Perusing Ebay about a week ago when I stumbled upon a Lyman Centennial Model long tube telescope for auction. It was near the end and the price was way too low, so I tossed a bid in and won it. It looked sort of worn, and maybe dirty, but auction description said the optics were great. These were made only one year in 1978.

It arrived today and when I opened it there was still an old "Mcbride's" sporting goods label on it for $225. The tube and mounts were filthy, but a little Kroil on 4/0 steel wool made it look like new! Both elevation and windage adjusters were stuck, so a drop of Kroil on each of them and with just a half turn they broke free and turned easily by hand! Wiped the tube down and it is ready to go on one of my old guns. It's a 34" tube, so will work with any rifle with a 30" barrel, or longer barrel if the front base is mounted back a bit. I had one of these on a Ruger-Lyman Centennial rifle years ago, and never saw one of the scopes sold separate from a Ruger until now.

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Is that the scope from the Ruger 45-70 of that era?

Green_Frog wrote on Jul 16^th, 2024 at 8:27am:


I was told many years ago when I owned my Ruger that Lyman built more scopes than Ruger built rifles, and the overruns were sold separately by Lyman. No idea how much they sold for, but I've seen them sell in the $500-$800 range, and I won this one for way under the lower end of that range.

I bought one from an older gentleman at a Rochester NY show in the early 80's for $60. It was new in the plain box that was obviously meant for the scope. Kind of a neat piece of Lyman history, but at the time of little use to me, as I was more interested in early original scopes. For that and other reasons, I sold it for $400 in the early 90's The fellow in Rochester was a long employed Lyman employee and had many very interesting obsolete Lyman products for sale. Unfortunately I had purchased a very high condition Highwall at the show, so had little available assets for a multitude of items he had for sale. I did keep in touch with him in passing years, and acquired a few more interesting items, sights and loading tools in particular. Had it been of higher than 4x, I might have kept it to use on a more modern replica, and as now seemed to need 4 to10x that much magnification. I might also note that in the not too distant future, it will be an older original scope, but a little late for me.

My rifle mentioned above in my earlier post had been D&T with an extra pair of holes that matched Ruger's "normal" scope base separation. This allows me to use two rear Ruger scope bases made for the 1V varmint rifle. Being able to use a modern scope meant that I had no real use for the long Lyman scope, so I sold it to my friend and we were both happy.

The mention of the Rochester NY show above caused a nostalgic moment for me. It was a good show and I did a lot of buying and selling there over the years. Now it's long gone like lots of other gun related things in this politically anti-gun state.

I guess perhaps Lyman figured that out and decided to let the buyer decide which rear base to use to extend range. Too, at that time there were far fewer long range disciplines and shooters to consider in their decision making.