Dad's First Deer, Mom's First Deer, My First Deer. Breathing New Life Into a Family Heirloom

Vintage build of the month: September.  Marlin 336 30.30/ Weaver K2.5 60

Sometimes the best place to start with bringing a gun back to useful life is not with stripping the bluing and wood finish.  Sometimes you have to step back and ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish with the finished product.  For a family heirloom with hundreds of fond memories built into its huge sentimental value you might want to keep that scratch in the stock that you made while crawling through the plum thickets to retrieve your first buck.  You might like that your fingerprints are on the exact same thinning blue finish that your grandpa’s were on.  You might like seeing the gouges in the old wood stock that conjure up images of all the hunts and memories that your uncle had on his many adventures, some with and some without you.

This month, I decided to take one of our family heirlooms, get it out of the gun cabinet where it really hasn’t moved for 30 years and bring it back to a highly useable state whilst keeping all of the character that we built into it back in the early days of my hunting heritage.  The goal was to keep it period correct but make it every bit and a little more than it was back in the 1960’s, to make it a rifle that my sons will want to take out to shoot a deer safely and effectively, if only to relive a piece of their history and heritage.

Putting a new finish on a family heirloom does little, in my opinion, to add value or utility to a firearm; it isn’t ever going to be sold.  Optics, on the other hand get worn out, so an upgrade in an old rifle’s optics are normally not only necessary, but may be the best money spent to increase the firearm’s value and utility, so that it gets more out of life than sitting in a cabinet and you and its future owners get more out of it than simply storing it away.

In my family it wasn’t just the men who hunted, all of us hunted.  Anyone who decided later to not hunt because the early mornings weren’t for them, the cold wasn’t for them, or the final act of harvest wasn’t for them, still understood the importance of hunting. 

Mom and her first deer c.1973.

The history of this month’s build is this:  A Marlin 336 lever action 30.30 was purchased by my dad for use in the first-ever deer season in our part of the state of Nebraska.  He successfully took his first deer with this rifle.  Later, my mother took her first deer with it and when I was of legal hunting age in the state, my dad passed it over to me to harvest my first deer on the opening morning of the 1982.  The lever gun proved to be just the ticket for that morning hunt.  We had 6 inches of fresh snow for the opener, my dad didn’t care for sitting so we walked until we cut a buck track and began trailing.  To this day I have never figured out how to track like Dad.  Even decades later his ability to know when to leave an elk’s trail to circle above or below and shoot the animal while bedded or watching its back trail is magical to me.  At no point in the hunt did I realize anything different in our tracking, but Dad instructed me to circle around and walk perpendicular to the track along a ridge top covered in scattered red-cedar.  I did it not knowing exactly what to expect but I held the 30.30 with the 4x scope at ready - ready for whatever.  Suddenly, I saw a buck sneaking quickly up the side of the ridge, away from its tracker.  It was close.  It would cross the ridge at only 30 yards.  It had no idea I was there, but it certainly had realized that Dad was on its trail.  Looking back, I’m guessing dad knew that the buck had turned to get the wind in its favor so Dad’s plan was to get me in front of it while he soft-pushed the buck up and across the ridge where it would have boundless cover and safety…if it made it.  Well, the buck did not make it that day.  I shot once behind the shoulder on its left side.  It spun to go back down the ridge but I had already instinctively levered another round and put one behind the shoulder on its right side.  It dropped.  I will admit it sounds pretty John Wayne, and maybe it didn’t even happen like this at all, but after 35 years, this is what the story is.  I remember being pretty proud of the shooting and Dad asked me why I felt the need to not only shoot him through the heart, but then also the lungs too.    That said, I remember the moment when I got into the thick brush and the buck was sneaking quickly through, I had wished for a moment that I could get to my irons.  I couldn’t.  They were covered up with a scope.

9 years later…..My first buck. Same gun, same tailgate.

The Marlin 336 in 30.30 is a brush gun, plain and simple.  It is perfectly designed for a hunt like I had that morning.  However, most of that country is open and I was sighted in and prepared for a 100-200 yard shot, not 30.  If I had a little different optics set up, I felt like that would be an improvement on that rifle.  Either a see-through mount, or a pivot mount.

In this case, I decided to keep the scope low profile as it was back then, so the look and feel is the same, but now I’ll have access to the iron sights.

Iron sights accessed.

Crosshairs accessed.

With our family heirloom needing a scope replacement anyway, I decided the best thing to do was to delete the non-functioning piece of Bushnell that was on it with a Weaver K2.5 60 and a set of Weaver pivot mount bases and rings.

I’m happy with the result of this build.  It makes me want to get in the brush, practice my stalking and see if I can take another buck with it.  I believe I will do just that.

Before….

One hour of work didn’t make this rifle look like new. It made it look just as I remembered it, but now it was useful again. New pivot mounts and rings, new VGS weaver K2.5 60 scope. VGS Scope and Gun Wax. Anyone can do this. What’s more, now it is ready for the field, or simply to shoot with the family on a Sunday afternoon.