32 he question

[ky wonder]

i have inherited a old 32 he 2 inch, that is nickel plated with what i assume are aftermerket mother of pearl grips that have been on the gun for years, they are an excellant fit but no medallions, the nickel is at least 98% and it locks up tight with good timing, 4 line smith address on the I frame and serial number is 5751xx, this gun has been a drawer queen all its life no evidence that it has ever been fired on the forcing crane or cylinder face, the only flaws to the finish is light flecking on two of the cyl flutes opposite each other ( i assume they were the one at the top and bottom all those years and never wiped clean) i know that this gun is about 40000 numbers from where my gun book showed the last 1903 model was stopped making it a post war, pre model 30 but it has the half moon front sight.

my mother in law left me this gun and she lived in dc every since she went to work for the government at the start of ww2, and her daughter never knew she had a gun. or the city government for that matter!

i was hoping that someone here could give me a date of birth for this gun, and answer the question as to when the half moon sites were discontinued on the early smiths

[DCWilson]

Welcome to the forum. A serial number in the 575xxx range would most likely put this gun in the late 1940s or early '50s.

It's always tempting to get too precise on a serial number, but S&W didn't always ship their guns in serial number order. They were mostly (but not always) produced in serial order, but a gun could sit on the shelf for a couple of years or more before it was shipped. So even if this gun was assembled as early as the late '40s, it might not have actually gone out the factory door until the early '50s.

I seem to recall that half round sights were replaced with ramp sights in a model redesign in 1953. So if you think of your gun as a 1952 unit, you probably wouldn't be more than a year off.

A lot of us here like the old prewar and immediate postwar I-frame .22s and .32s. Any chance you could post a photo or two? There are how-to instructions in the "Forum Office" subforum.

[smith17]

ky:
I assume yours is like this one but in nickel? I just picked this one up on the west FL coast; I believe the conventional latch of the early post war guns came before the flat latch guns, at least for the .32 HE.

Ed