JW
As to the pictures, you'll find them all in my MLP10 picture album. Just click on the
tab "Pictures and Albums", then search through the list page by page, until you find
MLP10 : Rare Pairs. Clicking on each picture will give you a larger image.
As to the 1902 vs 1905 question, it depends on what you think the reality is.
There are two frameworks of thought: the names/descriptions of the guns in the
catalogs and circulars, which is how the guns were sold, or the internal notes
primarily for the parts and service departments, which were trying to keep track of
the engineering changes, for obvious reasons.
The factory letters use the methodology of the engineering change notations. I believe
that it does not follow reality: when the model of 1905 was introduced, that is what it
was called: Model of 1905. Plain and simple , that is what it was, and that is what
customers bought. Its worthwhile noting that something like 50 factory employees
was the largest number of people that knew anything about the engineering change
notations. No one else in the factory had any reason, or need, to know. It was,
in some sense, a secret society !
On the other hand, there were about 800,000 commercial K-frames made between
1900 and 1940. ( I purposely am not counting the sales for WW2. ) Just for fun,
assume that each buyer of those 800,000 guns bought two of them. So, this means
that 400,000 non-military people read some kind of factory advertising, and based
on that, bought a couple of these guns. In a lot of cases, the guns were ordered
from a distributor, or dealer, or the factory, and so great care had to be taken to
make sure that the order was clear about what was being requested.
In other words, that is how the guns were known to the commercial market. People
thought they were buying either a Model of 1905 or a Model of 1902, up until about
1920, when those two names were changed to Square Butt Model and Round Butt
Model. This, to me, is the reality of the naming, and that is how they ought to be
described.
As a side-note, it's worthwhile mentioning that from 1904, for the next 60 years, the
catalogs and circulars always had two separate pages for the .38 M&P: a page for the
round-butt model, and a page for the square-butt model. You can see all these pages
in my MLP11 : 1902 vs 1905 picture library.
As to your square-butt gun, in my view its a model of 1905, not a 1902. That is probably
why Bob Neal has never seen a square-butt 1902. The 1905 was introduced before the 5th frame screw.
It was started at serial 58000 - the fifth frame screw comes at 62450. These two concepts
are not related - one is a new model introduction, and the other is a subsequent engineering
change. The engineering change definitions distort things - purposely - by combining them.
The reason they do this is to avoid the confusion of two different models that are otherwise
identical. Ie, if they kept them separate, then at 62450, that would be the 1st engineering
change for the 1905, but the second engineering change for the 1902. This, to me, is the
crux of the problem.
Another way to say this is that, as they did with the early pre-WW2 K-22's and K-32's, they
ran two models simultaneously in the same serial number series. That is, the Model of 1905 is
intertwined with the Model of 1902, as it relates to serial numbers. This would present no
problem if there were no intermediate engineering changes. Unfortunately, the Model of 1905
is introduced towards the end of the Model of 1902 1st change. Its unknown how many 4-screw
square-butt 1905's were produced before the introduction of the 5th frame screw, but there were
4450 serial numbers used before the 5th frame screw. It would be another 6 months or so until
the next engineering change revised the lockwork.
Regards, Mike
