The first of my winter projects is in the books: a 1927 vintage slide action Winchester 1890 in .22 Winchester Rimfire. The project involved replacing the existing buttstock and forend with new pieces of black walnut (which required fitting to the gun as well as the fitting of a curved steel buttplate). The folks at Homestead Gun Parts provided the 90% turned and inletted wood as well as the buttplate (and they give you your money's worth because there was LOTS of wood for me to work with! See my previous posts to see where I started...

Hours and hours of painstaking filing and fitting yielded what I consider a decent final product. My wood-to-metal fit isn't anywhere close to being in Aaron Michael Little's league, but it ain't near bad for somebody with only a "Wood Butcher, Second Class" rating! Alkanet root oil, linseed and rottenstone were used in the finishing process.

Lastly, I replaced the standard 1890 sights with a Lyman tang rear and a Montana Vintage recreation of the Lyman/Beech #5 front (which, with the nicer wood, effectively makes this more of a Model 1906 Expert than an 1890). The Beech sight, I understand, was a special order option for the 1906.

I haven't decided whether to refinish the metal...time will tell.

The finished product:



Original versus new stock:



Original versus new fore end:



Finished stock and fore end:





The Montana Vintage Combination (Beech) sight:

just freekin cool!

Great job on that old small game warrior and plinkster. I think she needs some rabbits for targets.

Thanks to both you and Buzz!

I'm short on bunnies but long on 'coons. Before the project started, the old gal rode along with me for some of the work. She did fine, too!

Dang, that's a big coon.

Well done Compadre.

No joke, right? May hafta start carrying my .375 loaded with solids!

Mark

Texas coons are VERY well fed!

Great Job Gun turned out beautiful.

Glorious job and that rifle and that Booner coon. May want to get him scored.

You did a fine job. Really impressed with the inletting on the butt for that wee crescent buttplate! The MVA Beech front is a great sight and a fine match for the Lyman rear. If your bore is nice and crisp, I'll bet she's a shooter.

Thank you, Sir! My initial testing before I started the project in earnest suggests that she shoots just fine. Now that its gonna warm up a bit (and if the wind ever lays) I’ll start wringing out the new sights.

Excellent work sir!

I like old guns as much as I like new ones.

Oh the stories that one could tell!

Love it

That’s the way of it, isn’t it? Every time that I’m afield with an oldster I find myself wondering, “What have you seen that I haven’t…what do you know that I don’t?”.

New toys are a blank slate and we make new memories together. The old ones have secrets…

Final Update & Parting Thoughts:

With the heavy lifting on this project done, all that had really remained for me to do was to wring out the sights. Enter several days of miserable cold followed by several more days of fog and drizzle (all of which made this healing knee ache like heck) and it was yesterday before I got that task accomplished.

I guess the ONE benefit to shooting an all-but-obsolete rimfire cartridge is that you don't waste any time testing a dozen different brands and styles of ammo...you shoot what exists! Thankfully, the CCI 45 grain HP ammo seems to get along just fine with the 1927 vintage barrel and I had the bullets hitting at the top of the brass blade in short order and plunked five rounds into 1/2" at 25 yards. So far, so good.

Flipping the Lyman/Beech replica front sight to the "globe" configuration, I'll confess to being a bit nervous about how it would perform. In theory, this sight allows BOTH a coarse, rugged sight for daily or low-light use with the option of a fine target bead for longer range applications...provided they hit in such a manner as to allow theory to become reality. I shouldn't have worried: The next five rounds clustered into 7/8" (four of them landing in 9/16") with a called flyer. Note: the trigger pull weight on this rifle slightly exceeds its own curb weight with two slight bumps before breaking thrown in for good measure. Benchrest quality it ain't!

The best news is that the "globe group" landed straight up the line, two inches above the "blade group". Hmmm...that's handy. To confirm, I swung the rifle onto my 100 yard swinger and ran the rest of the magazine dry dinging the steel!

Now, I undertook this project to honor a family member and, if I'm honest, the time, expense and effort to pull this off might approach unreasonable...even for an inveterate Luddite like myself. Still, we might remember that not every plum-brown, dinged up antique in Pawpaw's closet is fit only for duty as a tomato stake. Some have a lot of life left in them and will shoot as well as we can hold 'em!

Mind the wind,

Mark

Awesome report. As a fellow Luddite, I always read your posts with keen interest.

Awesome culmination to your project! Thanks for letting us is tag along!

Great work Sir.

Outstanding job! Heirloom for many more generations to come.

Very cool piece of history right there. Well done!