Just picked up my first Savage 99A in .308. Really wanted a .358 but this is neat.

Serial # is 9605XX
Cant tell what the lever stamp is. Maybe an 11A or something.

Any help is appreciated on aging this firearm. The previous owner told me 1953 but I'm unsure

You should like that 308. It'll do anything that .358 will do and more. Mine would be one of the very last rifles I'd ever get rid of.

This is what you want. It is, for now, the standard reference on Savage lever rifles.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Nine...istory/dp/B000UTHTQY

Doug is also a very nice guy !

quote:

Originally posted by z1r:
You should like that 308. It'll do anything that .358 will do and more. Mine would be one of the very last rifles I'd ever get rid of.

Thanks, I really like how this rifle has the lever safety and the round counter on the side. It feels like a well made rifle!

It was previously drilled and tapped for a scope...and I have an older wide angle Redfield that I'm going to put on it thursday.

Since savage didn't use up receivers in strict rotation serial number-wise, the most accurate way to date a 99 of that vintage is by the lever boss code. It is stamped on the forward surface of the protuberance in which the lever pivots (lever boss). Said code will be a number and a letter enclosed in a circle or an oval. The letter therein corresponds to the year it was made. A=1949, B=1950, C=1951, etc. up through the alphabet. (O and Q were skipped for obvious reasons.) The codes are often hard to read, usually requiring a magnifying glass to do so.

gnoahhh -- Are the #'s on the lever boss large, while the letter is small? If so I think the Lever Boss # was 11A. But due to the age it could be an N or V (Extremely hard to read)

I'll look at it again when I get home. Thanks!

Numbers about the same size as the letters. Given your serial #, it should be I, J, or K, as #960,000 was late 50's right before they they hit 1 million in 1960. Savage also purportedly used up some old receivers after the 1 million mark, so who really knows? (The 1M milestone also represented a shift in Savage quality, much like the well known shift in Winchester quality in 1964. Stamped instead of machined parts, safety moved up onto the tang, cheaper wood with impressed checkering, etc. That's not to say the post-mil guns are inferior to the pre-mil guns in terms of serviceability, just different.)

Thats a high number 99A, They were made about 1950 to about 196?, I bought my last one of those new in a store about 1970..Nice gun walnut stock, underlever safety, carbine barrel, 20 inches as I recall? no checkering and a straight grip. They came in 308, 250-3000, 358 Win and probably some others...

Nice guns, and probably the last of the really good Savage 99s..

I suspect your sellers date of 1953 is correct.