CLASSIC GUNS
Feeding the Vintage Firearm
How to keep those old guns in obscure calibers on the range instead of in the closet.
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Great-grandad's ancient deer rifle gathers dust on your gun rack, and the hunting season is approaching. Or you see an old military bolt-action rifle at the gun show, and you'd like to buy it. Or maybe you have a chance to purchase a rare handgun, but it's a make you've never heard of, in a caliber you didn't know existed.
In each case, you hesitate, thinking to yourself, Who the heck makes ammunition for this old firearm? Even if you track down the right ammo, it will probably be so expensive, just sighting in will cost you the equivalent of a car payment. Right?
Probably not. In fact, there are numerous sellers and makers of ammunition for rare and vintage guns. And while such ammo will usually cost more than its mass-produced counterparts, you can probably shoot and still make your car payment.
Owners of rare and vintage firearms, for example, might start their ammo search with the Old Western Scrounger. Owned by Val Forgett III, who also owns Navy Arms, OWS carries more than 200 calibers of obsolete ammunition. The company contracts out the actual ammo production to several American reloading concerns for centerfire calibers and to overseas ammunition makers for rimfires. Among OWS' offerings are hard-to-find rimfire calibers such as .22 Winchester Automatic as well as .32 and .351 Winchester Self-Loader, 8mm Nambu and .303 Savage.
OWS's top seller? The .22 Winchester Automatic rimfire. "That's the lead item, the vanilla ice cream of what we sell," says Forgett. "Winchester made a gun at the turn of the century, the 1903 Automatic rifle, and it was actually chambered in this proprietary cartridge. A standard .22 Long Rifle will not function in the gun. For 50, 60 years, nobody made the ammo. But there's probably 150,000 of those guns floating around."
OWS was started by gun enthusiast Dave Cumberland in the late 1970s, a time when major ammo makers were beginning to phase out many older, less popular calibers. Forgett acquired the business in September 2005. "There is a surprisingly strong market for obsolete cartridges," says Forgett. "You forget that there are literally hundreds of thousands of guns that are chambered in calibers that manufacturers don't make anymore."
Yet the guns themselves still exist and are used by many shooters. It is more expensive, though, to make ammunition in smaller lots in calibers that have gone out of fashion. The .22 Winchester Automatic, for example, sells for $12.95 a box, 50 rounds per box.
"I would say that the average rifle caliber that we sell is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 to $60 for a box [of 20 rounds]," says Forgett. "It's more expensive than .308, but it's not $10 a round."
Many rare firearm aficionados come to Mike Cook for their ammunition needs. Cook owns and operates Pacific Coast Cartridge in Florence, Oregon. A life-long shooter and reloader, Cook has run the company for a dozen years. He currently loads for more than 200 different calibers, producing small, custom batches of ammo for individual gun owners.
