Richard

The fascinatng thing about this is that the factory did not name their
changes and variations; that was done by the collectors, decades
later.

With one caveat, the only thing the factory named was the models.
Ie, the model of 1899; the model of 1902, and the model of 1905.
The collectors made up all the rest of it.

Now, the caveat is that while all of what I just said can be verified in
the public documents, ie, the marketing and sales literature,
internally, in the companies engineering department, there are a lot
of documents that relate to how the guns are made, and how they
are changed, from time to time. It is the case that Walter Roper
was keeping track of engineering changes, presumably so that the
service department could find appropriate parts when a gun was
returned for service. And it was apparently Roper who introduced the
notion of 1st change and 2nd change, etc, although I don't know
exactly what he called them.

So - there is an issue about the marketing department vs the
engineering department, when it comes to the nomenclature for
a particular gun.

Having said all of that, it is the case that it was the marketing and
sales literature that was distributed to, and used by, anyone buying
these revolvers. Ie, they did not have access to the engineering
change documents; only to the catalogs and flyers.

This is why I argue that the proper naming for the guns should be
based on what was available, from the catalogs and flyers, at the
time. Ie, we should not be retrospective, and create names for
guns several decades after the fact.

Regards, Mike Priwer