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November 7, 2015
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I don’t have a 52 Sporting and I must admit I’m partial to the clean, classic lines of its humble relative, the 75 Sporting. Mine has rather plain wood so won’t waste the bandwidth on pics. It has a period scope that gives me a little reprieve in my battle with presbyopia.
Mike
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BRP,
Absolutely stunning rimfires!
Thank you for sharing them. I’d have ponied up to bring home your 63 for the wood alone, and your 52s…!!!
I have one lowly 52B sporter with rather boring wood – especially compared to the sporters in your stable. Seems like you have most of the bases covered.
Thanks again for sharing, it gives some of us something to aspire to.
Thank you for the kind words. Most 52 Sporting rifles came with fairly uninspiring straight grain walnut, solid and certainly fit for purpose, but nothing to write home about. But every once in a while you see a true gem. I have been most fortunate in finding a few of them. It’s strange, but the Winchester 75 Sporting Rifles, which sold for about one third of the price of the 52 Sporters, came fairly frequently with nicely figured walnut. I guess the management at WRA figured the 52s would sell themselves, while the 75 needed more “wow” factor to move off the shelves.
And this 63 was one I could not leave behind. It was selling for not much more than the run of the mill Winchester 63 rifles out there. It was pure instinct to buy it, even though I have never before owned a Winchester autoloader. I really am hopeless when great walnut is on offer.
BRP
The 52C Sporting rifles were not produced in great quantity and are seldom — in my case never — seen at gun shows. In fact, the one I bought was and still is the only one I have ever seen outside of photographs, excluding Miroku reproductions for Browning. A fair number of the 52B version show up, from time to time.
The last published retail price of the C was eye-watering and it seemed to be a ghost – Oshman’s in Houston carried some high end firearms but I never saw a Model 52 Sporting on the racks before they were discontinued.
I’ve always had the feeling the 52 Sporting was more advertising than substance. You could get one if you could pay the price but I’d bet you had to place an order with. a dealer to get it. Maybe they were stocked back East at Abercrombie in NY and Marshall Fields in Chicago.
And the C only became available when the Winchester Commercial Gun Department was struggling with intense competition, labor troubles, worn-out machinery, and high postwar inflation. As much as we admire the old designs like the Model 61, 62, 63 and so on, they were becoming dinosaurs too costly to make and too expensive to sell in any quantity. And the very exemplar of the problem was the 52C Sporting. The last ones — mine especially — exhibit careless checkering and run of the mill Walnut, plastic buttplate, brazed front ramp — and for the price of a Super Grade Model 70 you couldn’t buy anymore in 1960.
The good Parson’s fantasy C is what the C should have been (in our eyes) but it could only have existed as a Custom Shop creation and then only as an advertisement to the proles of how nifty Winchester Super X ammo must be.
I’m pretty sure that the 52 Sporting, like the Model 21, died because of the waning and distracted influence of an aging John M. Olin, who only outlived the ownership of Winchester guns by about a year.
- Bill
WACA # 65205; life member, NRA; member, TGCA; member, TSRA; amateur preservationist
"I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both, and I believe they both get paid in the end, but the fools first." -- David Balfour, narrator and protagonist of the novel, Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
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