Winchester Model 72

About the Winchester Model 72

The Winchester Model 72 is a tubular magazine-fed, bolt-action rimfire rifle chambered in .22 Short, .22 Long, and .22 Long Rifle, produced by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company from 1938 to 1959. A close derivative of the earlier box-magazine Model 69, it was Winchester's first bolt-action design built around a tube magazine running beneath the barrel, holding up to 20 rounds of .22 Short, 16 of .22 Long, or 15 of .22 Long Rifle. The action cocks on opening and is fed one round at a time from the tube by a cartridge lifter, making the rifle popular for informal plinking, small-game hunting, and marksmanship training. Fitted with a 25-inch round blued barrel, a one-piece walnut stock, an adjustable aperture rear sight, and a bead front sight, the Model 72 was an economical, well-made sporting rifle aimed at the youth and utility market. A revised version, the Model 72A, introduced a backswept bolt handle and minor internal refinements. Roughly 161,000 examples of the Model 72 and 72A were built over the rifle's twenty-one-year production run.

Introduced in 1938 as a companion to the box-fed Model 69, the Model 72 gave a generation of American shooters an affordable, accurate first bolt-action .22, and its long tube magazine and cock-on-opening action made it a fixture on farms, at summer camps, and on backyard ranges well into the 1950s.

Winchester Model 72 specifications

Advertised tube capacity: 20 x .22 Short, 16 x .22 Long, 15 x .22 Long Rifle. Factory finish: blued; walnut stock.