Same day we were working out the NE54 I had the Win94 Dad gave me. Accuracy was about what I would expect. Since we were shooting at 50 yards the translation would be about 2" pattern at 100 with a rest. For the off hand I doubt I would shoot off hand at that distance as I don't practice it enough.
 
With a little more practice this will be an excellent companion for nice walks in the woods during deer season. For those nice little surprises when you look up and are face to face with some thing you would like to have for dinner.

I know that feeling, Alboy!

I just don't go anywhere up here un-armed. That 94 makes a nice little gun for those excursions sometimes.

I think I've always had a 94 since I was a kid. :)
Killed my first buck with one....You'd not believe me if I told you how far---running no less, but my Dad was standing right beside me when I did it. He still talks about that shot.
375 yards. Right in the shoulder...the bullet was under the skin on the other side.
I still have that bullet too.   I was 12 years old.:D

Rockin'

A good rifle/cartridge combo in anyone's gun rack.  Both my boys started out with .30-30s and did very well.  My little girl took her buck the first year with a .30-30/Model 94 combo.

In many of the old hunting books, the hunters welcomed the 'new' .30-30 and it's smokeless loads.  I had one once and foolishly traded it off.  Octagon barrel it had, and 'fine' sights.  It shot true but I thought I needed a custom muzzle loader more.  Ah foolish youth.

Rockin
 
I believe, I believe. Some of the shots I made when I did not know I couldn't with any particular combination still flit around in my memories. One was a hummingbird on the wing at about 25 yards with a .22 Benjamin pump up pellet gun. It was a great shot for a 9-10 or so year old. It was also a great seat warmer and loss of my shootin iron for about a month.
 
I would love to know hom many 22 shorts I burned on ground wasps down where the creek went under the trestle. Range 15-20 feet. Mom later told me that as long as they heard that little pop from the back 40 they knew I wasn't into someting I shoudn't be.

Alboy,

I was just thinking the same thing the other day!

Heck, we'd sight our rifles in over the hood of the pick-up truck....aiming at ball point pen circles drawn on an empty feed sack....

I'd make spectacular shots. Ones that really defy explanation....
One reason I think that could happen, was that we "Trusted" our rifles back then.
I mean if we could hit a ONE INCH CIRCLE at a hundred steps off the hood of a pick-up, then anything with with an 8 inch kill zone was just dead meat for  as far as we could shoot!

We didn't know the ballistic science of our guns. We knew that the bullet dropped a certain amount & used "Kentucky Windage" adjustments for bullet drop.

I thought my 30-30 was the ultimate rifle...period. It could take down a bull elephant if I ever got to go on one of the much fantasized about African Safari. I'd go sleep with my Grandad's old Field & Stream magazine drapped across my chest, & dream of killing a much dangerous Rhino, or the dreaded Grizzley bear....

Then I'd wake up on Saturday morning & call my "hunting buddies" up on the phone, & we'd pack our BB guns off to a new adventure.
(I had the best one in town...It was a Crosman pump-up .177 calber that would shoot BB's AND PELLETS. Wood stock, & blued steel.......I wonder why companies stopped making BB buns like that)

We could hardly wait to get after the wily sparrow....(I'm sure we kept the numbers in control for the whole town.)

A squirrel or a rabbit was "Big Game" back then....Every boy I knew had a BB gun of some sort, but only a very few of us had one that would actually take down the big stuff, like a cotton-tail. A Jack rabbit was the ultimate prize & trophy to a group of 8-10 year old boys.

The high school had a bunch of tall, thick evergreen trees around the tennis courts....there must have been 50-60 of those trees....Well the dove would roost in those trees & we would wait until they came in, late in the evening to light in those huge trees...There were hundreds of them....We would try & "bag out" before dark. We knew the limit was 15 doves, & sometimes we would get our limit, but not often.

And we really cleaned & ate what we killed with our BB guns.....IF they were dove or a cotton tail rabbit. The freezer always had old breadsacks filled with dove, quail, or cotton tails in it. (Most of the time, we forgot to write on the bread sack what kind of meat was actually in it....so mom had to come ask me what was in this one, and what was in that one.

I'd LOVE to make a movie about the way things were back then....
We had no video games. There were no street gangs in our town. We had plastic soldiers...
We built "Forts" next to the old oak tree.....

We would go around the allies in our town & gather up coke bottles for enough money to buy a highly coveted "Apple Beer" and a few handfulls of "penny candy"...

We also respected our elders. If an adult told us to do something, or to NOT do something we listened & answered with "Sir" & "Ma'am".....Backtalk would get you killed promptly when Dad got home after work...

As we grew older we were allowed to take or .22's & shotguns out. This opened up a whole new world outside the City Limits....
We still ate what we shot, (with-in limits....Mom wouldn't let us try things like rattlesnake or porcupine in HER kitchen!)

Nearly as often, we would take our fishing poles to one of the many stock-tanks that were scattered around the outskirts of town...We would try & dig some worms for bait, but the worms were hard to come by....we usually ended up with a can of bisquits, swiped from one of our mom's 'fridge...

It is amazing how good a few perch taste, cooked over an open fire, on a stick....salted with the yellow sulpher salt scraped from the rancher's salt block with our pocket knives....

It is also equally amazing how well you can sleep next to a campfire, in an old sand-filled army sleeping bag, when nobody was around to tell you what time to turn off the lights & go to sleep.

It is a good thing I have those memories. I often wonder what our kids & grand kids will reflect on when they get to be my age...:)

Rockin'

And all of the "Hunter Safety" and "Hunter Education" and adult-run "programs" WILL NEVER replace or adequately substitute for a kid being able to pick up a gun and go wander the fields and woods. And all the lip-service to "ethics", almost always imposded on someone else, will teach young hunters the difference between right and wrong, the difference between a "good" shot and a bad one, or most importantly, what Hunting really is.
 
No one wants to hear this, myself included, but I am convinced that Hunting will die with the generation born before 1960. In fact, I consider it already dead.
 
Ol' downer,
Paul

I would love to have lived back in those days.  Everything is too restricted now.  There are houses everywhere.  My dad used to be able to go out behind our house and into the woods to deer hunt.  Now there is maybe 1 acre of woods and 2 new housing plants.  There are more young hunters than you would think though.  I thought I was one of the only ones in my school, but suprisingly there are a lot of other people who hunt.  You can almost tell who they are just by the level of maturity.  It's not all of the young people who hunt, or only the people who hunt, but in general the people who hunt in our school are just more mature.  They have a better level of respect for the teachers and everyone else.  They aren't usually the people who are getting in trouble all the time.  I'm hoping I'll never have to see the day when hunting completely dies out, and I don't think I will.  I think it may happen in time, but not for a while.  Later

Keep that thought.
 
Paul

I'm sure it comes from spending time in the woods with friends and family, mostly your elders Marlin.  
 
 Paul, I'm doin my part.  Got both my boys hooked and am working a friends boy.  Supposed to take him out rabbit hunting with his new .410 given to him by an uncle.  His father doesn't hunt, uncle is too far away.  So him, my boys and I will venture out on the next available weekend and hopefully he will bag a cotton tail and get addicted liek the rest of us.  
 
 Another thing we do is have a "shootout" every couple of months.  The CO at work organizes it as a BBQ and Skeet Shoot.  It gets alot of people who otherwise would not shoot to come out and pick up a shotgun and get some exposure to The Hunter's Life.  The first one started off with butchering a small buck that the Chaplains son shot that morning and then we had grilled venison, dove and duck.  Followed by a skeet shoot and then a turkey shoot.  Was a great time.  If the person didn't have a shotgun, there were more than enough to use, we had a trailer full and they were welcome to any of them.  I saw children and wives shoot a firearm for the first time.  It was a grand success and we are having another this month.
 
 I dont think the era of the hunter is ending, but I am afraid the amount of hunters is going to decrease significantly more.
 
 Great reading Rockinbbar.

Thanks rockin', you brought back a lot of old memories!
 
My own rifle as a kid was a Sheridan 5mm pellet gun, and it'd handle the "big stuff" better than most of the rifles that my friends had.  Was hard for me to pump up and load at 6 years of age, so I didn't dare miss!
 
Daryl

There was a time as an innocent child that I was chastised daily, including selecting my own switch or belt. Now I say that to preface some of the following stories. By the way in my dotage I reflect I got "caught" only about half the time and I was not trying to hide anything only very curious. GOD bless my mother for not killing me young, I so richly deserved it.
 
There was the day at Uncle Sonny's when Aunt Doc had hung a weeks worth of laundry on the line. My cousin Mike and I had been shooting various lizards, sparrows, crickets and such with our BB guns. Both Red Ryders, his a carbine (Held about a half of a nickle tube, the red ones with crimped ends) mine a rifle (still smooth bore but would hold 3+ nickle tubes).
 
Any way we had temporarily run out of targets and got to discussing a movie we saw where some one shot the clothes pins off the wire. For purely scientific reasons we decided to see if that was really true and feasible. Now it works out that it is both true and false. The pins just waiting for laundry will not come off the line, they just spin (this may be the impetous where some other enterprising soul dreamed up spinning targets). They will come off when anchored by wet clothes. The added resistance to spin allowing the BB to snap the ear of the pin. Depending on how close to the spring you snap it either it fall or does not.
 
As an enteresting side line that is also the weekend Mike and I learned how to do laundry and hang it. As another direct correlation we learned how to iron. Now that is not all bad for a kid as we earned 5 cents a shirt and 7 cents a pair of pants for our labor. Voila money for ammo.

:)
 
Maybe if we get to see each other anytime soon Alboy, I'll relate a few of my "experiements".
 
Paul

I was a pre-teen in the 70s.......all belts had metal eyelets on them.....
 At granny's all the trees were hickory......nothing worse than going to get your own belt or switch, the anticipation was always worse than the switchin....thats the whole purpose.

I've owned some 94's and consider them fine woods guns. They carry especially well so they are always in your hand. Shot more deer than I can remember with them mostly in 30-30. As a boy the one thing that stays in my mind was spending time with my grandfathers (my dad was usually drunk and dangerous to be with). They trusted me to keep the woodchucks out of the garden with a 22. As a matter of fact anybody you asked would about hug you if you would shoot the whistlepigs out of their gardens or crop feilds. My grandads had one thing in common though. They both felt it a waste of cartridges if you practiced shooting. They were raised during hard times and ammo was nearly as scarce as money. If I left the house with 10 cartridges I'd better bring 10 tails home. I now practice a great deal. Shot probably 500 22's and 75 270's, and 50 shotgun shells last week and it was a slow week.And I always can see them shaking ther heads and saying not to waste ammo boy! Oh yeah, and to leave them sights alone! I really miss them both. God bless them for the time they spent with me.

My first was a Red Ryder.

 
I have many fine memories of my youth but I won't bore y'all. I will say this...when I was young I cannot recall a birthday (or Christmas) when I did not get at least one cap pistol.


Punishment was leather.
 

My first centerfire rifle (my very own) was a Model 94.