Sorting, and searching ( heavy 38/44 picture thread).

[Peter M. Eick]

Ok, I took a bit of grief a while back because I said I could not find a couple of my 38/44 Outdoorsmans. My records show I own 16 but I could only locate 14. I pulled out some of the contents of several safes and sorted them out searching but I could not get to another one because Christmas stuff is piled in front of it. So here is a bit of documentation of the sorting and searching. These were shot with an Iphone as my Nikon is with the wife. I was impressed at the quality of the pictures.



Original picture. Note the 14, but I am missing 2 pre-war specimens. Both are in excellent shape which is why I don't handle or shoot them.

Here they are laid out on the floor.



While I was at it, here are my Transitional 38/44 HD's.



It looks like I have 9 of them laid out there.



Here are some post wars or more accurately models of 1950. Note the very rare Light Lug 4" HD (Thank you again Bill!).



Just for interest sake here is the lightlug (top) compared to its cousin the normal 4" postwar. If you do a search on lightlug 38/44's there were several threads about them a few years back. I vaguely remember about a dozen were made custom ordered and essentially the lug was milled off to reduce weight. I think 3 have surfaced but I am going all by memory.



Here are the pre-war 4" and 6.5" ones. They black handled one is a particularly fine shooter. What a great carry gun!



Here are some of the 5" pre wars. I am sure there are more in the third safe so consider this a subset. The 3rd one up from the bottom, second row from the right is my favorite shooter. A nice pre-war target conversion ala "McGivern" like 5" outdoorsman build on an HD frame. Fun gun to shoot, but that King front sight is sharp! Note the Lanyard loop on the low right. I have a couple like that and I noticed one of these has the serial number offset for a lanyard, but none installed. I guess they changed their mind at the last minute.



Finally after a phone call I snapped a picture of the reloading laundry room.

If you look at the pictures you will note that most of the time I either store the guns in bore stores or in black cases. There are a few anomalies where I could not get black boyt cases so I used others, but in general that is the method I used. Bore stores mean look but don't shoot. Black cases mean look and maybe shoot. Non-black means caution. Either Shooter or special gun (like the light lug).

So you can see the problem. If you are hunting up a couple of 6.5" pre-war OD's and you have a bunch of other guns in the same cases, with the same shape, unless you open everything you are going to have a heck of a time finding things. Even in this run I did not open every gun in the safes. They could easily be on another shelf that I did not sort through. I just got bored of searching as I think they are in a particular spot I could not get to right now so why waste more time looking?

Anyway, they are all locked back up, lubed and now it is time to get organized for Football!

[Peak53]

So ... THAT's why I only have one HD. There aren't any more
Seriously, what an outstanding collection! I really like the long barrel versions.
I hope those two missing examples show up after Christmas!

[Tom K]

Looks to me like you need to modify a safe or two to have drawers, so that you can see what you've got.

How do you keep/store your S&Ws



The problem is keeping things organized as you keep collecting guns, and run out of spaces to put them.

[Peter M. Eick]

Tom, that is slick!

If circumstances were different, I would immediately switch my safes over to that idea.

I have swung around to being more in a culling mood for (obvious?) reasons so I will not need all of the space I have in the safes in a few years. I have guns literally crammed in the safes so it makes no sense any more to me.

When you can no longer find guns you know you have, that is an indication you need to focus and cull a bit is the conclusion I came to.