Neanderpundit

Try going to scorecard research and opting out.

if you wander around enough gunshows, you sometimes see piles of rifles with polished bolts, the bolt handle the predominant locking lug, the striker a knob on the back that can be manually cocked by pulling back.

“Nagants” you think, and most of the time, you’re right. The Gunshow equivalent of the cockroach, nagants are the cheap entry level rifle for gun nuts.

Sometimes, though, you’re wrong, and that’s where I begin to get excited. Once in a great while, you stumble onto something that looks very nagant like in the action and then gets wierd fore and aft, and then you might very well have something very special.

See, the Nagant action, simple and rugged, was by no means unique or new, the design of the Winchester Hotchkiss is strikingly similar in the basic design, though tens of years earlier.

Sunday’s gunshow in Crowntown had a guy with one on the table, under a stack of fine leverguns. I was astounded to see it there, and asked the guy if I could pick it up. It had a good deal of it’s blue, and the action was clean and crisp. Here’s a nice example of one at Collector’s Firearms

You’ll notice the little “Switch” looking thing on the right- that was a magazine cutout. I never figured out why the .mil was so hot to make the rifles single shot, but I guess they wasted less ammo than the spray&pray mall ninjas do today. Anyway, the Winchester Hotchkiss was a tubefeed through the stock, and I still believe it was part of the inspiration for later JMB designs.

The one at the show was blue, and not brown, and I don’t know if that is correct for it’s age. The stock is cracked in the usual place, that is to say, directly behind the receiver; I believe this must have been due to the tight fit of the magazine tube and the shrinkage of the wood over time.

I have only ever seen a few of these at local shows, never once at the Indy 1500, and a very few times at high end shops. They don’t seem to be too expensive, comparatively speaking; the one at the Crown point show was well under two k. And it’s one of the rifles I have always lusted after, though for a long time I thought they were a fiction.