Bummer that you had to surrender the gun. I suspect it was listed as stolen and will be turned into a manhole cover! As others have said, you should have swapped the stocks with a set of pachmayrs.
I bought a beautiful Flattop Ruger Blackhawk .44 from a friend in March of this year. My friend is in his 80's and purchased the gun used back in the mid-1980's. Michigan has handgun registration, so I dropped off the paperwork at my local PD.
A few days later, I received a call from Kathy in the PD records department (a very nice lady who knows me well). She informed me the Ruger Blackhawk .44, serial number 7363, was reported stolen out of Las Vegas in the late 1990's. My heart skipped a few beats...
I regained my composure and asked if she had any details on the gun. She informed me that the stolen gun had a 7-1/2" barrel. My gun has a 6-1/2" barrel, which was the only barrel length available that early in production on the .44 Blackhawk. Ruger duplicated serial numbers on their various models in the 50's and 60's (they all started at 1), so a 7-1/2" .44 with serial number 7363 had to be a Super Blackhawk, not a Blackhawk. Completely different model...
I explained all this to Kathy and she said she would call me back. Registration information is done online these days, but they were previously tracked on file cards by the Michigan State Police. The MSP didn't add the old records to the database (they go back to about 1935), so Kathy had to phone the MSP and have them dig out the old record. She was able to verify that my friend purchased it 16 years before the make/model/serial number was reported as stolen. His original registration record listed the gun as a Ruger "Single Action" .44 with a 6-1/2" barrel, with no mention of Blackhawk (which is stamped right on the frame)!
Happy ending for me and Kathy contacted the Vegas police and informed they that the stolen gun is actually a Super Blackhawk, not a Blackhawk. Hopefully, they updated the report.
