Nice gun Phil, and solving mysteries is part of the fun.
Good hunting,
Aaron

Don't know anything about Stevens rifles, but is it possible that the serial numbering didn't start at the number 1?
Has anybody seen an example with, say, a number in the low hundreds?
I'm not trying to tell those of you with experience here anything, just posing an idea in case it hasn't been considered.

Why does that buttstock kinda remind me of a Hopkins and Allen?

According to American Boys' Rifles by Jim Perkins, the Stevens Company claimed to have shipped 18,000 Favorites in one week alone.  No mention of provenance, or what year this "one week" occurred, but it isn't completely out of possibility that a year's worth of shipping got out 56,000 rifles.  There wasn't much in the way of competition in the Boy's Rifle market back then; except for Floberts and such like, most .22s were still adult sized.  And every kid wanted a gun back then; it was a rite of passage of sorts.

I have a sharp corner Favorite in .32 RF with no caliber marking on the barrel, but the Stevens and 1894 patent dates, Serial 49085.  There's another receiver around here with a "real" serial number on it as well, but I can't find it at the moment.

I used to make it a point to glom onto any Favorite I saw at a Gun Show that was going for much less than 50 bucks.  Don't know why; sort of like that Jerry guy in Conspiracy Theory who kept buying copies of Catcher In The Rye, I guess.  I also looked at a lot of others.  Most of them had the alphanumeric codes on them; only a couple had  "real" serial numbers.  Grant speculated that the actual numbers went up to where there was no more space on the tangs between the stock screw and the mainspring stud and then they went to the codes.  By my specimen, I would say that 99,999 was the cutoff.

I shoot my better condition .25 and .32 Rimfires on special occasions too.  Something you just have to do for the Experience.  Like those guys in the Explorer's Club in the 1920's that had that dinner of frozen Mammoth meat, dug out of the glacier and flown to New York.  Where will you get another chance, unless they invent a Time Machine?

The 1894 that I built for my wife. So, it is a "real" Lady's model

I had the stock made locally using a Stevens 44 stock and a #2 Schuetzen butt plate. I believe the stock maker, still has the pattern he made it from, if anyone is interested.

Frank.

It doesn't sound logical, but the numbers are there on the tangs.  Even if they continued the series from the small Side Plate, that wouldn't give them much of a boost in quantity.

Bent_Ramrod wrote on May 4^th, 2016 at 6:34pm:


I've been trying to convince myself that that's what might be the case, but I've been scouring Grant last night and today, and by his account the number of side-plates was quite low.