Info on working the Lefever Nitro Special double shotgun.

by Mark R. Hollensen

I recently took in a Lefever Nitro Special double shotgun for some much needed attention. Although these shotguns can sometimes take on a life of their own when working on them, I knew the customer well and reluctantly decided to have a go at it. The complaints about this gun were that the left firing pin was broken, the barrels were loose fitting, and that my customer wanted me to go through it to determine if it was worth saving. This gun had been in his family the past 80 years or so I was told. The gun itself? It celebrated its 96th birthday as of this writing!

Doing some research on this specific model didn’t turn up very much at all. I found no schematic that shows and lists every part for this shotgun. I did, however, find partial parts listings for the gun with drawings of the parts listed and some names associated with those parts. In the end, I found all of the naming conventions for each part on the Numrich Gun Parts website and used those to identify each part for this article. There are a few write-ups I ran across about the Lefever guns, some accurate and some not so accurate. It seems if there is a lack of factual information about a company or a specific line of firearms, it opens the door to assumptions and sometimes unsupported facts. So, I was reluctant to insert that information here. However, I did see one book about the Lefever for sale on Amazon.com; listed for $5,000, if anyone is interested.

That being said, it seems clear that Daniel Myron Lefever was born in…

Read more in the December 2019 issue.

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