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BTW, after having bought and shot my Marlin a little bit, I thought long and hard about side-gate loading versus the Henry system with the magazine tube loading..... A side loading gate was one reason why I bought the Marlin in the first place. But after loading rounds into the rifle with it, the spring on the loading gate was so stiff that it was difficult to feed rounds into the magazine that way. I have the beginnings of arthritis in my hands, and it's just too much of a pain (literally) to load the rifle through the side gate. Like I say, it wasn't so much the magazine tube spring, it was the loading gate spring that was the problem. While shooting for chronograph data, I finally gave up and started loading individual rounds through the ejection port. Since I can't imagine ever having to do some kind of speed reload under combat conditions with this rifle, it seems irrelevant to me whether a side loading gate is theoretically faster than the Henry system or not. It simply doesn't matter. If I was in the kind of situation where speed reloads of a .30 caliber rifle were necessary to my survival, I have several other rifles that fit that bill, and I'd most likely be carrying my well-scoped SCAR 17S instead, with its 20-round box magazines, 3.5 lb match trigger, and a suppressor.

So frankly, if unscrewing and pulling out a tube to put 6 rounds into the magazine takes a minute longer to reload the rifle, I'm OK with that. And my guess is that, given the pain in my hands and the stiffness of my Marlin's loading gate, it probably wouldn't actually take any longer to load a Henry than to load my Marlin.

If anybody has any suggestions for lightening up that loading gate, I'm all ears.

mupepe wrote:Thanks! I assume the JM marking would be on the barrel?

I'll probably go new and thus Henry since I don't like the idea of buying a used gun on the net and searching used at local shops is always a crap shoot and/or waiting game.

Do be careful........ Some early Remlins were assembled at the Remington plant, using left over JM stamped barrels. The barrels are good, but the build quality isn't there. If you are dead set on a Marlin, you'll probably want to find one manufactured before the move, which can probably be confirmed by looking up the serial number online somewhere.

BTW, there's no problem with Remington manufactured barrels in terms of accuracy. They know how to do barrels right. I have a Remington 700 precision rifle that will shoot the knees off a flea at long ranges. The internal ballistics and dynamics of the Remington barrels isn't an issue. My Remington manufactured barrel on my Marlin shoots just fine, so t isn't a barrel issue. It's a build quality issue.

For instance, there are many reports of earlier Remlin barrels being improperly timed to the receiver, such that the front sight post is slightly cocked to one side or the other, throwing shots off down range. You have to look close to see the problem, and early Remlin buyers often didn't discover the problem until after the first range session when they sat down at a bench and seriously examined their poorly shooting rifle. Fortunately, mine doesn't have that problem. However, the laminated wood stock is not anywhere near as nicely made as the laminated stock on my Ruger Gunsite Scout, or as nice as any aftermarket laminated stock you can buy from Boyd's. Laminated stocks are not exactly new technology. You'd think that they'd have it figured out by now. Mine looks like laminated plywood on close inspection. The fit of the stock to the receiver is haphazard. The fit of the magazine tube under the barrel was off.....actually cocked off to one side at the muzzle end. I figured out how to fix it after it actually shot loose at the range, forcing me to realign the magazine tube stud in the dovetail on the underside of the muzzle end of the barrel, and tighten it down. But when I did that, the forearm tip, tip tenon, and tip screws no longer properly lined up with the forearm when the tenon was centered in its dovetail in the barrel. The forearm tip is just stamped metal, so I had to force it to line up the holes, and even so, the screw on one side is now cocked a little bit instead of going straight in. It's not crossthreaded, but the parts just aren't true and square to the furniture.

Here's a PDF of the owners manual: http://www.marlinfirearms.com/pdfs/manu ... erfire.pdf.

Go to page 13 for the "exploded" view and the parts list. The parts at the muzzle end affecting the magazine tube alignment are 50, 51, and 53. You can barely see the dovetail on the underside of the barrel in the picture, but there is one there. The parts at the forearm are 26 - 28, but the picture doesn't depict the corresponding dovetail on the barrel that the tenon (#27) slots into. But there is a dovetail there......at least on MY model, the 336BL, which has an 18" barrel instead of the normal 20".

You won't find that kind of crappy build quality on older Marlins, which are fine examples of lever rifle genre. I was maybe a bit foolish. I really wanted that 18" barrel, and I wanted a big loop. My reasoning was "Truck Gun".......needs to be operable with gloves on. I don't want to be poking around trying to get my fingers into the action loop in a hurry. I wanted the shorter barrel for handiness, and ease of concealed storage in a vehicle. I never had it in mind to hunt with the thing beyond a couple of hundred yards, if at all, so the higher velocities that extra 2" would have bought me was irrelevant. As it is, I did chronograph the several loads I've shot in it, and the velocities are still plenty high enough to be very effective beyond 200 yards, so I'm not worried about that. The Hornady 160 grain LeverRevolution ammo performed best, and was also most accurate. As far as the cosmetics, I resigned myself to that, and really, as a truck gun, it's going to collect dings and scratches eventually anyway, so.....oh well.

The OEM sights leave much to be desired, especially if you have any current vision problems. I have the old Mark 64 eyeballs, with the aftermarket cataract add-ons, so the OEM sights are nearly worthless for me, even with my glasses on. They are just not well enough defined, one from the other, even when they are not blurry to me. I am replacing them with a XS Sight Systems scout rail with an integral rear peep sight, and a XS Sight Systems front sight with a white ramp that is more visible than the tiny little brass bead that comes on the OEM front sight. Once the irons are zeroed, I will be mounting a 1.5-5x32mm Leupold Scout Scope that I own that used to sit on my Ruger Gunsite Scout before I replaced it with a Vortex 2.5-10x32mm Viper PST FFP MRAD (yes, I have a thing for nice optics ). The Scout Scope has QD rings on it, so it can be easily dismounted if I ever needed to revert to the iron sights for any reason, but if I did, at least the irons would be usable to me, because the OEM's are crap.

NOW.....if you go for the Marlin Guide Gun — the Marlin 1895SBL, it comes with that XS Sight Systems rail, front, and rear ghost ring sight already mounted. IF I were going to buy another Marlin in .45-70, I would try to find a pre-Remlin that matched THAT description. Otherwise, I'd buy the Henry and add the XS Sight Systems parts myself. Given the nature of the .45-70 cartridge and its performance parameters, I'd probably either leave the gun optics-free, or just mount a simple RDS on it.

If you want to see my original thread about that new Marlin, with a lot of helpful comments from other members, click here.

I hope some of this will be helpful to you in picking one out.

I have a recently purchased .30-30, and plan to buy a .45-70 some day. My .30-30 is a Remlin. It functions just fine, and seems reasonably accurate for a general purpose rifle, but the fit of wood to metal, and some of the metal to metal fit leaves something to be desired. I soon after purchased a Henry .22 Octagon Barrel, and it is a simply beautiful rifle, heirloom quality (I'm excited about my grandson inheriting it some day), and the action is as smooth as butter - which the Remlin's is not as smooth. When I do get around to buying a .45-70, it will be a Henry. I'm not upset about the Marlin.......I like it OK, and I got a decent price on it. It is a good "truck gun", one you don't care too much about the wood getting dinged up. Like I said, it shoots OK, and I'll take good care of it and keep it. But the Henry is a better made gun if you're looking for a new one. If you want a Marlin, look for an older one.

As far as .30-30 versus .45-70 goes, I think you'll get more general use out of a .30-30, whether as a truck gun, for hunting, as a range gun, or for defense of self or property. By all means get a .45-70 for straight up range fun, or for hunting in Alaska, but get a .30-30 first if you're hoping to have a good general purpose rifle.