Winchester M-59 12

[Freightman]

I was told that I was going bird hunting this year by my son, said I had been lazy long enough. OK I said I do not have a SG so went by a pawn shop and there was a un-conventional 12 gauge it was a Winchester M-59 never seen one so looked at the tag and it was $175 I'll give you $150 no said he, ended up with it for $160 good or bad I do not know. Went home and cleaned it up (boy did it need it) here are some pictures. Let me know what the experts think, not really a shotgun person. Like big bore rifles.

 

[zinj]

The Winchester 50 and 59 have a bit of a cult following. I'm sure someone who is more familiar with the design will pop in and give you more information. The 59 has an aluminum receiver (it is essentially a Light-Weight variant of the 50), and operates on a short recoil system based around a floating chamber. $160 seems like a very good price.

 

[Milkmaster]

I found this about the M59...

http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/shooting/article/0,19912,1149068-2,00.html

A Glass-Barreled Wonder
That something different was the M59 (yep, born in 1959). Actually, the mechanism and operation of the M59 was identical to that of the M50, with several interchangeable parts. But what was radically different about the M59 was that it had a glass barrel! Not glass like a beer mug, but some 500 miles of thin glass fibers wrapped around a steel tube. To what advantage? Win-chester claimed that the glass barrel was stronger than ordinary steel barrels, and proved it by plugging the bore with a 20-gauge shell and firing a 12-gauge load behind it. The glass barrel survived the test.

Winchester got a lot of good press for the M59, but not enough to counter the buying public’s negative response to the bulky look of the glass-wrapped barrel. Winchester also offered the M59 with a curious feature called a Versalite choke, which screwed into the muzzle and offered different options of shot patterns with a single barrel.

Critics maintained that “screw-in” chokes were unworkable gadgets that would never succeed. A few M59s were made in 20-gauge and even an experimental 14-gauge. (If you run across one of these, try to buy it.) But after about five years of scant success with the M59, Winchester threw in the towel and went back to its by now well-used drawing board. John Browning was probably giggling in his grave.

 

[JNewell]

There have been a couple of really good threads on that here. Search hint - search doesn't like 2-character terms, but if you use something like *59 or 59* with "winchester" you can probably get a pretty tight sort. My recollection is that it is very well thought of here.