I odn't think anyone is dead set on not believing. We all want to find out the real story and enough of us have been burned by a story attached to a rifle to be cynical, plus there is also a fairly good percentage of crusty older types here too. Personally I don't see either what someone would gain from creating these rifles at the time as they would have made no profit and it would probably have been a significant amount of work. I'd say that having Peter Laidlericon examine some of the workmanship up close on one of these would be a good idea to assess the standards the work was done too.