Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Kimber of Oregon - photo and link dump

A nice 89 BGR Super America in 7x57. I highly doubt there's many of these! Not perfect, but very well done - minor checking flaw left grip.

84 Super Varminter, rounded forearm.

Note the shaped point in front of the floorplate...

Epoxied curved rubber pad. Drilled a bunch of holes into the back of these and the stock to link up when bonding. Heated with a lamp before bending and gluing. The 3M epoxy was so strong we could slam one (a reject of some sort) on its edge onto the concrete floor and the walnut would break, the bond wouldn't. In 35 more years? Hmmmm.

Definitely the vintage I was engaged with....

This beautiful Custom Cascade 82 shows a skeleton grip cap. (Need pics of KOO skeleton butts btw).

Anyways. A dirty little secret. Some skeleton stuff was fitted to the hardware - off the stock - and then epoxied into place. Sometimes a piece of scrap from the same blank was used, sometimes not. Recall, this was a production shop not custom shop and there was a lot of money into a stock by then.... An easy job to fubar. Still...

A couple of the best shapers, or the hardware guy fitted them depending upon the current work flow. A pre-Colton gun.

Looking for the following pics of Kimber of Oregon rifles to add to this thread.


Schnable forearm series with decorative point. Don't remember if it was a model 82 or 84. Only made like 30-50? or so in about 1990. IIRC they'd made some similar in years past...


Skeleton buttplates and grips.


89 Africans


Super Varminter with beavertail forearm, ebony and curved steel or curved rubber butt plates. 84s iirc. OOPS, SUCH WAS POSTED 11/02/22. And a VERY pretty one at that! Here it is again.







Laminated Varminter 84s with beavertail forearm. This stock material caused some of us to bleed from the nose. One guy from the ears! Was told to stuff our cigarettes butts in there - get to work! LOL Eventually cigarette smoking was forbidden in the woodshop, UAs were threatened and face masks arrived! Job went all to Hell in a handbasket! 😁

WOW!! Beautiful Kimbers. Thanks MtnBoomer

10-4



Welcome.

Here's the laminated type mentioned. It was described as an All American Match, Kimber of Oregon model 82 22lr. Although not new to the rifle world, the laminated stock wss certainly not mainstream in '90. Hard as a rock, extremely dense material...

Another find.The 82 unerschnitzel! LOL Ok, it's not much of a Schnabel. This appears to be the pre-'89ish version without shaped point ahead of the trigger guard and very basic two-point checkering. When directed to remake these later we wondered why, if they're a "special" run, then why wouldn't they have a pointed buttplate and/or be a Super?

Still seeking pics of the series with the point shaped ahead of the trigger guard.

Turd in the punch bowl. Hint.








Fhuqking LAUGHING!...............

Wow, never seen this, nor this kind of detaling before. Nicely done. No info on this besides one of a kind 84 223.

Continued

I'd like to get ahold of it and add ebony, shadowline, skeleton hardware, and get some fine-line multi-point checkering. But, it was done well to their design criteria at the time produced - to my eye.

M82S 22lr

Thanks for the pics! Dandy sporter. Do you know the vintage? (edit. I just read they're early 80s pre-dating the Super American. Possibly 500 (or 535) made.)


Here's another 82S. That point is the same style I've recently mentioned appearing on limited runs with Schnabel forearms. I like this a lot.

I sure would like to find a set ofKimber rings......

MtnBoomer, beautiful S series rifle. It appears to be a B action (judging by the bolt sleeve and bolt handle), though clearly an S series stock. Interested in your thoughts/observations.

I don't drink punch. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Thanks in advance!

Here's a little Kimber lore regarding a store that handled them in the middle of no-where in an unincorporated NM community of about 30 people.

Prior to the mid-1990s or so, there was a mercantile that seemed like it was out of 1800s in Milnesand, NM. The old man that owned it, Mr. Davis I want to say but could be wrong, always kept a big selection of really nice guns. In the early 1980s, he had the best selection I had seen up to that point of original Kimbers plus a lot more stuff in stock. They seemed to always have a dozen or so Kimbers, but my memory may be slipping. I remember handling the original 82s and 84s in all sorts of chamberings there in elementary school and thought they were greatest manmade inventions I had ever seen, but I learned to read in the Gun Digest and Shooter's Bible and pretty much had a one-track mind. The Super Americas were incredible.

My dad drove a good ways to go there and pick out a scope for my first .22, a Remington 581 for which my dad reshaped and cut down the stock to fit me. The mercantile had a big cardboard box of used scopes. I looked through the box and tested scopes by looking at sandhills a quarter of a mile or so out the front door of the store and chose a steel-tube Weaver 2.5x. My dad paid $20 or thereabouts for the scope and mounted it on the 581.

The Mercantile was in the metal building in the Wiki page that is now the post office. From what I understand, Mr. Davis (I think) in addition to Kimbers was a HUGE Winchester collector and his collection of M21s, M70s and lever actions went up for sale when he died in the 1990s and the store closed.

Pic of the store that was a big Kimber dealer on this Wiki link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milnesand,_New_Mexico

I was correct--Davis Mercantile. It is now on the historic register apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Mercantile

One other thing: did Kimber produce rifles in wildcat calibers? My memory is Davis Mercantile had .22 Hornets and .223s but I also seem to remember what appeared to be new factory rifles in wildcats, too. Did they possibly chamber for things like .17 K-Hornet, 6x45, etc?