The best you can do for a manufacturing date is a reasonable approximation based on other info. Clearly no gun can can be shipped without having first been manufactured, and it is probably mostly true that guns were manufactured in serial number order. That last generalization is weak in the case of different models numbered in the same series, because it would make more sense for the factory to make up a bunch of one model, regardless of the frame numbers available to them, than to make a couple of hundred of one model, then a thousand or so of a more popular model, then a couple hundred more of the first one.
But I think if you look closely at serial numbers around the one that interests you, the earliest recorded ship date for a gun within a few hundred of the number of interest will mark the latest possible date of manufacture. On the low side, the earliest ship date found for a gun numbered a thousand or so lower will probably set the earliest possible manufacture date within a week or so.
A catch: remember that sometimes thousands of frames could be manufactured and numbered, but no guns assembled until much later, with the assembly crews taking prepared frames as needed from the parts inventory.
If you are trying to date a gun from early in a model's production history, you are in much better shape, because we often know the date that production began. And dating a gun from a huge military contract is pretty easy because those were almost certainly assembled and shipped in numerical order. Until late in the war, for example, most Victory revolvers seem to have been shipped almost as soon as they were built. The same seems to be true of the Army contract 1917s and the British .455 military revolvers (with the understanding that there is less clarity about manufacture dates for the rare guns chambered in other calibers and shipped to commercial distributors).
So assembly dates are not ultimately knowable with precision, but a reasonable date range is not beyond all conjecture.
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David Wilson
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