@Cutfinger
Thank you for your comments. As stated, those production figures are pure speculation, just rough estimates based on whatever information I could glean from the sources I could find.
There was an article in The Deseret News for February 17, 1979, by Arnold Irvine, which appeared to include quotes from an interview with Lee A. Farber, president and general manager of Arms Technology, Inc. (ATI). At that time, ATI had forty employees. Some of the production was "farmed out" to unidentified subcontractors "around the country," but final machining and assembly of the Jonathan Browning Mountain Rifles was done by ATI in Salt Lake City. At that time (1979), the article said this rifle had been in production for two years, and the Salt Lake City plant was producing 60 blackpowder rifles per week. They were hoping to ramp up production to 80 rifles per week. It is my understanding, primarily based on this article by Larry Potterfield, The $500,000 Rifle, that production ceased some time in 1983.
We're just playing with numbers here. Allowing for vacations, equipment failures, and so forth, we might figure fifty weeks of production per year. Maybe the production figures quoted in the article were a bit optimistic, so we can round down to fifty rifles per week, times fifty weeks in a year, would be 2,500 rifles per year, conservatively. Assuming they only produced half that many the first and last years of production (1977 and 1983, respectively) would give us the equivalent of six years. Six times 2,500 would equal 15,000.
I would like to repeat that these are estimates made by fooling around with the numbers found by myself and a very knowledgeable collector friend. Toby Bridges featured the JBMR in a short piece he wrote, entitled "Collecting Modern Day Muzzleloaders." In that article, he wrote, "I'm not sure how many of the rifles were built, an educated guess would be around 10,000." He did not provide any supporting evidence, but he is a professional "gun writer" and must have arrived at that number some way. However, he also perpetuated the rumor that the barrels were made by Green River Rifle Works, and I have found nothing to corroborate that.
I don't have any of the Blue Books on hand. I did find a Blue Book excerpt with a listing for the JBMR, but it did not show any production figures, except to say that 1,000 of the JBMR Commemorative rifles were made in 1978.
As stated previously, I've never owned a JBMR, and in fact have never shot one. Over the years, I've passed up opportunities to buy one. I was just a bit put off by some of the rifle's features, including the ram's horn on the snail. However, I've recently taken more of an interest in rifles of that era. I would respectfully disagree with the statement that the muzzleloading business was "just getting rolling" in 1978. John Baird's Hawken articles were published in Muzzle Blasts in the mid-sixties, and compiled into a book, Hawken Rifles, the Mountain Man's Choice, in 1968, I believe. This was followed by the introduction of the Thompson/Center "Hawken" in 1970, and then the 1972 movie, Jeremiah Johnson. There was an active buckskinning community in the sixties, but those three phenomena, Baird's book, the T/C Hawken, and the movie, set off a mountain man and Hawken craze. I have on my lap right now the June, 1973 issue of Muzzle Blasts, and can tell you it is packed with ads for businesses such as "House of Hawken," Green River Forge, Trail Guns Armory, Cherry Corners, Track of the Wolf, Green River Rifle Works, and Tingle Manufacturing Co., all of which sold either "plains rifles" or the parts or kits to build them. There is a custom built Hawken on the cover of the magazine. If anything, Browning was a bit behind the curve in starting production of their Hawken-esque Mountain Rifle. For more on that era, check out "The Heyday of the Hawken" on the GRRW Collector's website.
Anyway, it sounds as if @Pb Mark may keep his rifle and shoot it! That's great! That's what it's for.
Best regards,
Notchy Bob
