No records, so no certainty. I for one have never accepted the claim that Ithaca built thousands of LeFevers after the sale. Perhaps a few hundreds from parts on hand and in a cleanup effort to recover investment from the sale. Part of that is that I have always considered LeFever being very much under funded for years. Living hand to mouth as it were, with no great capitol investment, to build up large stockpiles of actions or barreled actions. So how many parts on hand were there at the time of sale? Enough for six month production. Based on estimated serial numbers for production from 1910 to 1914, 5 years production was 8542 guns or about 1,708 guns a year on average. Six months production parts on hand would be less than 1,000 guns in total and I think their owners were not putting anymore money into production than they had to, as they were investing into auto parts production as the same time. By estimated serial number production ran from 71,336 to 73,000plus from 1915-1919 so that brings just a few more guns and Ithaca owned them for most of that time period. But no real facts because no real records exist.
Perhaps those numbers are off but the estimated production for 1905 to 1909 was just under 10,000 so either every estimate is off or production was really about 2000 a gun in" decent" times. The WWI would have made barrels a hard to source items I suspect and by 1919 most double production was in rapid decline across the board, for most makers. Times changed as shooters demanded those new repeaters instead of those lovely doubles we all love.
For that matter many of the out of sequence guns might have been built by LeFever before the sale, as they were being pushed by the owners to use up old parts on hand, instead of investing in more inventory or new raw parts. Or they might have built anything they ever made if a customer requested and paid for it. Often with stuff on hand I am sure. I do not think Uncle Dan like going backwards, to build old designs, but maybe he did so to make ends meet. Or it happened after he left to start up his last company and the owners decided to clean out all the old stuff and get any money out of it that they could. Sadly agian no records to tell us.
Has anyone ever found any records of how small or large an order was required for items like rough receivers? Was it 50, 100 or 500 for rough receivers?. Do we even know who supplied those for them or do we think they made all their own from a block of steel? Has anyone ever seen a rough casting for a LeFever? That would be a cool find. Or perhaps they are so generic that there is no way to tell a LeFever from a Smith or Aubrey. I have seen a few rough casting for British doubles and assume the American started from the same point. I do recall several threads about barrel suppliers but not receivers. I think that was the most likely limiting number, for Ithaca made guns, unless we have some record of Ithaca ordering some after the sale. So any parts cleanup might have been limited to receivers on hand at the time of sale. That should be hundreds not thousands I suspect. But even a full years production, as a parts cleanup, is a couple thousand tops.
Were there any records of LeFever employees moving to Ithaca NY and continuing to build guns? Perhaps a census record could give us a few names. But for that matter how many employees did LeFever have at the time of the sale. The owners were much more interested in making auto part than guns and skilled employees, worth retaining, might all have been offered jobs in that part of the business. If Ithaca built many LeFevers did they just do it in house with their people learning as they went or did they bring a couple people with them to help? Does not seem likely but again no records so no sure answer.
LeFever is the unanswerable quagmire in itself. What did he have like four partners or more? Plus he got wiped out by a fire at one point. I have heard he was constantly seeking infusion of capitol and took on partners when one ran out of money or personalities clashed. I never bought into the latter. It seems he was on good terms with everyone of them we know anything about. The firearms industry in the post civil war time frame was almost a constant series of failures and reinventions of companies. Investors hoped for a fast return and then decided to try something else when profits were less than hoped for. What would we learn if LeFever had records we could find?
