Jim also posted the fake rifle out of Senich's book, and takes books as gospel. But he ignores that Brophy came to the same conclusion I did.
This is from Brophy's book. The pic in his book, is from the WWI Winchester files.
I had a researcher copy the pic from Brophy's book at Cody. Here is the same rifle that Brophy identifies as Marine bases next to mine.
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Here is the top view of the WWI WRA Marine Mount pic next to mine. They are identical.
At the end of the day the Marine mount rifles that Winchester built for the Marines and Army in 1917/18 are IDENTICAL in everyway. There are no differences. There is no accurate way to tell if my rifle was a Marine or Army. But the fact that the Marine photo in France is also a pre 1910 rifle like mine ( mine is a 1909) is certainly interesting. Also a rifle about a 1000 digits off my serial is in the WRA WWI docs that looks like a test pattern rifle. Out of the 6 rifles I can identify with Marine mounts by WRA in WWI, 3 are pre 1910. There is some correlation to those pre 1910 rifles and the WRA Marine Mount Snipers.
But the thing about this all. There are only Four of these rifles known to exist. I have one, a very famous Sniper collector owns 2, and one in the Cody Museum. It's by far one of the rarest variations out there.
All four of the rifles can be put side by side and they are identical in everyway, and even have the same build traits. I noticed when I examined all the rifles torn apart and in detail. But I have never detailed any of those traits in public and never will. My hope is to find more, and the only way you will be able to identify them is by those traits.
No one knows yet how to fake one of these rifles and I thank God for that.
