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Originally Posted by 2008corvette
I wrote the NRA a letter asking for historical info but of course they dont speculate on value.
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Well, you would do better with a S&W Factory Authentication letter than one from the NRA.
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They did say it is a "collectible" and interesting because it has a "VS" prefix. They say the V was added when a new safety block was added in Dec 1944.
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I'm afraid they got this backwards. The V was added at V1 in April 1942, when the original Model of 1899 serial series hit one million. The S was added in December, 1944, when the improved sliding hammer block safety device was incorporated into production.
What is interesting in what you wrote is the
order of the two letters. SV is normal. There are reports of one or more VS marked guns, but no one I know can confirm an actual sighting of one. If they are out there, they are an anomaly. Please let us know - and post a picture - if yours is actually stamped VS and not SV.
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The serial # is: s/n V 769,000 Production ended in Sept 1945 with s/n S811,120.
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This is not quite right. The V prefix serial series started at V1 in 1942, as noted above. SV is reported to have started at SV769001, but I have been able to confirm two examples with numbers lower than that. The earliest one carries SV732261, has a 4" barrel and was shipped to the Navy on June 29, 1945, according to Mr. Jinks. The other is SV762832. I do not have shipping information on that one yet.
We know that the first recorded shipment to the Navy of an SV prefix revolver occurred in January, 1945. The first gun that carried a simple S prefix was S811120 and it was assembled on September 12, 1945, again according to Mr. Jinks. This is affirmed by the known whereabouts of SV811119 which, as you can see, carries the SV prefix. That gun was assembled on August 27, 1945, but didn't ship from the factory until March 1, 1946.
However, the simple S prefix marking did not take over completely right away. There are quite a few SV prefix guns that have serial numbers higher than 811120. They show up all the way to SV813132, which shipped on April 4, 1946. There are lots of simple S prefix guns within the range of S811120-S813xxx, so this was a transition period for the serial number prefix. It does appear from my research that
most of the M&P revolvers with numbers higher than 811120 have the simple S prefix, but certainly not all of them.
I hope this clarifies the situation for you, at least a little bit.