Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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Winchester tried to change that and came out with a better version, the Featherweight Model, with an alloy receiver. This made the gun lighter and shifted some weight to the front. It was an excellent gun, but still it did not sell well. It was trying to compete with the Browning A-5, which had been in production for over 50 years and had become a legend with field shooters. Among newer guns, the Remington 11-48 was a sleek looking, popular autoloader especially with skeet shooters. And Savage’s take on the Model 11-48, the Model 755, was selling well in its own right.

Winchester tried harder and came out with the Model 59, which used the same system but had a barrel that even today would be considered revolutionary. The Winchester Model 59 used a thin steel liner that was wrapped with 500 miles of fiberglass thread to make what they called a Win-lite barrel. Together with the alloy receiver, this made for an excellent upland gun weighing in at 6-½ pounds in 12 gauge. But the Model 59 with its revolutionary barrel didn’t make it, either. One good thing came out of that attempt. Winchester introduced screw-in chokes for the Model 59 in 1961, calling it the Versalite chokes. The concept eventually caught on. (Contrary to popular belief, Winchester was not the first with the interchangeable choke tube. A Massachusetts gunsmith by the name of Sylvester Roper patented a choke device that attached to the end of the barrel back in 1866, and the Italian gun maker Breda had a choke tube system called “Quick Choke,” which made its appearance in the 1940s. The Simmons Choke, very similar to Breda’s “Quick-Choke” came out a year before Winchester, and Armalite had a similar system on their revolutionary AR-17. If you include choke tubes that did not attach directly to the barrel, but to a recoil chamber, then you can go back to 1922 when the Cutts Compensator first appeared. But Winchester could rightly be given credit for having made the first commercially successful “internal” or “screw-in” choke tubes in the U.S.)