Does it have a pad added?

Hi Clipper47-

I’m always suspicious of a M70 with a shorter than standard LOP.  It is far more likely to have been shortened after it left the factory than to have been ordered that way.  

Since it’s a 243 (introduced in ’55) it might have either a steel (’55-’59) or plastic (’60-’63) butt plate.  Do you have the serial number or year of manufacture?

Removing the butt plate to look for any extra holes (from a once fitted recoil pad) might help.  Sometimes it’s possible to tell whether a butt plate has been ground/sanded down to fit after a stock was shortened.  Also good to check for glass bedding as that is a sure sign the stock has been worked on.

In any event, if the rifle is otherwise in excellent condition, fits well, and you are buying it to shoot, $1200 is not an outlandish price.  A high condition all original Varmint rifle might fetch $2400, especially with steel butt plate, so the 50% reduction in price is not too bad.  I have one in 220 SWIFT that is excellent and uncut, BUT at one point the barrel was fully glass bedded (professional looking job, barely noticeable from outside but definitely there).  If I were going to sell it (which I am not) I’d probably be asking $1250-1400 (not that I’d get that much for it).

Best,

Lou

Hi Dave-

If I were buying one to collect/admire I think I’d hold out for a clean ’55-’59 243 WIN Varmint with the steel butt plate and nice checkering.  They’re the most “desirable” from the collector standpoint and they are out there (not rare), albeit a bit pricier.

Besides my glass bedded ‘shooter’ mentioned above, I’ve got three original ones, an early 243 WIN and two in 220 SWIFT.  The last one I bought (from Justin Hale in late 2017) is a Swift that’s about 98% and if I recall I paid something like $2250 for it.  There are still nice photos of the rifle on pre64win.com (at the time it was missing its original scope blocks):

https://pre64win.com/collections/rifles/products/220-swift-varmint-rifle-1960

This one has the “CMS look alike” finish (as Rule called it in his book) on the stainless steel barrel.  The earlier Varmint rifles have the bead blasted-blued finish (with bright muzzle) that you expect to see on a stainless M70 barrel.  This barrel was one of the batch that Winchester sent out to be finished with a new stainless steel blackening process that were polished (not bead blasted) but still iron plated, so they ended up looking just like blued CMS and the muzzle is blackened b/c the finish would ‘take’ on stainless steel.  On the later stainless barrels, done by Winchester in-house, the finish was applied directly to the polished stainless steel (as intended).  These have a bit of a different color/tint that Rule’s book describes as “smoky”.

Because the SWIFT chambering was added to the catalog in ’59, they all have the plastic butt plate and many have the cheap looking machine cut checkering.  Even though my Swifts were made early enough (1960) to have avoided the narrow panel checkering, the 243 with the steel butt plate is by far the nicer looking gun IMHO. 

Best of luck,

Lou 

Hi Dave-

As far as I can tell, Winchester would shorten the LOP on a stock (up to 1 inch) on special order (catalogued option).  OTOH lengthening the LOP would have involved “special stock dimensions” which was also available but at a higher cost than shortening.  From the ‘collector’ perspective it’s just about impossible to verify the a stock was shortened by the factory so any such rifle will always be ‘suspect’, i.e. not something to buy if the idea is that it will necessarily increase in value over time.

As for pads, I suppose that unless otherwise directed the factory would keep the LOP at the standard 13.5″ when adding a pad, i.e. cut off the stock to the depth of the pad.  Obviously, they could leave the stock uncut and make the LOP up to just shy of 14.5″ (for a plastic butt gun) if ordered that way.  Same caveats apply, however, regarding impact on collector value.  Factory versus aftermarket is always the issue no matter what pad is on the gun.

And yes, absolutely, Roger’s book is the best available ‘go to’ reference currently available for the M70.  Get a copy (if you do not have one) before sinking much cash into M70s.  ‘Real’ ones, even in common configurations, are hard to come by these days.  Just about everything out there has been messed with in one way or another.  They were/are just too popular as working rifles and people trying to turn a working rifle into a collector piece usually have to be ‘creative’ in unfortunate ways…

Best,

Lou