Old Eatons Cooey Carcano Adds

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Not sure if it should be here or sporting arms
From the University of Saskatchewan archives: John Arthur Belton's book made some false statements in his very brief section on it. I'm now motivated to see if there was an actual suit and an official recall. Some times with guns you get those "old timey" legends that never die, even in face of new evidence. I own several and they handle regular loads just fine and despite its absolutely garbage sights, is quite accurate. There were a few different variants sold. They did have a model with a side scope mount. Some have four grove rifling and others six. The archives go from begin to end and I'll make a more concerted search this weekend.

So it looks like the cooey Carcano made its debut in the Eatons Fall-Winter 1929-30 catalog. I couldn't find it listed past FW 1934-35. I went to FW 39-40. It looks like it had a hooded front sight but I've never found one that way. I know for a fact that there was a side-scope mounted model. Maybe listed later, I'll check all the 1940's next weekend. Ill also checked the Bay and Sears through the same time frame.
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I love looking at these old adverts.

Used to fawn over the old Lebarons catalogues from the 70’s & 80’s when I was a kid.

Anyway you could put up higher resolution versions so we can read the descriptions?

Thanks for posting

Ryan
 
Back when I was a young adult I had one of those and fired a pile of 6.5x52 out of it until I found out it was actually 6.5x54. Mine had the dual set trigger set up but it was basically garbage so I put a single trigger set up on it.
 
Those old rifle adds are great, love the prices but at the same time those prices did reflect a substantial amount of disposable income for most people back then.

But at least you could buy a rifle without having to phone in a reference number, show a firearms licence or have the retailer write down all your info and hang on to it for two decades.
 
$225 for a carcano sporter, 830 bucks for a savage 99e, 160 for a cooey ranger, 10 bucks/100 22lr ammo. Nearly 90 years later and all are very similar too todays prices for nice used examples, wonder how the savage axis' and company will do...
 
Northshore said:
Those old rifle adds are great, love the prices but at the same time those prices did reflect a substantial amount of disposable income for most people back then.

But at least you could buy a rifle without having to phone in a reference number, show a firearms licence or have the retailer write down all your info and hang on to it for two decades.
Click to expand...

Those ads bring back a lot of memories. A Stevens Favorite for under $10. By the 1950s, they went up to $15 for the nice .32 RF I bought, but the dealer threw in a box of ammo with it.

As mentioned, what was the average wage at the time? I know I was making about $1.25 an hour when I bought the Stevens, so it cost me a whole day and a half of my pay cheque for that rifle.
 
Great ads - thanks for sharing.

As for studying this, I'm about 12 years ahead of you......

I have John Belton's (RIP) book and corresponded and spoke with him a few years back on the subject of the "Cooey Carcano". While I disagree that these rifles are of weak construction and are not safe to fire, I wouldn't say that he published "false statements", rather I'd soften it a bit to "unverified". The info he published regarding law suits was essentially hearsay, heard first-hand by Mr. Belton from someone who had worked for Cooey as I recall. Mr. Belton was never able to verify any law suit, nor an attempt at a recall, nor of any injuries or deaths!

The other part of the "folklore" was that "many people were injured". Several tales of "someone knowing someone who was friends with someone who overheard a conversation about an injury" abound - again, nothing verified. All that said, I have owned several over the years and when I heard that they were "unsafe", I was skeptical, so I conducted some tests and disassembled two of them. I published my findings here (in 2006):

https://www.canadiangunnutz.com/for...on-Carcano-quot-A-Myth-Busted-Updated-2-June? Good discussion, although the original pics were "confiscated" by Photobucket

http://www.milsurps.com/content.php?r=303-Myth-Busted-Proof-Testing-an-Eaton-Carcano-Rifle Pics are here!

All of the 10 or so I've owned and/or examined, were constructed the same way as the one that held together under ~100K psi. That isn't to say that someone wasn't injured (as there are many stupid things possible), but I would not agree that it was due to faulty unsafe construction.

Here's a pic of one of mine:

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Here's the piece from Belton's book that got me to investigating for myself. There is no proof that: "injuries (including death!), litigation and a recall attempt took place".

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