Originally Posted by Grogel_Deluxe
Gene, is it just me or does it seem that when the task of entering all that pat. info was done, many of the firearms related items where miss spelled in such a way to make them hard to find.


Actually they spell beter than I do - I just write my posts in WORD and use the spell checker before I post (I actually do!)

Seriously though all US patents before 1976 are only stored as scanned .tif files and not as text. GOOGLE uses text recognition software to try to decipher it, if you look at some of the stored scans they are not very clear of sharp, the software will read specks of dirt as part of a letter and miss light or missing areas - for example a B with a faded bottom will be read as a P, a P with a speck of dirt a B, a K could end up being read as a R, P, B, or b. You can see the problem. Most of the patents I have, I stored as pictures about 3 years ago from the US patent site, I filtered out just gun patents - their site is harder to use initially but makes it much faster to view patents once you have some filtered out. This is from their web site with the restrictions for the early patents -
"Patents from 1790 through 1975 are searchable only by Issue Date, Patent Number, and Current US Classification. When searching for specific numbers in the Patent Number field, patent numbers must be seven characters in length, excluding commas, which are optional"

You also must have a program capable of reading .tif files - they have a link to a couple of free ones which is what I used.

I recently tried to find a patent using just the date - there were 850+ patent assigned on that one day!!! I filter out the firearms patents and ended up with 3 but none of them were the ones, don't think just having a patent date will make finding a paticular patent easy!

I only use the Google site to relookup patents I had already found and then post that link because it does not require a special viewer.

Gene

As long as we are looking at pumps, here are some more Marlins - 22's though. 2nd up from the bottom is a model 32 and has the Swebilius rear sight - standard on those, pre WWI - it was also used for a short time after WWI on early model 38's, all I have seen with it are Marlin-Rockwell stamped. Those sights are very easily broken and many you see will be damaged (not that you really see many!).
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Last edited by GeneB; 08/02/10. Reason: added picture