S&W
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If you are reading this because you subscribed, be aware there are a few large images that you may miss. If they don’t appear in your email, read the original at: Original Post Magnum Opus Project (MAGOPUS) Update – 07OCT26 I have completed, for the most part, adding a solid block of 500 serial numbers…
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One of the by-products of having to read through so many documents within the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation archives is that one learns a great deal more about a vast multitude of things than one set out to do. I’ve said before, and I really do believe it, that I could write a fairly…
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(I mention a guns specific serial number here and I do so because the owner of the gun had already publicly posted the s/n on a public forum. If he had posted it on a private forum, I would not disclose the s/n without his permission.) A sleeper is a gun that flies under the…
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MAGOPUS Update 24AUG26 I’ve been rather busy the past few weeks with some research with the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation and the result has been that my personal research has taken a bit of a hit time-wise. However, I have started looking in directions I otherwise might not have gone in. For example, I’ve…
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(All document images courtesy of Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation unless indicated otherwise) I haven’t said anything publicly about it, but a few weeks ago I became one of the fortunate few who gets to write what we used to call “Factory Letters” for the Smith & Wesson Historical Foundation. I didn’t want to be…
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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…