Well, I finally got around to taking some more pictures and these are my lever actions.
The first is my Marlin 1881 chambered in .40-60 Marlin. It was my great-uncle's train gun and they used it to shoot deer and buffalo from the tracks. They had refrigerator cars and somehow picked up a lot of meat that way. I have to get a better press before I can get serious about reloading for it, however, as the first brass I made from .45-70 took me 3 hours for 1 piece. Then I rushed seating the bullet and crushed it. 8( I'm hoping to reload this with black powder only as that's mainly all it's fired, although once the ammo was too hard to get, the last 3 shots through it in the 1920's were .40-65 Winchester factory ammo, it's only 1/8" shorter.
The second is my Winchester Model 94 in .32 Special, which was purchased for my great-grandmother in 1926. She often sat on the back porch and shot deer from her rocking chair. She wore out her original 30-30, and this was it's replacement, so I guess she shot a lot.
I carried this gun deer hunting for about 5 years and it has the flip up ladder sight. I took a long shot for our property using it and it hit right at the deer's feet and dug a nice hole in the ground. When I paced it off, long before range finders, I found I'd miscalculated by 60 yards. I set the sight for 400 and I think I might have been close to getting that dandy if my eye were a little better.
