Telescopic sight is easy to mount on a Marlin 336, enhancing both accuracy and hunter safety. Useful, inexpensive accessories include lightweight fabric carry sling and elastic butt cuff for spare cartridges. Slightly heavier, in part because of its action design and partly because its more generous stock design simply had more wood on both ends, it was never weighed more than a pound over its Winchester equivalent of the same barrel length and caliber, and the difference was often even less than that, depending on the density of the wood. There are many who believe it was, from the beginning, a stronger rifle than the Model ’94 Winchester to which the Marlin played Avis opposite Hertz. The 336 was a stronger rifle than the Model 36 that preceded it, not only in terms of more modern metallurgy but because of its rugged and simple round bolt mechanism that rolled smoothly inside the receiver, or frame. With the stock Marlin, a hunter could simply attach an ordinary scope on an ordinary mount in the traditional position. The top-ejecting Winchester would have its mechanism blocked by a telescopic sight in its usual position atop the rifle’s frame. As telescopic sights became more popular among American outdoorsmen, this became a key advantage. This continued with the Model 336 and its many variations.
At the SHOT Show-it stands for Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade, the largest trade show in the firearms industry-in Las Vegas in January, 2005, I had the privilege of looking over a handsomely engraved rifle that was Marlin’s four millionth Model 336.įrom the early days, the Marlin’s solid frame with ejection to the right side (instead of out the top of the mechanism, as with the Winchester) was one of its distinguishing features. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Veteran hunter and gun dealer Jeff Boss demonstrates the excellent handling of the lever action Marlin carbine, unusually accurate for a rifle of this type. These attributes were carried into the newer gun, destined to be their longest-lived deer rifle: the Model 336, introduced in 1948 and still Marlin’s most popular hunting rifle.
Where Winchester emphasized a lean, mean straight-stock design with a slim, spare fore-end, the Marlin had a pistol grip style stock with its lever loop bent accordingly, and a fuller fore-end. Some 900,000 of these guns were made between then and 1935, when the company replaced it with their sleeker Model 36.
Marlin introduced their Model 1893 rifle in the eponymous year, initially in old black powder calibers like the. 30-30 that sold over five million units since the year 1894, I knew that I’d have to follow up with an article on the other such deer rifle, Marlin’s Model 336. In the March/April 2005 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine, this space was devoted to the “Winchester ’94: the Classic Backwoods Home Deer Rifle.” And you know, even when I was writing that paean to the lever-action.
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