Those don't really compare to the Henry-made rifles.  Also had one of these, and it is 'average commercial'.  The rifles made by Alexander Henry are really works of art.
Once handled a Cased 577/500 express, Wow...

Finally got it out to the range today to attempt to fire form cases. They all fired and I guess it went well as they came out looking an awful lot like they went in;-) Nice chamber. I got tired of just berm blasting and decided to see if I could hit the 300 meter gong. I raised the ladder sight to about 350 yards and ran off a few shots. At this point I was down to shooting brass that just had some Unique and a blunt 300 grain bullet with a single narrow lube groove. Looked like it was shooting about a foot and a half to the left at this distance  (I'm past my precise aiming these days with a broad V and a bead) so I held just off the gong to the right and, by golly, I was hitting it. I'll probably have a leaded barrel with those almost unlubed bullets but I can't wait to get some good powder behind some good bullets.

Thanks, Curly, that makes sense.

Man those are some fine rifles!  Also I'm glad to see that Ron Peterson is still with us and doing his thing.

oneatatime wrote on Nov 12^th, 2021 at 7:39pm:


Did he have those white whiskers back 58 years ago Chauncey?

And when I look in the mirror in the morning I still see that college kid;-)

I'm happy to report that my rifle is back to being the way it was built -probably;-) A friend was kind enough to volunteer his time, experience, skill, machinery and a bar of steel to make from a sketch I made of how I figured the detachable long range front sight that was with the rifle when first built back in 1874, into that sight. So you don't have to scroll back a few pages to see what the unusual front sight that goes with the open barrel sights looks like, I'll add a pic of that and then the pic of the "new" long range detachable. The new sight block slides over the existing block and is pinned in place through the hole in the existing block. It has a dovetail for the Pedersoli wind gauge sight (the lowest wind gauge I could find) which may be a bit higher than the original but the detachable long range tang sight can handle it and I rarely hit the chickens anyway;-( Of course, I could just do the quick detach and use the barrel sights for 200. By the way, the detachable pin I used to attach the block, in the spirit of something old, is a barrel band spring retainer off some unknown old military in my distant past.