Peter, Believe me it aint going to be recorded twice, i had to chisel 2 numbers out of him , i think at this point were just looking for numbers under 1000 or numbers over 6000 , all numbers between are just verifing what we already know! Don
Don, you may be correct about 5000 guns, but I still find it odd that I have found no consecutive serial numbers. Remember when I started this thread everybody thought there were 26,000 Stevens 425 High Powers manufactured. Then it was ascertained that the High Power production records were lumped in with another gun and Savage could not separate them out. If all the Stevens High Power rifles were consecutively numbered from 1000 to 6000 it would have been easy to separate them from the other gun. In addition, Brophy in his Marlin book claimed that only about 1,000 Stevens 425 High Power rifles were manufactured. Without any consectutive serial numbers we still can't make a good case for whether 5000 or 1000 guns were made.
So the 4-digit serial number of your friend's gun does become more important than just preventing duplicate numbers.
