doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Advantages of a Lefever over a Smith?

These fellas were impressed with their Lefevers

Walter Ewing, Canada (Individual Gold) and George Beattie (Silver) at the 1908 London Olympic Games

To what is this advertising verbiage referring? Was there something unique about the Lefever top rib extension lock-up?
March 7, 1908 "Forest & Stream"
The top rib extension compensating screw was eliminated by then?

I like their barrel protectors. On Damascus guns they make good sense and I use them regularly. Lefevers are neat guns, Uncle Dan was a mercurial character by every account I've ever read about him, but his guns were usually well-made and interesting. I'll probably have to go back and look that F-Grade over a little more carefully (it was pretty inexpensive).

More "classic American stuff" right? I suspect that the market for it will never entirely go away, unless something has been beaten to death (& this one didn't appear to be).

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

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 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

Yeah, kind of like one's taste in women, it is simply a matter of personal opinion... I'd step on an L.C. Smith's throat to get to a nice Lefever, but the Smith's do alright as well, sooner or later someone takes home the homley girls too!

day awl are jes wunnerful...

"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.

Has anyone here seen a Lefever that looks like this; unrelated to a fall or dropping the gun?
Help me out Ted



IMHO these cracks start at the head of the stock and extend toward the butt