Quote:
Originally Posted by retnavyshooter
. . . Ser. # 97J424 . . . Would appreciate a date if someone could research . . .
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MetalMan
The “floating J” should place this as 1971-1972 . . . Someone else may come along and narrow the date down a bit.....
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Quote:
Originally Posted by two-bit cowboy
. . . I'd say it likely shipped in the first quarter of 1971.
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I'm going to guess sometime in the 1st quarter of 1972 . . . not because I have one nearby with a known ship date . . . or that I've been keeping track of actual ship dates for floating J s/n's . . . but because I got bored one day and did some ciphering on the floating J plus one-to-five numerical digits serial numbers
IF the floating J serial numbers started Jan 1st 1971 and ended Dec 31st 1972 . . . and IF there were an equal number of “floating J-frames” produced in 1971 and 1972 . . . the dividing line between '71 and '72 would be near the 56J prefix . . . meaning a 1J1 to 55J999 s/n would be 1971 and a 56J1 to 999J99 would be 1972.
If that’s not intuitive, here's a hint: 1J1 to 1J9999 has 10,000 combinations . . . and . . . 999J1 to 999J99 has 100 combinations.
Hopefully someone who has been keeping tract of actual ship dates will come along and provide us a real (rather than theoretical) answer to this perplexing question.
Russ