While I had several Contenders I went a different route and bought my son one of the few Anschutz Woodchuckers that were only available in 1984 from RSR. It had a 16" barrel, hooded front sight/adj. open rear, was grooved for scope, a 5-shot clip, adjustable trigger, very positive safety and this one had very high grade high figure wood that I later found out was very unusual. It was the perfect size for my son who was 7 at the time to go along with the 3-screw Ruger Bearcat I gave him along with it. I put a scope on it to see just how accurate it was, and was very impressed, but my son learned to shoot it with just the open sights. Seems like I paid around $180-190 for it in '84, and the dealer told me he would gladly buy it back anytime I wanted to sell it as he had only been able to get 2 of them from RSR. But when I sold it 3-4 years years later after my son grew into full size rifles and so didn't use it anymore, the gent who got it gave me $500 for it. I shouldn't have sold it, but with around 45 firearms and more I wanted to buy, keeping one not used wasn't in the game plan in those days. I didn't know until years later that the story on them supposedly is that Anschutz had something like 400-500 full size rifles with bad muzzles, so they cut the barrels and stocks down to make youth rifles out of them and put the name Woodchucker on the barrels. Sounds reasonable as this rifles butt had no butt plate and instead the cut off stock itself was deep cut checkered for a no slip butt plate.
