Store brands

One thing you run into when you start looking at older firearms, rifles and shotguns in particular, is the 'store brand'. Some company wanted to carry a firearm with their name or their brand on it but didn't want to build it themselves. So they'd contract with some gunmaker to produce one or more of their firearms- sometimes with small differences, sometimes pretty much identical- with the store's name on it.

Montgomery Ward was one. My dad has a shotgun marked with their name, that was actually made by Winchester. Sears & Roebuck did this a lot. I remember going to the bigger Sears stores and roaming the sporting goods while my parents looked at whatever. Rifles and shotguns, many with the 'Ted Williams' brand marked on them, others simply marked 'Sears'.

Here's one:












This is a Sears single-shot .22 rifle. This one was actually made by Marlin, with the Sears name and model number on the barrel. Lots and lots of people bought these both as a kid's first rifle and as a 'get the varmints out of the garden and squirrels out of the pecan tree' rifle. About as simple as you can get: open the bolt, drop in a cartridge, close, pull the cocking piece back, fire.

A guy found this one a while back, with electrical tape wrapped around the wrist(no idea why, no cracks or breaks) and the buttplate broken. You had to brace the butt on your hip and pull to get the bolt open, and he got it cheap. It gave the impression of never having been oiled in its life, lots of light rust on the barrel & receiver. But the bore, thanks to the wonders of .22 ammo, was spotless. At least after a oiled patch had been pushed through. Stripping and oiling took care of the stiff bolt and cleaned the rust off, and it had a trip to the range today. It's actually got a damn good trigger, breaking at about three pounds with no creep or drag. With better sights or a scope(the receiver is grooved) I think it might do really well; with the front bead and rear notch on a somewhat dim range at 30 yards it gave about 1" groups. He's going to refinish the stock and hit the metal with cold blue to improve the finish. What there is of it.

Next time you see an old .22 with a store name on it, going cheap, give it a close look; it might be worth a lot more as a shooter than they're asking.