About The Lightning

[Shotgun Franklin]

I was wondering just how popular they were out West pre-1900 and how reliable were they with black powder? I don't think I've seen but a couple at matches and none of'm were being used with BP.

[Pettifogger]

Speaking of the Medium frames only, they were made from 1884 through 1904.  In other words, 20 years.  They made 90,000 of them so they were relatively popular.  They were not shot thousands of rounds pumping as fast as you can like our cowboy guns, so yes the new ones were relatively reliable.  Problem is that as the guns wore, they can and did go out of time so it is not uncommon to find 120+ year old originals that don't work.  I have originals in all three of the original calibers (.32-20, .38-40 and .44-40) and they shoot fine.  The Winchester bottleneck cartridges were designed for black powder in repeating rifles.  The bores foul (as all BP does), but the actions stay fairly clean.  Certainly as clean as a Winchester 73.  They also made tens of thousands of small frame Lightning .22s and about 6,000 Large frame models that shot .45-70 and other large calibers.