Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Winchester Collectors Anyone wanna see a $3500 rifle turn into.....

a $1500 rifle..............



Ouch................



Original 52 Sporter, with Leupold 2-7 rimfire. Missing the rear peep sight and the small stock cut out has been plugged.

Oh, well........

Betcha it will still shoot good.

OH CHIT! I will forever be grateful for men like my gunsmith, I was picking up some work he'd done in his shop one day, a guy came in with some sort of pre-64 FWT rifle with a ebony tip, may have been a super-grade FWT, the guy ask for a recoil pad to be installed, I didn't, and still don't know much about pre-64 model 70's but I damn near went weak kneed and fell in the floor when he said that.

My 'Smith, the fine man that he is, said, "Thanks for coming in today Sir, and I want to do business with you, but I wont do that to that rifle" that guy looked at him and then me like he was hit in the face with a hubcap fulla dogchit, God Bless Men like my 'Smith!

Believe you'd be right.

Hey, for an even thousand bucks, I could get used to that “art” work. Can’t see it while shooting.

Be glad to take it off someone’s hands.

DF

I've got a beautiful 52D Sporter that someone had reblued to a shiney gloss.....a nice shooter for sure.

Jesus wept.

Remarkable what time does to environment.

You have a good smith. Much like mine. They are a dying breed though.. its a shame

LOL.

I worked part time for a 'smith that had a similar issue. The man had died and the widow came in wanting 2 rifles reblued: one a model 54 in '06 the other a model 94 in 30-30. She said she was gonna give one each to her sons and wanted them reblued to be equally nice. We both tried to reason with her that the rifles were not of equal value to start with and that reblueing them would decrease their value. The 54 was 95% and the 94 was 85%. She insisted that her boys were gonna get "equal" guns and demanded that they both be refinished. The shop owner got tied of arguing with her and took them in. I polished the 54 with a tear in my eye and reluctantly polished the pre 64 94. I wasn't there when the lady picked them up, I hope she was satisfied that she cut the value in half. I don't know what son got what rifle, or if they knew enough to know what happened to the heirlooms.
The customer is not always right!

As if to add insult to injury, IMO the carving on that 52 is not even very well done.

Damn right BSA, they're dying out, very sad, we've all seen guns butchered by cutting the stocks, drilling extra holes, chiseling on the wood and such, matter of fact, those damn griffin and howe dudes that drilled all those M-70 receivers for that god awful side mount need to be dug up and kicked in the nuts!

CowboyBart, lord have mercy, as the Warden said in the old 'Cool Hand Luke' movie, "some people you just cant reach." bet that did pain you to have to do those jobs.

I would find a stock surgeon like our old buddy Karnis here at the fire, have him thin the whole stock down, butt plate and all chit-canning that engraving then re cutting the checkering, slimmer and trimmer and not factory? yes, but a hell of a lot nicer to look at? hell yes, win/win

Just looking at the picture, it may be cut too deep for that.

If not, that would be an option. Wouldn’t be factory, but it’s not factory now. It would look a heap better with that treatment by a good stock man.

DF

I miss ol’ Crossfire!

😞

One thing y'all should consider is that at the time, the G&H side mount was highly regarded. At the time, correctly installing one was far from "butchering."
I agree on not making irreversible modifications to a pristine rifle. That said, I'm willing to shoot them.
What gets me is all the folks who won't consider for a build a receiver with a few holes in the side, but then proceed to Ceracoat. Plug the holes, build the rifle, refinish to your heart's content. Those plugged holes change the performance of the rifle not one bit. You will save a bunch of money and leave more un-drilled receivers alone for people who don't plan to refinish or perhaps only to minimally refinish.

So are there any 52 sporter collectors out there? Wondering what model is the rarest ? Pre a , a , b , c ,d ? Which is the most desireable?

I would replace it with a McMillan or some such.

Or maybe this: https://www.midwestgunworks.com/page/mgwi/prod/B2563070

Think not model but rather serries?

Anyone who fails to understand the wisdom of a G& Howe sidemount with a Lyman Alaskan scope
has never hunted bear or moose in the fog along SE Alaska.
These mounts could save your life in limited visibility-with a fogged scope-whatever the make.

That can be said for whitetail hunters in Pennsylvania too. I'm a firm believer in that setup.

G&H always gets a Bubba pass in my book...

Thank god for a few Bubbas. If it weren't for a few Bubba's, us peons of the gun world would not be afforded the opportunity to hunt with nice model 71s. pre 64 70s. They would be all sitting in fancy showcases of the few well-heeled, smoking their fancy Castro cigars while drinking brandy. Anyone with a mutt model 54 can send them here. Gordon's house of Rescued Winchesters. I'll even pay the shipping. lol

My pre'64 M/70 and my Springfield 1922 M2 both have G & H mounts, the M/70 has a Lyman All American with 2 minute LEE dot and the M2 a Lyman Alaskan with LEE dot.

Had the same thing happen to me. . Kind of..

I bought a Winchester custom shop 358 winchester that a guy had already shot..., they had Less than 15 of them according to the custom shop.
When it got to the gunshop the local gunsmith there saw it and asked me what I was going to do with it (it hardly had any wear so he thought it was mint)..

When I said - I’m going to hunt it ... He got pissed.

I hunted with it for a couple years, now it’s up in Alaska some place...

Yes, akin to the time jimmy carters no lead gas came out, you couldn't give away a Chrysler Hemi muscle car, thankfully I wasn't born a blind as a bat sawed off circus hobbit, so, even in those days, NO cut stocks or drilled receivers would have even been done for me, I could/do manage with factory LOP's and no notch/cut receiver peep sights, have a pre-64 300 H&H set up that way, 300 yard steel is cake with 220gr partitions, those that endure the g&h's, enjoy.