About a year ago, I was looking at rifles in the behind the counter rack at a semi-local gun shop, and found a pre-A 52 Winchester with a factory stainless bbl. I'd read about these barrels in the Houze book on the 52, but had never seen one before. A previous owner had cut the butt 1/2" shorter and cut off the tip of the forearm from the bbl band forward, then checkered the pg & forend. The wood has some nice darker stripes running through it; just goes to show that it's not unusual to find these older 52s with some nice grain in the stock. Anyway, I looked it over out of curiosity, but eventually handed it back to the sales guy and got out of there before I was tempted to buy it.
So a few weeks ago, I went back to that same shop to see what might've shown up since my last visit, and found a Winchester 9422 XTR in very good condition. I'd been thinking about buying one of these rifles forever, from back when they were still being made, but had never pulled the trigger on the purchase of one. This one had the muzzle threaded 1/2-20, and when quizzed about it, the sales guy told me that they'd imported it back into the States from Finland. I wound up buying it...but that pre-A 52 was still in the rack. Again, I walked out with the 9422, but couldn't stop thinking about that old 52...
I wound up going back to that shop a couple of weeks after the 9422 purchase, and asked to look at the pre-A 52 again. The owner came down a few hundred on the price, and so it came home with me. I had bought a 15x 1" Unertl target scope with 2" objective several months ago, and finally decided to mount it on this rifle. I'd examined the bore with a Hawkeye borescope before making the decision to buy the rifle, and was impressed with its condition - very smooth, no pits or any other visible defects. Only thing that needed done was to remove a carbon ring in the leade, which was easy enough to do with Bore Tech C4. So yesterday, I had time to take the 52 out to zero that Unertl scope and hopefully find out how the rifle shoots. I started out with a box of old Wolf Match Target, the type that was made by SK. That old stuff shot pretty decent, so I moved on to a recently purchased lot of SK Std+, and it shot even better. Then tried some SK Rifle Match, and it was good too. Finally broke out a box of Eley Match, and the 1st 5 shots went into a nice tight group, as is often the case when I follow up shooting SK/Lapua with Eley...and is often the case, the next few groups of Eley don't do as well - which is probably something to do with dissimilar bullet lubes, since I didn't wipe the bore out before shooting the Eley.
Whatever - I'm pleased with this old rifle - with the exception of the trigger not being 100% predictable. When I get the bbl'd action out of the stock to examine the trigger, I'll also look for a date stamp on the bbl.
