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THE UNLIKELIEST SLEEPER of them all BY DAN SHIDELER

Back around 1971, when I was just getting interested in guns and shooting, my older cousin Steve Shideler sent me a full-page ad he had clipped from the pages of Guns &Ammos magazine. In the margin of the ad he had penned a brief editorial comment: “HA HA HA!”

The ad showed two guns, the ugliest things I had ever seen. They looked like some sort of over-and-under rimfire Rifle, but there wasn’t a splinter of wood anywhere on them. Their stocks were made of wire. They apparently had two triggers. And they were headlined “Bronco. No nonsense, hard-working guns without the frills. ”

Ah, yes, the Garcia Bronco! At the time, I dismissed the Bronco as just another one of those nutty phenomena that appeared with distressing regularity in those days, like Tiny Tim or George McGovern. Time heals all wounds, however, and today the ugly-duckling Bronco is a prime collectible. Don’t believe me? Just try to find one!

The weird little gun best known as the Garcia Bronco appeared in a number of incarnations in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s. To begin with, the name “Bronco” wasn’t even unique to the skeleton-stock rifle. Garcia - a major sporting goods distributor - used the name “Bronco” pretty willynilly. In fact, if you wanted to spend a day in the Great Outdoors, you could outfit your Garcia Bronco spinning rod with a Garcia Bronco open-face reel. For good measure you could carry your Garcia Bronco recurve bow and strap on your Garcia Bronco quiver. And if squirrel season was in, you’d better take along your Garcia Bronco rifle.

The gun later known as the Bronco was first made in 1967 in Accokeek, Maryland, by Firearms International Corporation and wasn’t labeled “Bronco” at all. It came in only one flavor: a 3-1/2 lb., 16-1/2-inch-barreled, solid-frame single-shot .22 rifle. When Garcia bought Firearms International in 1970, they added three more flavors: a single-shot .22 Magnum rifle with pretty much the same dimensions as the .22 LR version; a 4 lb. single-shot .410 shotgun with a somewhat heavier receiver and a 20-inch barrel; and a .22/.410 over-under combo gun with a 20-inch barrel. As Garcia maintained, the Broncos were indeed guns “without the frills.” No truer words were ever spoken.

My first impressions of the Garcia Bronco were erroneous. The gun did not in fact have two triggers: what I had mistaken for a front trigger was in fact a cocking piece. On the single-shot version, what appeared to be the upper barrel was in fact a pivot rod that allowed the barrel to swing sideways for loading. And the stock wasn’t wire at all but a zinc-alloy casting with a rod-stock insert.

If the truth be told, the Bronco was nothing more than an updated version of the old Hamilton Model 7 made from 1889 to 1901 by the Hamilton Rifle Company of Plymouth, Michigan. In the Hamilton Model 7, the barrel pivoted to the right away from a standing breech. You stuck a shell in the exposed chamber, swung the barrel to the left to close the action, cocked the striker, and touched ‘er off. It was a simple, low-cost, virtually foolproof system. In fact, the system was so elemental and easy to manufacture that it later appeared in

Hamilton’s later Model 11 and in the Savage Model 101 single-shot revolver-that-wasn’t-a-revolver. The Hamilton Model 7 was a rather attractive little gun, what with its brilliant nickel plating. The appearance of the Bronco, however, fell somewhat short of brilliant. On the Firearms International models, the pot-metal frame and stock were painted with olive drab or bronze enamel (often incorrectly described as an anodized or powder-coated finish), while the post-1970 Garcia versions were finished in black crinkle paint. The Bronco differed in other details from the Hamilton, too. When the front “trigger” was squeezed back, it simultaneously cocked the coil spring-operated striker and retracted a locating pin that locked the swiveling barrel to the breech. You then swung the barrel to the left, exposing the chamber. A short plunger-style extractor on the right side of the barrel assembly popped out the empty. The safety was a plain, square trigger-locking pushbolt mounted just above the rear of the trigger guard.

The Bronco’s rear sight was minimal or, as Garcia might put it, “without frills”: a crescent-shaped stamping secured to a barrel lug with a common screw. The Bronco’s sights were thus adjustable for both windage and elevation, often unintentionally, at the same time. The front sight was a stubby, fl at-topped post, protected by two ears like the front sight of an M1 carbine. On the combo version, the rear sight was a more substantial affair that also served as a barrel selector. Pulling the sight up selected the upper rifle barrel. Pushing it down selected the lower shotgun barrel.

A 1969 Firearms International Bronco, pictured with an old piece of rebar. Rebar is at the top.

The operative phrase here is “without the frills.”

For the first few years of its existence, the Bronco was a fixed-barrel rifle. After a few years, however, it morphed into a takedown version. To take down a Bronco, you swung a flimsy, stamped lever located on the right side of the receiver backward. This in turn rotated an integral cam inside the receiver, disengaging it from an oblique cut in the pivoting barrel extension. The whole barrel assembly then pulled off toward the front. That’s the easy part. Reassembling the Bronco is a different matter entirely. In fact, I monkeyed with mine for perhaps 10 minutes, during which the barrel extension stubbornly refused to reseat itself in the receiver. After filling the atmosphere with a thick purple haze of profanity, I realized that the oblique cut had to be facing downward and the lever cam had to be in its full rearward position for the barrel extension to fully enter its recess. Swinging the lever forward relocked the whole works.

If you’re trying to disassemble a Bronco, you’ll quickly notice that there aren’t many screws in sight. The gun is held together mostly by pins, all of which have to be laboriously driven out by hand. This may account for the fact that relatively few Broncos have survived: it was easier to throw them away when they broke rather than fool around with them. Detailed serial number records for the Bronco haven’t survived, but the guns can be approximately dated nevetheless. Firearms International models don’t bear the Bronco name, and until 1969 they didn’t have serial numbers, either. Serial-numbered, unnamed Firearms International models were made in 1969 and 1970. When Garcia bought Firearms International in 1970, they named the rifle the Bronco which, as we have seen, was a proprietary Garcia pet name. The combo gun was made in limited quantities in 1975 only, and the Bronco was dropped altogether that same year despite a failed attempt to remarket it as the “Bauer Rabbit.”

Pete Dickey of the American Rifleman’s technical staff maintains that the Bronco ultimately failed because of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the transfer paperwork it mandated. Before GCA 1968, you could walk into a hardware store with cash in hand and walk out with a Bronco. After GCA 1968, you had to fill out forms to own a Bronco, and that hardly seemed worth the effort for a gun that retailed for under $20 for most of its life.

In my admittedly limited experience, the Bronco’s chief fault, aside from its hideous sights, is that its pivoting barrel extension and locating pin inevitably gather their fair share of slop, resulting in a loose barrel-to-receiver fit. This doesn’t help accuracy any, but my Bronco will still put fi ve shots into three inches at 40 yards despite the fact that its bore looks like the colon of a goat that’s been eating steel wool.

My friend Richard Clauss has what may well be the Rolls-Royce of customized Broncos. Richard filled the skeletonized buttstock of his .410 Bronco with hinged walnut inserts that conceal, as so many of Richard’s buttstocks do, a reservoir of shells. The pistol grip is decked out with checkered walnut panels. Richard also installed a beautiful walnut forend that conceals an integral laser sight. It would be a horrible offense against aesthetic principles to call any Bronco beautiful, but there’s no doubt that Richard’s is an attractive little shotgun. The idea of adding wood to the Bronco also occurred to the Rau Arms Corporation of El Dorado, Kansas, who refined the Bronco concept to what is certainly its highest evolutionary factory form: the Wildcat Model 500. (The Wildcat will be the subject of the next of these mercifully brief columns.)

So far I haven’t noticed anyone offering to trade their Model 70 collection for a Garcia Bronco. I suspect that to most serious gun fanciers, a Bronco isn’t worth the calories it would burn to throw one in the river. But there’s apparently a handful of die-hard enthusiasts out there who are willing to pay $200 to $300 for a Bronco in pristine condition. The combo gun is a real collector’s prize and may command a 25 to 50 percent premium.

The Bronco’s receiver, cocking handle and barrel assembly. Ain’t it purty?

As Garcia put it, the Bronco was “a work gun. A survival gun. A camp gun. It’s for the man who cares more about how his gun works than how it looks.” Admittedly, the Bronco looked horrible in its day. But to modern collectors, they look pretty good!