clarence said

 Here’s a particularly sloppy one from a nice honest fairly early post war .257 Roberts(S/N 59820) with pre-war features.1ned1 said

  

Looks like the printing of a First Grader.

  

Or the work of an individual proficient in writing ransom letters. 

Hi Win61-

The photo below is of the floor plate on my African S/N 392161.  As I said, it’s a high condition gun but not “new”, and I have no other reason to doubt its authenticity.  FWIW… S/N 392161 was recorded by Bob Porter as an African in 1985, so the gun wasn’t “made up” last week.

These “dashed” floor plates are more uniform than the earlier ones, and to me look like they were made with a roll die rather than a pieced-together stamp.  I totally agree with seewin (of course) that the only reasonable way to explain the oddities seen again and again in the earlier marking is if the stamps were pieced together from individual letter dies, then used to stamp a “batch” of floor plates.  I wonder if Winchester didn’t change to using a roll die somewhere in 1957-58, resulting in the change in font and dashes instead of teardrops?

This has been a very helpful discussion for me… Thank you for bringing it up.

Lou

Steve’s right…

Even if the “dashed” floor plates are original factory parts used to make M70s prior to 1964, they never replaced the older style floor plates.  In fact they seem to be relatively uncommon even on late guns, though the sample size is relatively small given the scarcity of M70 Super Grades made after about the middle of 1958.  But I’ve seen enough of them on late Super Grades to think that they may be “real”… 

This is the floor plate on S/N 520589, an African with a 1961 PR date.  While it’s just a picture I’d saved and I cannot attest to the rifle’s authenticity, you can see its got the earlier “teardrop” stamp.

Mysteries abound!!!

Lou

Hi Ned-

I like your image analysis.  You should get “distracted” more often!!!

True… One striking thing (to me) about these floor plates is that the “inconsistency” is often “consistent”.  For example the way the “U” and “E” in “SUPER” are consistently just a smidge above the other letters.  Also the way that in many strikes inside the “loops” in the “P” and “R” are rough, as though the flat/rough surface of the die inside the loop came into contact with the surface of the floor plate.  That varies with the depth of the impression, of course.  But those are some of the things I like to see in deciding whether I think a given floor plate is original.

The earlier plates, i.e. the ones with the Helvetica “G”, while more variable in “style”, also show such “consistent inconsistencies”.  For example, the ones with the outsized “A” and “G” appear over and over, even while others have more consistent letter heights (albeit similar misalignment), and the ones with the “feet” on the “A” seem to me to occur not infrequently within a relatively narrow serial number range.  All potential clues to legitimacy IMHO… I think it would be very difficult for a forger to exactly replicate a factory Super Grade stamp because of these “errors”…  I could post a multitude of SUPER GRADE floor plate stamps that I personally think are NOT factory work.  Same goes for certain “rare” (as in often faked) caliber designation stamps.  There are often little “flaws” in the “real” dies that you like see…  

While the use of a “pieced together” stamp seems to be the only explanation for the real oddities, e.g. “teardrops” pointing “in” instead of “out” (those are not rare), and that crazy upside down “A” that Clarence likes so much , I have to think that once pieced together the same die was used to mark a batch of floor plates done at the same time.

To offer a (weak) defense of Winchester’s quality control, I do try to keep in mind that what we are obsessing over are highly magnified digital images of letters that in reality are 0.10″” tall.  Except for some of the more outlandish early stamps, I think they look pretty good overall.  I guess Winchester still considered the M70 Super Grade to be a regular production item, and didn’t exercise the care that they put into the M21.  After all, they COULD have lettered the guns by hand like this (compare the hand cut inscription with the regular factory barrel marking):

Maverick-

Where did you even acquire that image of the cover of that M70 & M54 blueprint book?  It must exist somewhere, right?  I’d love to have digital copies of what’s inside…

Lou

Hi Win61-

Like I said before, there’s a lot more to figuring out if a M70 Super Grade is legit than just the floor plate.  That said, the floor plate in your photo looks very similar (except for depth of impression) to the one I posted of one of my Africans.  Same “G”, same “R”, same “dashes”, etc.  I believe that my African is genuine, as they’re not very easy to fake, and the gun, while nice, is not in NIB “looks test fired only” condition.

So IMHO the floor plate on your Super is probably a genuine Winchester part.  The question we’ve been discussing is whether it is a genuine pre-64 part that would have been used intermittently in 1957-58 or later.  If the rest of the rifle checked out; stock, front sight, metal finishes, jeweling, under barrel markings, recoil lug stamp, etc., then that floor plate would not bother me.  Others may disagree, of course…

One thing this thread got me to do is undertake a crude interim analysis using the Porter card catalog (11,340 M70s – about 2% of production) to generate an ESTIMATE of how many Super Grades were actually made during later M70 production.  Since Super Grades with “dashed” floor plates (legit or not) are not commonly seen, I’m curious how many might be out there IF these floor plates began to be used intermittently circa 1957-58.  What we KNOW is that the Standard and FWT Super Grades were last CATALOGED in 1959… We also know (according to Roger Rule’s record search) that the total number of Standard Super Grades shipped (1936-1963) was 15881, and we know the number of M70s (all styles) made each year.  What we don’t know is how many of the total M70s made each year were Super Grades.

Hence my “tortured math”… This is based on the ASSUMPTION that the odds of a Super Grade made in 1937 showing up in an observational survey is the same as one made in 1949 or 1957 (as a proportion of the total number of rifles surveyed).  This is the only real ASSUMPTION in my “math”… But since the survey “coverage” varies from over 4% of total production in some (early) years to a little less than 2% of production for much of the 1950s, AND an observational survey of M70s at gun shows or otherwise offered for sale is subject to “selection bias”, i.e. more “desirable” styles or calibers will be overrepresented in the sample compared to “beater” 30-06 standard rifles, I “corrected” the survey data (fraction of the annual sample represented by Super Grades) both for the fact that the number of total M70s made varied substantially year-to-year AND that Super Grades appear more common in the survey than they actually are (selection bias).  Anyway, this is what I came up with. Excuse the crappy graph generated in Excel – I refuse to fool with the axis labels.  Each column in the bar graph represents a year (from 1936-1963).  Africans and SG FWTs are excluded:

If this is anything even close to accurate, it’s pretty clear that M70 Super Grades made during/after 1957 represent only about 11% of the total manufactured, and that the factory basically quit making Super Grades after 1958.  So if pre-64 guns with “dashed” floor plates are “real”, it might make sense that they aren’t common…

Since my “estimation process” will look like tortured BS to many folks, I’ll put below the same analysis using Standard Rifles (excluding the Alaskan and Westerner sub-styles).  In this graph the blue columns represent the ACTUAL number of M70s made each year (according to Rule) and the orange bars represent the ESTIMATED number of Standard Rifles:

This one looks pretty good IMHO… It suggests that Standard rifles were a pretty consistent 80-85% of total production until 1955, which (not coincidentally IMHO) is the year Winchester started offering Featherweights in a wider variety of chamberings (not just 308 WIN).  FWT production went way up and Standard rifle production went down both as a fraction of production and absolute number made. The final drop off in Standard rifle production occurred around 1960 and later, coinciding with the introduction of the widely popular short magnums (338 WIN MAGNUM, 264 WIN MAGNUM and 300 WIN MAGNUM) that were marketed as distinct “sub-styles” and are excluded here.

I don’t know if this helps or just causes a headache… You know the old saying about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”…

Best,

Lou

Tedk said
That doesn’t appear to be factory machining on the bolt and extractor.

  

The later S/G’s had jeweled bolts, extractors and followers. They also had rust blued barrels which this particular one does not have. Also appears to have the stock refinished. It is very light colored.

Steve