogs. In the 1970 Remington catalog, there is an announcement of the
NEW cartridge offered by Remington as the .25-06 Rem.
Now it's logical to me to see that if Winchester had introduced it, it would be the .25-06
WINCHESTER Also most any reloading manual states in their pre-amble to the .25-06 that it was intoduced by
REMINGTON in
1969 Now that's several printed sources stating the same thing, so it's a safe bet that the information is correct.
If indeed it were a 1st-year production .25-06 it's not inconceivable to believe that Remington
COULD have produced them with stainless barrels. I have seen many early magnum M-700's with barrels labeled "Stainless steel". Also most of them had the bluing mottled to something very ugly. I knew one guy who had a .264 Win barrel removed and satin bead blasted to get rid of the mottled look.
That would be the only reason I could fathom why anyone would have the bluing removed.
Thus if the bluing has been removed, any collector interest is therefore null and void; and it becomes just another early M-700 with a SS barrel. BTW: Barrel steel is NOT true stainless and WILL oxidize if not properly cared for.
Further: Any argument on production dates is moot since any collector value is gone. It really wouldn't have any collector value unless accompanied by the original box, anyway.
I've never heard that early .25-06's had SS barrels, but I believe it
COULD have happened because general sentiment at that time was that high intensity cartridges needed SS or the barrels would shoot out prematurely. We now know that that thought process is bunk. Which is why Remington ceased to make the magnums in SS and switched over to Chrome moly steel.
It sounds to me as if the owner was hoping to extract a premium for an early speciman.
I know this happens because I know a guy who is building Pre-'64 model 70's in rare configurations and he is very successful at it. (He has somehow managed to procure a set of the original Winchester roll stamps. ) He recently showed me an early model in .250/3000 "Carbine" configuration that he claimed an expert couldn't tell from original. (I certaily couldn't...)
At any rate, it seems no one here is interested. I would like to see someone post the auction #'s if it's listed on
Gunbroker or
Auction Arms . I'm just curious to see what it goes for...
GH
