My understanding at the time (around the time I graduated high school in 1983) was that the two companies worked in partnership with each other but had a falling out over creative differences. It resulted in a lawsuit where one of the businesses got the rights to the “Shiloh Sharps” name and the other got the rights to use the “C. Sharps” name.
Since I was fuzzy on the details after 40 ish years I looked over on the Shiloh rifle site and found this:
“My wife and I were insiders in the early days having worked for C. Sharps Arms and with Shiloh. C. Sharps and Shiloh Sharps have always been two separate companies. Originally Wolfgang Droege, owner of Drovel Tool Mfg. Co. began making Sharps replicas in Farmingdale, NY. Early guns are marked Shiloh Products then became the Shiloh Sharps.
When Wolfgang met John Schoffstall at a Shot Show they began to develop a relationship where Schoffstall, who owned a gun shop in Washington state, was selling Shiloh rifles among other products.
In 1979, I was one of two gunsmiths hired to work at Farmingdale by John Schoffstall under Wolfgang Droege to assist in any manner we could. Then us two were hired by Schoffstall to build custom ordered rifles based on Shiloh Sharps barreled actions and this was done under the name C. Sharps Arms but the guns were not marked C. Sharps in any manner. Around this time C. Sharps Arms, owned by Schoffstall, became the distributor west of the Mississippi while Shiloh Sharps owned by Droege was the east of the Mississippi distributor.
Early in 1981 the C. Sharps Arms Co. moved from Washington to Big Timber, MT and a few years later Shiloh Sharps moved to Big Timber and occupied a new building along with C. Sharps Arms still as separate companies. Also around this time is when Schoffstall got Wolfgang to start marking the barrels with C. Sharps, but the guns were always Shiloh Sharps made by Shiloh and C. Sharps Arms became the sole distributor and still the custom shop. The “Old Reliable" marking was trade marked by Schoffstall and was allowed to be stamped on the barrels.
By 1984 the two companies were having disagreements. We left C. Sharps Arms in late 1984. Lawsuits started shortly after and at the end of it Droege built his own building and moved into it and years later he sold the business to the Bryan's.”
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They both make really good black powder rifles, just with a few differences.
Shiloh Sharps prides itself on things like full parts compatibility with the original Christen Sharps owned Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company rifles, even though they had their share of flaws such as a firing pin that was prone to breakage.
C. Sharps has been a bit more interested in updating the design where needed internally, but at the same time has kept the stock proportions true to the old Christen Sharps design.
Shiloh Sharp also uses a lost wax investment cast process with 4140 steel for the receivers, where my understanding is that C. Sharps makes them from forged billets.
C. Sharps also uses Green Mountain and Badger barrels that are cut rifled, while Shiloh Sharps prefers to make its own button rifled barrels.
Before they split Shiloh Sharps rifles had a long free bore and as I recall that was the case until the Bryan family bought out Droge (1990 IIRC). At or not long after that point they started free boring the rifle based on the customers intended load and bullet.
It’s one of the reasons my .45-70 loads using a 480 gr Lyman 457658 bullet end up seated a bit shallow in the case. I suspect the chamber was originally free bored for the longer Lyman 457132 535 gr Postell bullet that most BPCR shooters were using back in the day.
I don’t mind the shallow seating though as it lets me pack in 82 grs (weight not volume) of FFg using a 36” drop tube with a card wad and 3/32” of compression. Seating it closer to the lands improved the accuracy (poor accuracy was the major complaint about the Lyman 480 gr and similar Saeco 645 “Schmittzer” bullets. Needing more powder to fill the space in the case just added a bit more velocity. If I were ordering a rifle today, I’d send them one, or the measurements from one for chambering purposes. (I’d probably also order a .45-90 instead).
Shiloh Sharps made serious money following the Quigley Down Under movie and I think their waiting period is still over a year. In the late 1990s it was a 4-5 year wait and new rifles in hand were selling for 2-3 times their actual price.
