I am interested in finding the age of my new departure pistol, before I send in any requests for history of the gun. serial #41xxx. I want to make sure it falls into the "antique" category per US standards. So far I know it was manufactured up to 1902, an exact year would be helpful. Thanks in advance!

you'll probably need to post the entire serial number.. & even then it's a dice* shoot, S&W shipped these out of sequence... so a pistol with a 2000 lower serial # might have been shipped 2 years later than newer ones if I'm remembering what the docents/mavens here have said... but with the whole #, guys will chime in with shipping dates of their pistols with lower or higher #'s ... hope this helps.

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be safe,enjoylife,journey well

Welcome to the Forum. That is a 32 Safety Hammerless, 1st Model, shipped in 1892. The cut-off number for antique status is 91,400 for this model. Actually, 32 Safeties were shipped into the 1930s.

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Gary
SWCA 2515

Welcome to the Forum. If you really want to know when your gun was made ( not when it was shipped, but when it was made ) the floor Foreman's daily production logs for the .32 Safety Hammerless models are at the the Springfield History Museum. I know because I helped donate them there a few years ago when they were part of the late Bill Maier's Estate. These are very fragile hand written note books, so you would have to contact the Museum as to the correct way to access these records. The Museum is a tax supported public institution so their material is available to researchers. The S&W Factory Historian, Roy Jinks, has only the shipping records, so the factory letters will not tell you when the gun was made, but when it was shipped. The BATF usually goes by the shipping dates to determine whether a gun is an antique, etc., however the manufacturing dates, when known, will trump a shipping date if there's a controversy. For example, S&W.44DAs are all considered as antiques, although many were shipped up to the 1915 era, as Roy Jinks found records at the factory the showed all the .44DA frames were made before 1899. Ed.