DarkLord said

HUGE thank you to Burt!!

 

My rifle has a long story and has been in my family since it was originally purchased in 1929 (sorry Burt, I made a typo in our email, it was purchased in ’29, not ’28). MFG in August of 1928 my grandfather and his brother both went to a hardware store in Oklahoma City to buy each other a Christmas gift…They bought each other a M94 Winchester, and this is the one my grandfather got. The one my uncle got was a standard 94 Carbine, not a Hybrid. I received the rifle from my grandfather in the ’70’s just a couple of weeks before he died. The finish was completely trashed from an incident involving a can of Coke, so when I got it the rifle looked pretty bad, but was mechanically perfect. I did the restoration myself (I’m a retired gunsmith). At the time I did the restoration, no one had yet discovered what we now know as the M94/95 Hybrid, so I thought I was working on an M94 with a non-standard barrel length which is not all that uncommon. So since there was “nothing special” about the rifle and it was to be a working hunting rifle for me, it got re-finished. But I wanted it to look right, so all the polishing was done by hand and every effort was made to make it look factory new.  Unfortunately the only bluing processes available to me in the very early ’80’s was hot bluing, and rust bluing.  To my eye, hot bluing looks closer to Carbonia than rust bluing (some may disagree), so I went with hot bluing and I’m generally pleased with the results.  Besides, the “Carbonia” bluing done these days is still much more black than the original finish done by Colt, Winchester and the others in the ’20’s…I suspect that may have something to do with the fact that Sperm Oil isn’t generally available anymore and everyone has to use a substitute…just my guess, I don’t “know” for sure. 
I had a conversation with Art Gogan, the many who first wrote about the 94/95 Hybrid’s around 2003-ish IIRC.  He related his findings, and at that time the 94/95 Hybrid’s were still pretty rate (34 20″ had been identified, and 10 21.5″).  Since then, Bert has documented many more, and has a good idea of how many are actually out there (2,900+), so they’re not nearly as rare as they were a couple of decades ago.  I got a very fat offer from George Madis at one point; he wanted to buy on behalf of one of his customers.  But the rifle has sentimental value to me so it’s never for sale. 

 

So now that the value of my rifle has basically dropped by a factor of around 6x; I’m actually pretty happy (monetary value of this rifle means ZERO to me)…I think I’ll go back to shooting the crap out of it.  And since the finish isn’t original, I may just go ahead and customize it with a CCH finish on the reciever (jury’s still out on that one…we’ll see).

  

Due to a recent discovery by one of our fellow WACA members,  there were just 1,303 of these model 94/95 hybrid carbines produced.  See below link.

https://winchestercollector.org/forum/winchester-rifles/94s-with-94-95-hybrid-barrels-total/

Don