Quote:
Originally Posted by 29-1
Hondo, the shipping date is considered the birth or production date for S&W revolvers. That's why collectors get factory letters, especially for older, more scare/possibly rare examples. A shipping date can mean the difference between hundreds to even thousands in value depending on what the letter states about a particular gun. This is also why most S&W collectors will pass on a gun that hasn't been lettered. Buy the letter, not the story...  |
The letter only supplies the shipping date because that's the only date available to Roy. He does not have the actual production (birth) date. But in reality, production dates and shipping dates can vary by days, weeks, months and as much as 10 years in extreme cases during the depression. Another example is the 32-20 M&Ps which were not produced after the 1920s but shipped as late as ~ WW II.
In those cases the features of the gun like extractor rod style, original matching # style of stocks, etc., will be far more accurate for identifying the guns actual production date.
The value of the letter is in verifying various features of the gun as factory original, like barrel length, target features, finish, other rare parts, celebrity delivery, etc., not the shipping date. That's just "nice" to know. We settle for knowing the shipping date as desirable only because there's no real production date associated with the revolver available.
Note: some members have access to the floor foreman's production date logs and only in those cases can the production date be confirmed.