doublegunshop.com - home Forums Thread Like Summary - Advantages of a Lefever over a Smith?

This will teach me to snoop around out-of-town gun stores. I was buying some ammo last week and ran across a clean old F-grade Lefever. Another heavy, American 12-gauge double (& I already have plenty) but....this one seems to be better than average. Damascus tubes, decent wood, clean and unabused. G-grades tend to be pretty common in my experience, this is probably the 1st F-grade I've ever seen up close or handled. What says the cognoscenti here?

Per Dewey Vicknair :

DeweyDecember 16, 2020 at 5:04 PM

“ Almost anything is a better double than a Smith.”

But if you want a real expert’s bona fide ( best George Clooney “ soggy bottom boys voice) take on a Smith - go consult Pine Creek Dave!

Dewey Vicknair has it right

If I had to choose, I would take the Lefever. I think the locking, and cocking, mechanisms are much simpler than the L.C. Smith. I have owned a few of each, and really appreciated the overall simplicity of the Lefever when disassembling/reassembling.

The head of the Lefever stock has more wood surface to transmit recoil, so finding this is not common



Smith

Better than either:

https://www.gunsinternational.com/g...r-sidelock-12-gauge.cfm?gun_id=102654622


https://www.gunsinternational.com/g...intage-firearms-inc.cfm?gun_id=102593611

Best,
Ted

Personally, and this is INDEED a personal issue, I'd rather have a very nice example of an American vintage double than that of a foreign made one. I'm not taking anything away from fine English guns, it's just that I'm not an Anglophile and never will be. I bleed red, white and blue.

Parker



Ithaca



Fox



L C Smith



Different strokes for different fokes ...... Would love to find a good Lefever 12 ga. with 32" barrels (or a 20 ga. one with 28s).

I have been inside field grade Smiths but never a Lefever. I can say that on the field grade guns ( maybe higher grade interiors are better) that they are very roughly made. Surprisingly they work

John
Quality Arms

LeFever wins, hands down. No contest, etc.

Chief

Didn't Lefever mostly use English walnut? That's a significant upgrade vs. most American walnut.

I weighed Last Dollar's 28" Lefever 12 and it is right at 7 lbs. I have another one with very, very thick tubes. They slightly overhang the face of the action fences. It's disassembled but, I would guess it is well over 8 lbs. Has anyone else seen this overhang?

I envy how one could order what they wanted back in the day. You can't really configure a custom citori. Well Bob Cash does but his name is Cash.

Jimmy box locks, especially those with scalloped fits to their stocks will often crack and Metkels are no exception to that. The cracks are usually quite minor and easily dealt with.

Boxlocks aren't known for this type of problem. They aren't as artistically wrought (and there is an argument that sidelocks have better trigger pulls) but boxlocks clearly aren't as prone to problems either.

Well, yea:




The second gun, with the crack starting behind the lock plate needs to have a good ‘Smith take a look at it and stabilize the crack. Many were the guns that had an issue like this and were just run until they didn’t run anymore.

The other gun needs work. Badly cracked. Wood sometimes just breaks to be mean, it is one of those things, no specific reason, and sometimes there are excellent reasons that wood breaks, like, behind the lock plates of an LC Smith.

Best,
Ted

I bought my first Lefever as an afterthought. I saw a guy in the parking lot of a gun show carrying three guns in cases, and asked if he had any doubles to sell. He had a two nice doubles, a 20 ga. L.C. Smith Ideal Grade with ejectors and an FE Grade Lefever. He knew very little about them. They had belonged to his late father-in-law, and his wife wanted him to get rid of them. At the time, I was partial to L.C. Smith shotguns, and owned several. I bought the 20 ga. Ideal Grade Smith and he gave me his business card. I kept thinking about the Lefever, and called to ask if he still had it. I met him at his business a couple days later and bought it. It was so light and trim that I honestly thought it was a 16 ga. I learned it was a 12 ga. when I dropped 16 ga. snap caps into it and they fell deep into the chambers.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had lucked into one of the scarce 12 ga. Lefevers built on a smaller frame. With 28" Krupp Steel barrels, it weighed only 6 lbs. 3 oz. and had engraving and several other features more commonly found on E Grade guns. The vast majority of 12 ga. Lefevers fall in the 7 to 8 lb. range, and some are a bit heavier.

I've been collecting and studying them ever since, and in all those years, I have only found one other 12 ga. on a small frame, and it weighs 6 lb. 5 oz.

I really like my Lefevers. To me, they look better than any other American gun and have an almost semi-custom aura. But I am not so smitten as to be blind to some faults or weaknesses they have. Earlier in this Thread, the Preacher posted a couple pics of the stock heads of a Lefever and an L.C. Smith. He commented "The head of the Lefever stock has more wood surface to transmit recoil..." so finding the cracks shown in his photo is not common. That is absolutely incorrect. Cracks of that nature are quite commonly found on sideplate Syracuse Lefevers. Every surviving Lefever is over 100 years old. Many are found with a piece of wood missing above or below the sideplate, and many are found with a glue joint where an old repair was made. Not a deal breaker if caught and properly repaired before cracks get too bad. Even really good Stockmakers find both Lefever's and L.C. Smith's to be difficult (expensive) to restock. Here's one that recently sold on Gunbroker that has a new and poorly matched piece of wood spliced in below the left sideplate:



Another fairly common Lefever malady is a weak or broken top lever spring. I've seen this often enough that I have the theory, with no proof, that Dan Lefever may have bought or made a large quantity of top lever springs that were tempered incorrectly, or made from a bad heat of steel. Again, not a difficult repair, and the spring is not complicated to make. Finding an original spring from parts dealers is always hard because of the demand for them. And that brings us to another minor problem....

The design of hammerless Lefever Guns was always evolving. They are pretty reliable, but like any used gun that is over 100 years old, other parts can wear out or break. No gun is perfect or indestructible. Many have been worked on by people who don't know what they are doing. As I pointed out in the "Lefever Gunsmith" Thread last week, this can make finding any needed replacement parts more difficult than many other guns that didn't have so many variations, and also had far greater production numbers than Lefever's:

https://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=645257&page=1

"Lloyd, Your Richards is better built than any old American double. Far better."

Ted: As far as game guns go, you're absolutely right. It still boils down to how much human time was spent on a gun and the better British guns get that in spades.

Hand-made versus machine-made is the big difference here, and by the teens and 20s in this country "hand-made" was essentially no longer available. Mass-production has its place (we'd of never won WWII without it) but there are trade-offs. It's funny, but somehow your eyes picks-up on the differences almost instinctively. I'll see a gun and an alarm goes off inside my head that there are "problems" with it, even if I can't identify them at first. Machine made guns always seem to trigger that "alarm" for me, even if they are damnedably useful and dependable. Oh, and yes...that Lefever is an "F" grade gun, made in 1889. If only there were a slot in my battery for it....

By the way....in 1889, all the American guns were mostly hand-made and it shows.

Ted: It isn't just the Yank doubles that are getting old here, eh?

My "newest" British double is from 1905, my oldest perfectly-functional side-by-side (also British) is from 1866. A well-made gun is almost timeless if (a big if) it receives proper care and feeding over the years of its use (I almost typed "lifetime" here). We all get fooled from time-to-time but... if you've been paying attention over the years of your own life, you'll learn a few things about what to look for in an older gun. Contrary to some strongly-held opinions here, American doubleguns from the 1890s were actually very-well made. It wasn't until economic forces (from around the world, essentially) forced the American manufacturers (& that's all of them, not just Smith) to modify their production processes to reduce the cost of the human component. The big difference today between a "fine" gun and all the others (see the above photo of the trouble-fee gun) is that rather-essential "human element". That's were the artistic part of any gunmaker's creation comes from. As the old saw goes..."beauty comes from art, art come from grace and grace comes only from God."

Yeah, Lloyd, I've been through the FFL Transfer thing where pre-1899 Antique guns are concerned several times. Many FFL's are just being overly cautious with guns that are clearly pre-1899 Antiques, or are simply too lazy to bother to verify date of manufacture.

I can't blame them for the overly cautious part, because in recent years, the anti-gun Democrats have pushed for terminating the licenses of FFL's who make even one inadvertent and totally unintentional error during a firearms transfer or in their record-keeping. Several years ago, I was discussing ATF regulations concerning Antiques with a local gun shop owner, and he called the nearest ATF Field Office to get clarification from them. The Agent he spoke with verified that a frame or receiver that was built prior to 1899 is considered to be an Antique, and should not even be entered into an FFL's Bound Ledger Book because an Antique is legally not considered to be a firearm. Still, many dealers will enter Antiques into their books, and do the Background Check that is required only for post-1898 firearms, even when you can show them the actual date of manufacture.

I did not know that anti-gun Democrat controlled Colorado has reimposed a 3-Day Waiting Period to buy a gun. I thought the NICS Background Checks were supposed to supplant all that. I recently heard that Colorado is also raising the legal age to buy a firearm. This is another Democrat Blue State that hates guns, yet will provide free syringes for drug addicts.

I recently gave my FFL guy the link to the "High Grade Shotgun Dates of Manufacture" that can be found in "Other Useful Information" on the Home Page of DoubleGunShop.com It certainly doesn't cover all guns, but is another useful source that FFL's can use to check dates of manufacture.

This all started with the GCA of 1968, when a pre-1899 Antique was just 70 years old. Now a gun must be at least 126 years old to be considered an Antique. I suppose one could just get a Curio & Relic License, but I've heard of C&R License holders who say they still run into difficulties when trying to buy a gun that is clearly legal to purchase as a C&R gun.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden apparently will get no penalties for lying on a Form 4473 about his drug abuse and illegal handgun purchase, while his anti-gun Democrat father keeps doing end runs around the law to violate the 2nd Amendment Rights of law abiding citizens. When I was at that Gun Show last weekend, several vendors were talking about Biden's latest violation of the law by signing an Executive Order to impose Background Checks and FFL transfers on private sales. This crap is coming from a life-long anti-gun Democrat who won't do a damn thing about the illegal drugs that are killing roughly 300 U.S. citizens every day. That is far worse than a Boeing 737 crashing and killing all passengers every single day, yet anti-gun Democrats and Liberal Left Media are silent about it. Actually, they are responsible for it.

Nothing Trump ever did came close to such extreme violations of our Constitutional Rights or such wanton disregard for the lives and safety of our citizens. Yet we have fools right here who continue to make stupid excuses for why they intend to support and re-elect the corrupt anti-gunner Biden, and other anti-gun Democrats. Not only are these guys not on our side... they are proving beyond any doubt they are mentally unfit to own any guns.