marlinguy
Frequent Elocutionist
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Ballards may be weaker, but they sure are neater!
Posts: 16269
Location: Oregon
Joined: Feb 2 nd, 2009
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Re: Remington Rolling Block made In the Netherlands...
Reply #4 - Feb 1st, 2020 at 11:07pm
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I have a Rolling Block I bought at the Reno gun show to use the action and parts. It's an octagon top #1 sporting rifle, but in rare .22 rimfire. I figured it was so Bubba'd I'd keep it as a .22 rimfire, but toss the barrel, and wood, and put new barrel and wood on it. It had the front dovetail cut by hand with a dull file and they made it 3/4" wide! Not sure why, but then they cut another correct 3/8" dovetail in the bottom of the first 3/4" dovetail! And since one buggered wasn't enough, they messed up the rear dovetail also, and just left it blank. Then I guess they wanted a tang sight, but didn't know what spacing to do. So they drilled and tapped 5 holes in the top tang, and made a mess of that. And the topper was the stocks. They used a file to cut large checkering in the buttplate, but somehow actually got it even spaced. Problem was the spacing is about 1/4", and not in a diamond pattern like checkering is. Instead in a tic tac toe pattern straight across vertically and horizontally! The stocks also got amateur checkering, and then had big chips missing from the forearm and buttstock. It looked pretty bad, but surprisingly had a very nice bore! I began taking it apart and found a name stamped under the forearm on the bottom barrel flat. It read, "E.C. Hackett" and I thought the name was familiar? The person I bought it from happened to be from Oregon also, but had mostly military guns, and wanted this one gone badly. I tried a Google search of the name and found EC Hackett was an Oregon Pioneer born about 10 miles away in 1852 to early settlers. He went on to become one of the first deputies in Oregon City, which was the state capitol back then. Later he became mayor of Oregon City, and finally County Recorder until he died in his 80's. So I went from salvage mode, to saving mode. I repaired all the barrel dovetails with tight fitting plugs, and then milled in new proper dovetails. I matched the rust blue, and faded it in to blend. I filled all except two of the tang sight holes, and blended them in also. Then installed a tang sight to cover the repaired holes. I fixed all the broken wood, and touched up the checkering. I left the crude checkering on the buttplate as I saw no good way to correct it. It's a very good shooter, and it looks 100% better than it did. But it doesn't look restored, it looks like a survivor. I also got hundreds of pages of documentation on EC Hackett from the Oregon City Historical Society that I keep with his gun.
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