doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Lefevers--gotta love 'em..... ;)

Lefevers remind me of Forest Gump: they are like a box of chocolate--you never know what you're going to get. I took the lockplates off my little GE Damascus barreled 20 gauge and found their first serial numbers had been struck over, being replaced by new ones. Undoubtably done at the factory. Wonder if they were just using up parts? But why would new plates have had a number on them if they hadn't been mated to a gun? Tis a mystery to me. Oh, all numbers on the gun match.

Were both side plate strike overs?

Very interesting find. Lefevers are truely an always surprising make of shotgun.

Yup, both of 'em

Sounds like 65818 was made up as a G grade and was already on hand. Then an order came in for F or E grade and two new side plates were fit and finished to make the gun in stock an F or E grade to fill the order. Not wanting to waste anything the take off side plates were returned to stock (bin). Later they were used to finish 69767 as a G grade.

We often say that if these guns could only talk the stories they could tell would be interesting. I had a H grade that had blued barrels. Factory I am positive. But when the gun was refinished we found one barrel was twist and one was damascus. Now I wish that I had kept that gun just for the odd feature. I saw another DS grade, clearly marked as DS, that had damascus barrels and dolls head rib extension but no indicators. It was not a late parts clearing gun but one of the very early ones. I figured it was run up from stock parts before the features of the grade were firmly set. I passed on that gun because the owner wanted more than a grand for it when mint DS guns did not bring half that much.

Isn't it a bit odd to find damascus barrels on a G grade gun with such a high serial number?

I pulled the sideplates off my 66xxx h grade 20 ga recently. Numbers match the rest of the gun but are stamped over some older numbers on both plates. Old numbers still somewhat visible but not well with the overstamped ones. I like your strikethrough better. Guess it was a different guy that day.

I have a very late H grade on which the SN's on both frame & barrels have been over stamped. @ # 73,138 & # 73142 though they got them 4 numbers apart. SN's on other parts match one of the two numbers, but offhand I forget which. Quite certain this is an Ithaca assembled gun. Has twist barrels & only weighs 6� lbs, 12 ga-28". Also is fitted with an Infallible SST, quite possibly done when new by Ithaca.
Damascus barrels were available on the G grade all the way up to the end, not really unusual to find them. The 20ga though is most often found in the DS grade. The higher the grade the less common it is to find a 20.

Joe, can you check the numbers behind the ejectors and other hidden places ? I wonder what numbers you'll find.

Daryl, most of the gun seems to have stamped over numbers or whatever and they seems to be different numbers. The ejectors have the correct serial number. Is that a "F" following the number on the barrel? Seems to be awfully high quality damascus for a G grade. And the stamping dies all seem to be different! Could it be such an unusual configuration that many parts were just scavenged from others?

Just as a footnote, all these pictures were taken with an iPhone. Incredible macro quality for such a basic camera! Photos were taken about 6" away and then heavily cropped on the phone itself.