Good luck making one shoot extremey well. The .25 Stevens was designed as a hunting round. In my opinion ammo is the deciding factor. I have 418 Walnunt Hill's in .22 Short, Long Rifle, .22 WRF, and .25 Stevens. All with pristine bores. Have shot Canuk and some old Remington ammo and the .25 always shoot the least accurate groups. If you could come up with better ammo based on the .17 Winchester Super Magnum I think it could be better. Would love to see that happen as I have several .25 Stevent guns with good bores to play with it.

I have looked at about 350 different favorites' "serial numbers" from live ones, ebay, etc over the past 3+ years and recorded them in notes and am near to making conclusions to report.  Members of this blog have also contributed some also.  It looks like that the side plate favorites MAY be in the same numerical serials as the 7 o'clocks, but so very few of them were made, it's hard to tell.  I have #4515, a 7 0'clock, but it is much higher than any of the very few side plates I have discovered.  As previously stated I have observed 7 o'clock models up to about #69,000.

It looks like the letter - numerals started with the 6 o'clock favorites and they look like about every letter in the alphabet and the letters were repeated almost at random throughout production.  My first favorite had an ampersand - & - and I have found one other so marked, but so far, no other non letter symbols.  A was probably used early and one was found with 4 numbers, but not sure if that was a fluke.  About 1900 has been mentioned as the end of the 7 o'clocks, but I'm not so sure at this point based on survival numbers and density.

Variations of the width of the extractors seem to be very early, sort of T shaped, and antedated the barrel nuts which came fairly early, and which slightly outlasted the "boxed X" around the barrel address.    I'm trying to wrap this up within a few months and plan to write it up and send it to the Journal.  Any contributions, especially side plates or weird ones would be appreciated., looking for approximate letter-numbers, barrel markings, calibers, leaning block types (cut back or flat top), unusual butt plates, etc.  These contributions will not be "pseudo-statistical", but would be helpful.

Thanks, James Hays, jbkhays@centex.net

The stepped shank looks like its characteristic of the 7 o'clock ones, but a majority of them do not show the shank on the usual for sale description.  They look like all visible have the boxed X, but not all are visible.  The factor that determined whether they could be in this study was the serial number, visible or stated with some reliability.  Tang lengths and other variations could not be included because they were almost never measured or described.  Looks like the boxed X disappears early in the 6 o'clock sequence and it MAY be a measure of age, too early to tell yet.

James

Above procedure looks good but omits one small detail: converting from RF to CF.

Quote:
The block was bushed from RF to CF by my gunsmith

Has anyone got a few .25 Stevens cartridges and a caliper?   

Here's my problem:  The O.P. on this thread 
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is using a .251" bullet in his cartridges made from .17 WSM.   Barnes lists the bullet for the .25 Stevens as .251".   BUT, John Boy is using a .257" bullet, and lo-and-behold when I measured my somewhat tatty .25 Stevens Model 12 Marksman just now, it is bored and rifled for a .257" bullet.   

What the heck????   Was there a change at some point?  Is Barnes wrong?  (And by extension willsweptline is also using the wrong bullet?)    I'm not finding any help in my books and cattledogs.    

I have no factory .25 Stevens cartridges to measure.  A little help would be appreciated.  No need to pull a bullet, just measure the O.D. of the loaded cartridge at the case mouth.

Phil 

I have written this before.  I have a Stevens Model 47, with a 44 action, the face of which is marked 47 and EX.  It has a half-round barrel with ordinary Stevens markings and is stamped 25-20 in ordinary Stevens script. It is chambered for the ordinary 25-20 Single Shot cartridge.

But inside is a 17" twist and a .251 groove diameter.  I have shot it for years with .257 lead bullets (before I ever got round to slugging the barrel.  Since then, I have tried 60 and 74 grain harder lead bullets and 85 to 87 grain soft lead.  The heavier bullets are far more accurate, but the rifle will not stabilize any heavier bullets.  Now I need to get some of those .251 air rifle bullets and try them.