Smith & Wesson
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Right now, I am questing through the archives looking for “orphans”; Registered Magnums that have had their paperwork mis-filed so that it exists but can’t be found (and on a philosophical note, does information exist if it can not be found?). I’ve managed to fill in quite a few Registered Magnum gaps and am learning…
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Searching for information in the archives is not really as easy as one might think. There is a great limitation placed upon the archive by the fact that the people who entered in all the data were not ‘gun people’ and thus were not as accurate as they might have been in discerning between a…
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MAGOPUS Update 17JUL26 I managed to add 88 guns to my Magnum Opus project (MAGOPUS) since the last update. The vast majority of them were what I call ‘orphans; Magnums for which no data could be found in the archive. I explained these, I think, fairly well in this post: MIA Magnums: The Magnums Missing…
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Magnum Musings: Long Distance While perusing the archives searching for MIA Magnums, I found a batch of five that were part of a single order. They are so odd as to be humorous. The S&W Magnum could be ordered from the factory targeted with a variety of sights and at a wide range of distances. I’ve…
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The greatest disappointment when requesting a historical letter on a gun, be it from the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation (SWHF), Colt Archives or any other lettering service is when the response comes back “No Record Found”. The key word in that depressingly terse statement is “found”. No one is saying that a record doesn’t…
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History and development of the Smith & Wesson Model 64 NY-1 family of revolvers contract produced for the NYPD
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The way the Rabbit Hole of my research works is like this: I start writing about something, I find a small item within that research that sends me off on a tangent, while on the tangent I find another small item and the next you know I’m researching Brooklyn mother-of-pearl manufacturers who contracted with S&W…
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I’ve been working on my Registered Magnum project (MAGOPUS) this past week. I managed to add 92 completed entries. A completed entry is one that has all available information on a gun as well as the file names that were the source of the data. This last point is very important, as it allows me…
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One of the guns that I had the most difficulty in finding for my collection of NYPD guns was a Smith & Wesson Terrier with the appropriate provenance. While I am confident that several thousand Terriers went to the Department, I can only find records for about 1,700. Once Chiefs Special’s came out, the days…
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When one looks at the entries in the Shipping Ledgers, it is very easy to overlook guns that may have a significant history. The Shipping Ledgers have, at different times, recorded different fields of information. As part of my NOVEMBERFRAME and MAGOPUS projects, I’m working right now in the pre-war N-frame revolver records. During this…