POTD: The Winchester Model 88 – A Bolt Action with a Lever

Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have the most unusual lever gun Winchester ever built, and one a lot of folks have never handled. This is the Winchester Model 88, introduced in 1955, the first all-new lever-action Winchester had designed in roughly 60 years, and it threw out almost everything that made a lever gun a lever gun.

Gone was the exposed hammer, the tube magazine, the two-piece stock. In their place: a three-lug rotating bolt that locked up front right behind the chamber like a bolt action, a one-piece stock, side ejection so you could mount a scope over the bore, and a short 60-degree lever throw. Winchester’s own ad copy called it “the bolt action rifle with a lever,” and that was honest.

The point of all this was the detachable box magazine. Tube-fed levers can’t safely run pointed bullets; under recoil a spitzer tip can set off the round ahead of it. The box mag freed the 88 to shoot modern high-pressure rounds with pointed bullets: .243, .284, .308, and .358 Winchester. Accurate as a bolt gun, fast as a lever.

It actually sold well, third best-selling Winchester lever ever, but the Model 70 bolt gun in the same calibers ate its lunch, and it was dropped in 1973. This particular one’s an oddball even among 88s: assembled around 1993 from leftover 1973 parts, one of the very last handful ever put together.

Most of our POTDs utilize images from our friends at Rock Island Auction Company, the premier firearms auction in the United States. Take some time to browse their current auctions – who knows, maybe you’ll find a piece of history to take home!

“Winchester Model 88 Lever Action Rifle.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/5032/1024/winchester-model-88-lever-action-rifle. Accessed 25 June 2026.

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