HOW FAR APART MAY SERIAL NUMBER & CARTOUCHE DATE SAFELY BE?
So far as general circumstances are concerned, the serial number SHOULD agree with the date (1877 and later, only) on the Master Armorers cartouche. The PRODUCTION DATA given on the home page of this web site gives the best correlation thus far presented. If your serial number is +/- 1500 digits from a designated final production number for a given year, that is considered acceptable because the serial numbering of receivers was to be about a month ahead of production. Thus, depending on which box of receivers was grabbed first, you can have variations of this order of magnitude. There are two notable exceptions to this rule, and both involve the final model of the trapdoor, the MODEL 1888 Rod-bayonet Rifle. A number (too many to be chance) of arms in the 97,000 – 145,000 range have been found, frequently in fine condition, in this configuration. Clearly, these represent “sweeping out the shop, or since there are so many, possibly disassembling the older model arms”. Another group of “
