Jim, if I am keeping the varieties straight, the .38 RP that Lee Jarrett posted on his Transitional RP thread a couple of weeks ago was a coil-mainspring gun with a rebated frame. He didn't post a picture of the exposed frame, but said in the narrative that it had one. The serial number on that one was 68415.

Can you mention serial numbers of the postwar rebated unimproved I-frames that you mentioned? I was trying to ID the earliest postwar .38 RPs earlier today, and with the exception of some .38/32 Terriers, the 1951 guns in the 58xxx range are the earliest postwar units I can find. The last prewar .38 RP is said to be 54474. I doubt the company punched out nearly 4000 postwar Terriers before resuming production of the longer barrel guns, but who knows?

Info on these guns may be sparse because there is no major collector's market for .38 RPs on either side of WWII. If people hungered after these guns the way they do Registered Magnums, I bet we'd know a lot more about the dates of their production runs.

I'm beginning to develop a small fondness for the .38 S&W round. It is obviously a little less powerful than the .38 Special, but it is far from being anemic.

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David Wilson