Sharps,
Carl and Harry were well known on the gunshow circuit of the Northwest and some of the people that I know up here over the age of 70 know who they were. Because there is no documentation of Harry's work it will slip into obscurity when our generation is gone.
With the exception of the Borchardts the only guns I remember the Lufts had in the gun racks at the 1976 visit were continental, mostly German.
I bought a nice drilling in Anchorage in 1979 and the scope was in parts in a bag. I had imagined it was junk as it was missing the ocular lens group and some other parts. I sent it to Carl and he rebuilt it. I don't know where he got the lens and Harry cut a new brass objective lens retaining ring for it. The gun had a tang flip up peep and these peep apertures typically had double dovetails. The smaller dovetail was missing and Harry also made a new one returning it to service.
I took this elk on Raspberry Island in 1979 with the drilling using the peep sight. Don't remember why I wasn't using the scope. The RWS 193 grain 9.3x72R bullet came completely apart but did function well enough to kill the elk. This is a 2 1/2 year old animal and yielded nearly 450 pounds of meat. These are the largest bodied elk in North America and year-for-year agewise are moose size. Ben Balinger was a Fish and Game technician working out of Kodiak and he said they weighed a number of carcasses for a research project. Hunters would be supplied with radios and when they took an animal they would call in. A helicopter would be dispatched to the kill site and a sling suspended from a scales would be used to weigh the total carcass weight. For large animals they often had to dress it first and weigh the parts because the live weight exceeded the 1,000 pound limit of the scales.
Dennis
