So What Have I got Here? Old Rifle and Old Lyman Receiver Sight

[penultimate]

I am puzzling over a custom rifle I am guessing from somewhere between
1920 and WWII built on a spiffed up military Krag carbine that quality-
wise is several orders of magnitude better than than the bubba Krag
sporters you commonly see at gun shows. It is still chambered in
30-40 Krag and probably wearing a reshaped and patched up military
barrel. Though this is a working rifle without engraving and the wood
is plain, the stock work is masterful with a generous wrap-around
checkering pattern on both grip and forearm with nary the slightest
run-out. Overall the quality is what you see in a Springfield 03
turned into a working sporter rifle by Segeley or Owens or Niedner or
Griffin and Howe. A sort of credible story with the rifle says it is
from Niedner's shop and certainly stock styling is very much like
Shellhammer's work there. Alas, I can find no clear marks that peg
such a regal heritage and would add many hundreds to value. But who
can complain on a day they are able to buy an obvious masterwork for a
Bubba-krag price.

If you know of or own or have information on fine sporter Krag rifles
that might have escaped unmarked from one or more of the several great
shops around in the early days of custom bolt action rifles, let me
know. Since Krag rifles were plentiful and really cheap at the time
and the Depression probably dried up the high-end custom rifle
business, I'm guessing that maybe they were the basis for "unmarked"
or "keep-busy" work, perhaps from apprentices, to be sold off-the-
rack.

Anyway, the rifle has a pretty early Lyman receiver micrometer sight
which is marked only with the Lyman logo and a July 11, 1911 patent
date. The elevation slide is marked past 125 (1.25"), so it was
purpose-built for some long-range work. But what is particularly neat
and new to me (given my comparative ignorance of Lyman sight features)
is design of the peep aperture. All that I can recall previously and
all that I can find pictured on the web use threaded aperture inserts
to establish peep size.

This one at first appears a fixed aperture that is very small
(suitable only for target work in good light) until you notice a
little tab at the aperture top. If you push on the tab, the very
small aperture reveals itself as an insert, hinged on the bottom, that
rotates downwards to open a "ghost-ring" size peep suitable for
hunting use. Except for appearing a little delicate, this is really
neat! Maybe this is a special Lyman model or maybe this is a custom
mod to the standard Lyman sight made by the rifle maker or maybe this
is an Lyman original sight design with the threaded peep inserts being
a later "improvement" for durability. There is supposed to be some
documentation on "collectible" Lyman sights out there and if this is a
Lyman variation, this should be in it. But I don't have any.

Can anybody ID and/or date this Lyman Receiver Sight variation?


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[Stanley Schaefer]

The turn-down insert was quite common and available on a lot of Lyman
sights, early 20th century is the closest guess I'd have. Were
concurrent with the screw-in apertures, screw-in more for target guns,
turn-downs for hunting. Don't know exactly what you have there, they
were usually marked somewhere on the body with the model number and a
letter for what gun that submodel fit, might be underneath. There were
a LOT of sights made to fit Krags, could be a 48, 1911 was startup
date for those. The book I have is "Old Gunsights & Rifle Scopes" by
Stroebel, put out by the Gun Digest folks and can be had on sale at
hamiltonbooks.com right now. Just got mine this last week.

Stan

[Larry]

In article <jfgqpj$6bv$1...@news.albasani.net>, drw...@cimtel.net says...

# If you know of or own or have information on fine sporter Krag rifles
# that might have escaped unmarked from one or more of the several great
# shops around in the early days of custom bolt action rifles, let me
# know. Since Krag rifles were plentiful and really cheap at the time
# and the Depression probably dried up the high-end custom rifle
# business, I'm guessing that maybe they were the basis for "unmarked"
# or "keep-busy" work, perhaps from apprentices, to be sold off-the-
# rack.

Or it was built for his personal use by an unknown immigrant after WWI that
had some real skills. My father was a machinist who built his own hunting
rifle by sporterizing a 6.5 Swede carbine. It was a work of art, but he only
built one. He even put a Lyman peep on it.

[penultimate]

On Jan 23, 7:17=A0am, Stanley Schaefer <sta...@prolynx.com> wrote:
# The turn-down insert was quite common and available on a lot of Lyman
# sights, early 20th century is the closest guess I'd have. =A0Were
# concurrent with the screw-in apertures, screw-in more for target guns,
# turn-downs for hunting. =A0 Don't know exactly what you have there, they
# were usually marked somewhere on the body with the model number and a
# letter for what gun that submodel fit, might be underneath. There were
# a LOT of sights made to fit Krags, could be a 48, 1911 was startup
# date for those. =A0The book I have is "Old Gunsights & Rifle Scopes" by
# Stroebel, put out by the Gun Digest folks and can be had on sale at
# hamiltonbooks.com right now. =A0Just got mine this last week.

Thanks Stan for the sight info and heads up on the book. Except for
the novel (evidently only to me!) peep arrangement and absence of
marks, I would have said this sight is an early 48.

[penultimate]

Larry, you are of course right about your suggestion being a
reasonable possibility, especially in the context of reacting to my
few words of description. And without doubt America had an influx of
highly skilled immigrants from Europe fleeing the chaos there, at
least some of whom were master gunsmiths from Germany. I just got my
hands on a copy of Michael Petrov's book "Custom [American] Gunmakers
of the 20th Century." There I learned last night (among other
tidbits) that Griffin at Griffin and Howe hired several experienced
German and Austrian gunmakers when Howe was hired away by the Hoffman
Gun company in 1923. And, of course, the class of "American custom
rifle" we are talking about very much grew from the wave of mostly
post civil war German immigration that brought with them the Schutzen
tradition of target competition that flourished in the 1880's and
created a market demand beyond the mundane factory Winchester (and the
like).

At the risk of oversimplification, Winchester's mass market was
largely rural farmers and ranchers that viewed a gun of any sort as a
working tool. The custom gun maker's most common client was a city-
dwelling factory worker who road the trolley on Sunday to a range on
the edge of town for target matches - the 1885 "bowling league" of a
German born machinist working in a Cleveland or Milwaukee factory.
These clients viewed their rifle as a key attribute of personal
expression and social life. As might be guessed, many of America's
great gunsmiths from the 1880's on wards were born in Austria or
Germany, spiced by some that left Birmingham (England) or London as
journeymen in the gun trade seeking more opportunity in America.

Anyway, I would wager a large sum that whoever checkered the rifle I
am talking about had previously checkered dozens of rifles even if
this was the only one he completed in America. And the precision and
quality of the inletting work reflects at least supervision from
someone of equivalent experience.

I can add some newly discovered details (and aided by stuff I did not
know last week learned from Petrov's book) that point to the rifle
being a product A. O. Niedner's shop. On the remote possibility that
someone might be interested in an emerging detective story:

My first impression of the rifle from 10 feet away was "that stock is
by Shellhammer." I was reacting to its form and style, a reaction
that was supported when I got close enough to see the workmanship.
For those that do not know, Tom Shellhammer stocked most of the rifles
made by the "Niedner Rifle Company" during its years from 1920 in
Michigan and whose work, with that of Al Linden, Bob Owen, and Seymour
Griffin, define the classic style of the American custom bolt action
rifle. Most of the examples you see of stocks by these old masters
are on 1903 Springfield or Mauser actions. But I am an avid enough
amateur stockmaker to have studied the style of Tom Shellhammer's work
and see its clean form in the Krag. If this stock is not by
Shellhammer, it is certainly by someone that has studied his work.
But the reality is I did not know the maker and was counting on
internal marks to clarify things. A story was not included with the
purchase. That came a few days later.

The reason I made the "Niedner" attribution is that that is who I was
told made the rifle when after purchase I got in touch with the person
who inherited the rifle and sold it to the person who sold it to me.
This person sold the rifle (for a song and I paid the middleman about
$50 more) because they did not know or care anything about rifles. I
was told "Daddy called this his Niedner rifle. He got it (had it
made?) in 1943." When it comes to who might have made a rifle,
"Niedner" is not a name the falls from the clouds, especially if it is
already sold, paid for, and gone. But to my awareness, 1943 seemed a
strange date for a Krag, Niedner would have been nearly 80, and a
vague oral provenance isn't worth the paper it is printed on. But I
could not find any obvious marks on the rifle that confirmed how the
rifle looked to me or what I was told, presumably in good faith.

But things are now more encouraging. Yesterday I took the rifle to my
gunsmith to have a proper repair done to the swivel which also secures
the forearm to the barrel in lieu of a barrel band. Time was
limited. But while the rifle was disassembled so he could scope the
job, I was able to examine part of the stock using his light and
optics on his bench. Low and behold, in proper light and clearly
magnified, what previously looked like an illegible and broken-up
numbers in the pattern of a Social Security number scrawled in faint
pencil on the stock flat where the receiver rests into ??? NIEDNER."
The print appears as if inked by a rubber stamp. After a moment of
euphoria, I had to depart, leaving the rifle with my gunsmith.

When I got home, the Petrov book had arrived in my mailbox!

With book in hand I am now better prepared to study the rifle for
clues and possibly make sense of them. But I won't have the rifle
until my smith gets around to doing the necessary work! On the
outside chance somebody is actually interested, I will update if and
when I know more.

In the meantime, the Petrov book does not show any examples of a Krag
sporter done by Niedner. If anyone is aware of other examples (there
is one pictured on 24 Hr campfire), let me know.