Three Simple Steps to a Legit Vintage Build

There are a lot of reasons to keep a vintage rifle/optics build period correct, but who wants to have to know everything about every scope, gun, ring, base and screw made in the last 100 years? I think the answer to that question is almost no one. So, we gave you some tools to accomplish this on your projects in three easy steps, which only takes a few minutes. Here is how it works:

Our date your gun page includes serial number lookup for hundreds of vintage gun models from 7 major manufacturers. Just click on the manufacturer and find the date your gun was made.

Currently our scope genealogy table includes scopes for Weaver and Redfield Only. That said, on our shopping by model pages, you can also find a circa for most other brands and models. Simply compare the year of your gun to the table and you’ll know your period correct model choices. And we think it’s ok to fudge a few years on the scope in many cases. I normally follow the rule of thumb that a scope could come after a gun, but a gun rarely comes after a scope. In other words, you could put a 1956 scope on a 1949 rifle, and that would be normal, since that rifle might not have even been scoped for the first years of its existence, especially during that transition period when folks really didn’t trust their optics since their shooting/hunting styles had been forged by iron sight type hunting for so many years in brush, snow, rain, and low light. The use of optics actually changed the methods of how we shoot/hunt today, but it took a while to get there. Doing the reverse, however by putting a 1949 scope on a 1956 rifle would be less common. That said, you can get by with it sometimes. For instance some rifles didn’t change much during decades of manufacture, so I would hold that you could use any scope made during the period that the rifle was manufactured with the same look.

Not all mounts are the same and in many cases the type of mounting system makes or breaks your build. There’s nothing worse, nor cheaper and easier to fix, than having a perfectly matched period rifle and scope with modern mounts. Our table gives you dates, once again for Weaver and Redfield manufacturing periods, for each mount type.

Of course, not all builds are that cut and dried, and not every build component is found in our tables, so when folks are ordering components for a vintage build, they often email us the make/model/year of their gun(s) and ask us to recommend products to complete their shopping cart prior to checkout, something that we enjoy doing. If you follow these steps you can put together a vintage build that even the most particular of your gun buddies will be jealous of.