Pick any year of manufacture from the end of WWII to yesterday, and you will have a chance to get an absolute dog of a gun, or an absolute champion. While I prefer the looks, finish and overall feel of '40s and '50s revolvers, I have to acknowledge that my 460XVR has the sweetest trigger pull I have ever felt on any Smith, and my new-production 649 (yes, with lock) has the tightest lockup of any revolver in my collection. Nobody will ever convince me that these are substandard units because "modern production isn't as good as midcentury production."

Maybe it would help to think about the company's annual production by fitting data points on a two-dimensional field with fit and finish running in one direction and functional quality (smoothness of action, accuracy, and so on) in the other. If you graph every gun made by the company in a particular year, you will get a cloud of points with a very dark center and a fuzzy outlying fringe. Do that for every year (assuming consistency of evaluation criteria), and then overlay the datapoint clouds. Mostly you won't be able to tell one from another. MAYBE if you could identify the company's best year and its worst year, you would find that -- making up numbers as an example -- about 55 percent of the best year's guns are better than just 50 percent of the worst year's guns. But remember that means the top 50 percent of the worst year's guns will still be better than 45 percent of the best year's guns. Not much of a difference, in my eyes.

This is a discussion that will never come to a resolution. People have preferences and biases, and they will praise the guns that are most consistent with their preconceptions.

I like them all but prefer the classics because, as Thomas Pynchon noted in an early novel, many of us suffer from a vast chronological homesickness for the decade of our birth and early childhood. If I should happen to end up with a revolver of any age that doesn't feel right to me, I'll sell it. If it stays in my collection, that's because I like it regardless of its age and the company's process control and design standards in the year of its manufacture.

David Wilson

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David Wilson