Quote:
Originally Posted by rburg
I'm not doubting Roy, but that ship date kind of violates the tables he and Supica and Nahas have been printing for decades. I think the truth of life we can take from this is don't trust the tables very far.
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Dick - I am too lazy to go look, but was the information in SCSW3 manufacturing dates or ship dates?? Anyway, K9XXX, K15XXX, and K17XXX shipped in early 1948.
I have been doing a ship date correlation for models, but have not gotten up to the K frames yet. What I see is, in general, we make too much of random shipping of S&Ws. There are many early models that have near perfect shipping/sn correlation, others that can be reliably dated to within 2 years, and only a few to date that have little to no correlation.
Examples like 32 DA, 32 Safety, Model 1 1/2 & Model 2 Tip-ups have near perfect ship date/sn correlation, while the 38 DA, 38 SA, 44 DA, NM3 have little correlation. Post-war K frame Masterpiece revolvers are in near perfect ship date order for their production from 1946 to 1970, probably due the the market demand being near the capacity of the factory to produce this model during all these years.
There is also a likelihood that the early and late years of production for many models show the most abnormalities, where the model was either just gaining popularity or was losing sales due to a replacement model introduction.