Tag: Water moccasins in New Jersey

The Rimfire Series: Winchester Model 62

By Joe Berk

The gun that has been in my family the longest is a Model 62 Winchester chambered in .22 Short, Long, and Long Rifle.  I remember it being in the gun cabinet when I was a little boy and being told never to play with it (you can guess how well I listened to that advice).

I could go into a bunch of technical details about the Model 62, and I’ll provide a little bit of that below, but that’s not my intent with this article.  I decided to instead focus on the rifle, how it shoots and handles, a little bit of its history, and what it means to me.

The starboard side of my Winchester Model 62 rifle. It’s a sleek and lightweight .pump-action 22.
A port side view of the Model 62 on the range at the West End Gun Club.

When Dad had the rifle up until the time I went into the Army (and that would be in 1973), the rifle’s metalwork was flawless.  Then I disappeared from the scene for about 10 years (the Army, work, and other things).  I guess during that time my father stopped paying attention to the rifle.  Dad passed in 1982, and when I came home for the funeral, the metal parts had taken on the patina you see here.  New Jersey is a unforgiving and humid place; if you don’t keep your toys oiled, they corrode quickly.  But the Model 62 still looks good and it shoots well.

Shooting in RAW (the camera, that is), a macro lens, and even lighting bring out the inherent beauty of this fine old rifle.

I like the Model 62 Winchester’s straight grip stock.  It felt right to me when I was a kid and it influenced my future preferences in firearms.  I have more than a few rifles with that same straight grip stock now…a Winchester 1886 .45 70 clone made by Chiappa in Italy, several Ruger No. 3 rifles, and a few Marlin lever guns.

The Model 62 is what we call a “takedown” rifle.  A single thumb screw secures the stock and trigger group to the rest of the gun.  It’s a cool approach.

The Model 62 taken down. The stock and the trigger group detach from the barreled action with a single thumbscrew on the left side of the receiver.
I rotated the photo 90 degrees clockwise to provide a better look at the rifle after take down.
A macro view of the aft portion of the Model 62 after it has been taken down. The large thumbscrew in the center of this photo allows disassembly.
The Model 62’s barreled action after take down.

The sights on the Model 62 are old school.  They’re Lyman front and rear.  Nothing fancy, but they work well.  A simple gold bead up front, and a drift adjustable rear with a stepped ramp for adjusting elevation.  But I’ve never had to adjust them.   Either they came zeroed from the factory, or the guy who owned the rifle before Dad adjusted the sights, or Dad adjusted them.

Winchester used Lyman sights front and rear back in the 1930s. This front sight has a brass bead. It tarnished enough so that it looks black when I align the sights, and that works for me. Bright brass beads reflect light and pull the shots to one side.
The Model 62 rear sight. Simple, elegant, and traditional.

I think my Nikon 810 and the Sigma 50mm 2.8 macro lens do a good job in bringing out the rifle’s vintage beauty.  You can see it in the next few photos.

The Model 62’s bolt lifts up and slides to the rear when the pump is actuated. The spent brass ejects upward.
Another shot of the retracted bolt, showing the mechanism that ejects the spent brass case.
Rollmarks on the right side of the barrel: “Made in U.S.A. Winchester Repeating Arms Co. New Haven, Conn. Patents Pending.” Cool stuff.
The receiver from the left side. Patina, they call it. I could have it reblued, but then it wouldn’t be original, and like they say, it’s only original once.
The pump action forearm with its distinctive pre-war oval shape. Post-war forearms were straight. This one is much classier.

When I was a kid and my parents weren’t home, I sometimes snuck out of the house with the Model 62 and a box of .22 ammo.  We had a couple of acres in New Jersey that ran into the woods with a stream behind the house (the stream fed Farrington Lake, which emptied into Raritan Bay on the Atlantic Ocean).   You might think having a couple of acres in central Jersey with property bordered by a stream was a sign of wealth, but it wasn’t.  It’s what people did in the 1950s: You bought a couple of acres and built a house, and that’s what my Dad did.  He didn’t pay somebody else to build a house; he actually built our house.  Today you’d have to be rich to own those two acres.  Back then it was the path you took if you didn’t have money.

Those were good days and good times.   One time a kid from my junior high came home with me (Bob Dixon, if you’re reading this, drop us a line).  Mom and Dad weren’t home yet, so Bob and I grabbed the Model 62 and headed into the woods.  There was an old cellar door laying in the mud next to the stream and Bob thought it would be a good idea to flip it over.  “You know, there might be a snake or something under there…”

A New Jersey water snake. This one was about five feet long. We used to think these were water moccasins.

We did, and what we saw shocked the hell out of both of us: A monstrous, scaly, and scary reptile.  Being kids, we were convinced it was a water moccasin.  Today, I realize it was probably a water snake.  But it was huge and we did the only thing any kid would have done in similar circumstances, and that was to put the Model 62 to good use.  Call me Bwana.  (On a recent trip back to New Jersey’s Farrington Lake, I saw another one of those frighteningly large snakes and I wrote about it here.)

Loading the Model 62 is pretty straightforward.  The rifle has a tubular magazine that holds a ton of ammo.  As you see from the rollmarks above, it will shoot .22 Long Rifle, .22 Long, and .22 Short.  I don’t know how many rounds of each it will hold, but it is a lot.  I only load five rounds at a time, so it’s kind of a moot point to me.  Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I saw .22 Long or .22 Short ammo anywhere.  It’s all .22 Long Rifle these days.

The tubular magazine below the barrel. The arrow points to the knurled knob that opens the magazine.
A macro shot of the tubular magazine’s knurled knob and its bayonet lock. Twist the knob and the plunger can be pulled forward for loading.
When the magazine’s inner plunger is pulled forward, the loading port can receive ammo.
A Federal .22 Long Rifle being loaded into the Model 62.

So how accurate is this nearly 80-year-old pump action .22?  I’m glad you asked.  I had not shot it in three or four years, so I grabbed three different kinds of .22 ammunition I had in my ammo locker:  Older Federal copper washed high velocity ammo, CCI standard velocity ammo good buddy Greg gave me a few years ago, and Aguila standard velocity target ammo I bought from a local sporting goods chain when it was on sale.

I’m just about to the end of this box of .22 Long Rifle Federal ammo. Look at the price!
The accuracy load: CCI standard velocity .22 Long Rifle ammo. This is good stuff.
Aguila .22 Long Rifle target loads. Previous testing at 50 yards showed this worked best in my Ruger 10/22 (a Rimfire Series blog on that rifle will follow in the near future).

My U-boat Subie and I braved the Meyers Canyon water crossing to get to the West End Gun Club, I went to the .22 range and set up a table, and I tested the Model 62’s accuracy at 50 feet from a bench rest.  I fired three 5-shot groups at an old 50-foot rimfire target I found in my stash.   Here’s how it went:

Test results at 50 feet. The top right target was the first target of the day, and it was predicably the largest group (the bore was unfouled, and I was not yet in form). The Model 62 did best with CCI standard velocity ammo. This is not too shabby with open sights on an 85-year-old rifle.

A bit more info on the Model 62 Winchester:  This Model 62 carries the serial number 94XXX, which puts its date of manufacture at 1939.  My father bought the rifle when he was a kid; he would have been 13 years old in 1939.  Winchester manufactured 409,000 Model 62 rifles from 1932 to 1958, with a two-year break during World War II.   In 1939, production switched over to the Model 62A.  The Model 62A incorporated engineering changes to reduce production cost (mine is the original Model 62, not the 62A).  When Winchester introduced the Model 62 in 1932, the rifle’s suggested retail price was $17.85.  Presumably, the price had climbed a bit by 1939.  Family lore has it that Dad paid $8 for the rifle.  Sales of recently completed auctions on Gunbroker.com show the price for a Model 62 today ranges from $300 to $3000.   That’s quite a spread, but to me it’s irrelevant.  This rifle is not for sale at any price; one day it will go to one of my grandsons.

Model 62 Winchesters show up for sale on Gunbroker.com pretty much all the time, so if you want one they are available.  More good news is that the Model 62 is legal here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia.

The Rossi Model 62.

More good news is that Rossi, a Brazilian firearms manufacturer, offered their Model 62 (a fairly faithful reproduction of the Winchester Model 62) from 1970 to 1998 and the Rossi rifles can still be found.   Rossi discontinued the Model 62 when they were acquired by Taurus, but the Rossi rifles still show up on the auction site gunboards. Sometimes you see one in a pawnshop or a gunstore’s used gun rack. I’ve never handled or fired the Rossi so I can’t say anything about them, but if I came across one at a reasonable price I would jump on it.  You might consider doing the same.

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Check out our other Tales of the Gun Rimfire Series articles here.

Snakes Alive!

When I was a kid growing up in rural New Jersey, we convinced ourselves that the local lakes and streams were inhabited by water moccasins.  All the books said cottonmouths didn’t live that far north, but we had seen them (or so we thought).  I even caught one in a pond on a fishing lure…I saw it sitting on a rock, I dangled the lure in front of it, and the snake went for it.  That scared the hell out of me:  I was the classic case of the dog that finally caught the bus he always chased.  What do I do now?  I ended up cutting the line to let the snake (and my lure) get away.  It was, after all, a water moccasin (or so I thought).

And then, of course, many years later there was that rather unsettling scene in my favorite movie, Lonesome Dove:

Last week Sue and I were back in Sopranoland for a wedding, and the next day we rode around so I could show her my old haunts.  One was the Old Mill in Deans (not to be confused with the Old Mill Hotel in Baja).  It was behind where my grandma lived and it was basically a dam that created a huge lake where we used to play back in the day.  So we’re walking around and I snapped a photo or two when this woman said “there’s a snake down there!”

A panorama of the lake at the Old Mill…five photos stitched together in PhotoShop.

I checked and what do you know, she was right.  The snake was on a log downstream of the dam where a bridge carried traffic over the spillway.  The snake was almost directly beneath the bridge.  As usual, I didn’t have the perfect lens on my Nikon (that would have been the 70-300 Nikkor), but what I had on the camera (Old Faithful, my 24-120 Nikon lens) worked a lot better than a cell phone.  I zoomed all the way and grabbed some awesome photos.  Then I looked around and I saw another snake on the same log.  And then another slithering through the water.  And then two more that might have been making even more snakes.  Snakes alive, I was in the middle of a moccasin orgy!

This spot is at least a couple of hundred years ago. There used to be a mill located here, powered by the water held behind this dam. We played here as kids. It was a good time and a good place to grow up.
And another!. The lower snake is the same one you see in the big photo above. Then I spotted the one you see at the top of this photo!
This guy was next to the log, slithering around in the water.
I saw these two looking straight down from my vantage point on the bridge above the stream. I leaned waaaay over the bridge railing to get this shot. Water moccasins making whoopee?

I was so intrigued by the above photos that I Googled “water moccasin” to get photos of the real McCoy.  After spending decades believing there were indeed moccasins in New Jersey, I convinced myself that what I was seeing in my photos were common New Jersey water snakes.  Moccasins have a more triangular head and a slightly different pattern.  Still, these snakes are pretty big (the big one on the log in the photo above was about 5 feet long) and I would not want to tangle with any of them.  You never know…I might be wrong and maybe they are moccasins.

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