Vintage 1906 Quackenbush Rifle vs. Modern Rossi Compact RB22 Rifle

AmmoLand ^ | January 24, 2024 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

The Quackenbush .22 rifle was popular a hundred and 20 years ago. Advertisements for the rifles are easily found. They were mostly sold mail order.

The prices for the rifles seem modest. A rifle with a wood stock and an 18-inch barrel cost about six dollars. The price of gold was fixed at $20 a Troy ounce. A day laborer might be paid $1 (and fed) for a 12-hour workday. It was the beginning of the petroleum age. While people were far more productive than they had been a hundred years earlier, the industrial age with power machinery, cheap steel, cheap transport, and cheap food was just getting into full swing.

The Quackenbush was a good single-shot rifle, by all accounts. It was developed before smokeless powder and non-corrosive priming became the norm. Today, the norm is the semi-automatic rifle. Manually operated repeaters are still popular. They have an advantage as training arms and with silencers/suppressors, as the sound of the action is more easily controlled.

The Rossi RB22 Compact is a modern equivalent of the Quackenbush.

The Rossi RB22 is very light, very compact, and inexpensive. The Quackenbush commonly had an 18″ barrel, The RB22 Compact has a 16.5″ barrel. The Quackenbush weighed 4 1/2 pounds. The RB22 Compact weighs 3 lbs, 5 ounces. The cost of Quackenbush model, most comparable to the RB22 Compact, was $6.00 in 1906.

There are several ways to compare prices from 1906 to today. Measuringworth is an excellent website that explains how prices can be compared and supplies calculators to do comparisons in several ways.  Six dollars in 1906 would be worth between $767 and $367 in 2023.

The $165 for the RB22 Compact would be about $1-$2 in 1906.

[Woodman]

I like my Sears Ranger single shot (Marlin model 100) takedown, vintage early 30’s. Probably not much more expensive at the time and much nicer build.