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Another New Guy From Out in the Great Southwest

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treadhead1952 View Drop Down
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Joined: July 10 2011
Location: Las Vegas, NV
Status: Offline
Points: 15
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    Posted: July 10 2011 at 10:22am
Hi All,

Having lurked through this site a number of times over the years, I have decided to finally join up and join in on the frivolity.  As can be surmised by my screen name, I am an old goat, as such I have a number of years under my belt tinkering with firearms.  From age 10 when my old Dad gave me my first rifle, a Remington 514 .22 LR single shot bolt action in 1962.  It accounted for lots of squirrels and rabbits for the stewpot, the odd occassional wolf ( bounty at the time was $2.50 for a pair of ears) not to mention several hundred pounds of tin cans.  The wolf hunting was one of the early ways that I had to finance my shooting, a box of .22 LR at the local hardware store was .49 cents, so 1 pair of ears was 5 boxes of cartridges(along with the "Dad provided" Arkansas sales tax of 3% at the time).

My first Lee Enfield was a SMLE made by BSA in WWI as I recall.  Would that I had it now, it never would have had the fate that befell it later in my teen years.  I purchased it at age 13 on my own from the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Store in our little town for $25.  At the time it was still in it's original military wood and metal, untouched and actually very nice.  I shot it with Remington 180 grain Soft Points to get my very first deer.  My old Dad would never let me touch his Remington 7400 .30-06, his official Deer Rifle, so I had to get my own.  When I got up in years, 15 if memory serves, I got to reading far too many Guns and Ammo, Shooting Times, and Guns magazines and all their articles on the craze of "Sporterizing" military surplus.  Never mind that the military surplus they were sporterizing were Mausers and Springfields, most of the work done by professional ranked gunsmiths along with some of the finer pieces of wood from companies like Reinhart Fajen.  I had a saw and knew how to use it!  The wood fell away in chunks until I had something that sorta resembled a Sporter stock.  Lots of elbow grease and sandpaper later the end of the fore-end was now rounded off pretty much.  To make things match up, I sanded it down overall, stained it with, of course, Walnut wood stain and then started applying coat after coat of shellac.  I had to deal with the buttstock in the same manner and nevermind that the shellac sort of made things go to the reddish orange side of the spectrum.  I was so very proud of my first "Bubba" sporterized work.LOL

I did use it to get some more deer before enlisting in the Marine Corps.  Eventually it was passed on to my Nephew who also used it for his first deer rifle.  It is still floating around back there in Arkansas in the family doing it's duty as a deer rifle.  The last time I saw it the Shellac work had fallen by the wayside and a polyurethane clear coat was on all the wood work.  Over the years I have gotten Number 5's a couple of Number 4's and while they served as intermediate hunting arms on the cheap, I never did bubba them up after that first one.  When I moved to Nevada about thirty years ago or so, my landlord at the time asked if I might be interested in an old rifle that one of his previous tennants had left behind.  This came up in conversation as I had made more than one trip up the stairs to my apartment carrying firearms when moving in.  He noticed the immediate quietening effect this had on his little complex and we became buddies.

A few days later when I was paying my rent, he drug out an old worn rifle case from under the counter in the office and carefully unzipped it and pulled, yep, you guessed it, a SMLE out.  This particular one looked quite similar to my old Bubba job, the missing wood and metal parts long gone.  The wood hacked away and sanded down.  Checking the stock tang I discovered that this one was made at the Enfield Armory in 1918 and what little finish was left on the barrel had been attacked with sand paper until the barrel was as shiny as the front bumper on an old Buick.  The front sight was missing completely, all that was left was the groove in the end of the barrel where it belonged.  The rest of the finish was worn down and it was sort of gray overall.  But it did sort of hit a soft spot remembering my old Enfield from those many years ago.  We settled on the princely sum of $40.

I later found out that his wife had made him sell it, she didn't like it hanging around, she was afraid he might try and confront some gang banger with it over a rental disagreement.  I have since moved on to better neighborhoods.  Over the years an ATI Black Plastic stock has taken the place of the battered and abused wood.  Since the front sight was long gone and the adjustment part of the rear ladder was missing, I removed the rest of the rear sight remains completely, installed an ATI scope mount and added an old Weatherby 3-9 power scope I came across in a gun show here.  The old "SMELLY" has a pretty fair bore after some serious scrubbing and cleaning, I manage 1 and 1/2 inch groups at 100 yards with the scope resting it shooting jacketed rounds in Remington, Sellier & Bellot, Winchester, and Federal flavors.  It does prefer 180 grain bullets over the lighter offerings.  When I can get them the 215 grain bullets shoot even better.  I am considering going over to cast lead bullets for it to see what I can see with them.

I even found a Ishapore Bubba job to go with my SMELLY at a gun show about a year ago.  Someone had taken an ATI buttstock and the original wooden forearm as their choice of detriment.  At least it still has the original sights although they did chop off the clip loading bridge in an effort to make it look a bit more stream lined I suppose.  I paid $50 for it and the first rounds that I ran through it were all done with it strapped to a spare tire with a string tied to the trigger.  After shooting a couple of boxes of 7.62X51MM military loads through it, I ran a box of .308 rounds for good measure and it held together.  I have since discovered it is another fine shooter and will be working it over to see what I can do with it.


Jay
treadhead1952
Las Vegas, NV USA
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