doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Lefever DS

When we visit family post-Christmas, a few of us usually go visit a number of pawn shops in the area. Went today and found my favorite revolver for a great price, and also a Lefever 12ga. Looks to be 1904, ejectors, and has 28� twist, mod/full. Will post pictures as soon as I can get some taken. In the meantime .....

DS is stamped on the water table. It has cocking indicators, but I thought those weren�t offered in the DS. It also has an H after the serial number on one of the tubes, which is a different number than on the barrel flats. The tube number is also present on the back sides of the extractors (half on each).

Any initial thoughts?

The revolver is a S&W 36, no dash, pinned barrel, round butt. Excellent little snub nose.

Bill, Ithaca assembled Lefever sideplated guns until the parts were used up. Might be one of those. My DS has barrels stamped "I".

Thanks John. Makes sense. The stamp of one number on the flats, and a different one on tube could certainly be explained that way. I like that it�s ejectors, and twist. Couple of servieable dents, but nice bright bores for a change.

Mmmmm send me pics

Does it have a dolls head rib extension too?

Sounds like you have one of those DS guns that are DS in name only. There are a good amount of them out there. You basically have an H grade that is marked as a DS. Having mismatched grade stamps on barrels and frame are not out of the ordinary on Lefever guns.

Yes Sir. It having the cocking indicators motivated me to inquire, since I read the DS�s did not. It is interesting that the barrel and flats have different numbers. The flats match the rest of the gun.

Later LAC catalogs state the DS was available only with steel barrels, no cocking indicators, straight rib extension & un-capped half pistol grip stock. There was also no escutcheon in the forend. As noted several are known to exist which have all features of the H, including the twist barrels, except the wood.I feel that several possibilities exist for these.
1; some may be early experimental guns in development of the grade
2; some may well be Ithaca built using up parts. There is a known 1914 Ithaca catalog which had the DS grade x'd out, so apparently they had run out of DS frames. They may well have assembled some guns with H frames & marked & sold them as DS's.
3; LAC themselves may at times have had orders for DS guns but were short of Frames, barrels etc & assembled some using H parts with DS wood & so marked & sold.

I will note I have an Ithaca assembled 12 gauge H grade, twist barreled, marked as H, which has DS wood. It is an extractor gun fitted with an Infallible SST. SN's on barrel & frame are 4 digits apart, which are incidentally unless recently superseded the highest numbers listed in the LACA SN data base. It may well have been assembled like a Johnny Cash Cadillac. Barrels are 28" & it weighs 6 1/2 lb & is not on the XX frame.

I have to disagree with a couple things here. These DS Grade Lefevers that have the characteristics of an H Grade with Twist barrels are not all that common. I have a couple of them, but would estimate that less than one out of 25 DS Grade Guns are in this configuration. Probably much less. And I have never seen one of these with ejectors, so that is interesting. I've also never seen one in anything other than 12 gauge... yet.

The mismatched numbers on the frame and barrel are definitely out of the ordinary if no numbers on the barrels match those on the frame. There are a number of Lefever guns that have more than one serial number on the barrels. But this seems to indicate that the gun had been returned to the factory for major repairs such as a replacement barrel or upgrade to automatic ejectors. This practice consumed several thousand serial numbers, but normally, one of the numbers will match the number on the frame and forend iron. But If no serial numbers match, I'd suspect that the barrels are replacements, and not original to the gun. The only exception to this might be found on a very late gun that was assembled by Ithaca from left-over parts. But none of these unusual DS guns with H characteristics seem to have the features associated with Ithaca assembly.

The left barrel has an H and a set of numbers near the forend lump. They same number is spread between the extractors, on their backsides.

The section of bottom rib between the flats has a number 5, set part from the serial number, which matches the rest of the gun. I would post pictures, but haven�t picked a replacement service for hosting them.

The bores are really nice, which is usually not what I end up with. The dents are being assessed and raised on Friday.

Not being in the position to �collect� at this time, if this configuration is of importance to someone, I�m happy to let someone else have it. At least it�s not laying around in a pawn shop anymore.

OK, that makes sense. If one of the serial numbers on the barrel matches the frame, and the odd set of numbers on the left barrel is the same as those on the back side of the ejectors, I'd suspect that this gun left the factory with plain extractors. Then it was likely later sent back to the factory to have automatic ejectors installed, and another serial number was assigned to the gun at that time.

Finding barrels with a different letter grade than that of the frame is seen from time to time. Typically, the letter grade on the barrels is a higher grade than that of the rest of the gun. It seems that if they had to substitute parts for some reason, they always used parts that were originally destined for a higher grade gun. But these DS grades with doll's heads and other H grade characteristics seem to all have Twist barrels which were used only on H Grade guns.

As I said earlier, it is estimated that this multiple serial number practice consumed several thousand serial numbers, but the exact number is anyone's guess because all of the original factory records were lost. That is why there is so much conjecture and absolute misinformation about Lefevers, and trying to decipher the facts is like trying to solve a 120 year old puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. It seems like every time I'm sure about something, another unusual one comes out of the woodwork to prove me wrong.