Good news from the gun show...

[Truckman]

One of the seven guns I acquired this past weekend was a S&W K22 Masterpiece with a three digit serial number, making it a very early production gun...I had a hunch it was special when I looked it up at home and saw it was manufactured in 1946, one of the very first postwar sporting arms...It's blued, 6" barrel, all numbers match (barrel, frame, cylinder, extractor star and even the walnut grips)...It came with a period correct and model specific box that may or may not be original (they didn't print serial numbers on boxes in those years)...

So playing a hunch, I asked S&W's official historian, Roy Jinks, today when this gun shipped from the factory...S&W does not keep records of dates of manufacture, only shipping dates...He looked it up and said this one shipped March of 1947, two months after I arrived on the scene...That makes this gun not only very valuable in its own right, but it is now my birth year gun...Somebody roll out the cake, and light the candles!......Ben

[Note: It can be scene in this group photo of the weekend haul at the top left of the first pic...Its box is second from the top in pic two...The third photo is a newly remanufactured Marlin Camp Carbine in .45 ACP which I've been looking for diligently for some time...Most of the vintage Marlins I find are close to paperweight status with cracked stocks from the heavy recoil...I bought this prototype rebuild from the manufacturer for less money than I see on most of the originals I've found...]