Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Redux: Gene's 1920/26 Project Thread

Like 260 said, rifles in unusual configurations. My 1912 H 22HP was advertised as barn find condition with no name vintage scope. When I got it, under better light, I could see Malcolm. Got a JTC letter and it states the date it came into the warehouse, and it shipped out later that day to, The Malcolm Rifle Telescope Co. My high condition 250-3000 V2 that I got from Randy. The butt stock is off a little from the receiver and forearm. He got two letters and the receiver number had the usual info. The stock number said, "no rifle with that number left the factory". The consensus was that confirmed the butt stock was original to the rifle. I'd like a letter for my K, butt not $70 worth of "like".

I might have misread what Rory and others said, but, I don't think your ship date on the rifle is unreliable, it's just out of sequence. Maybe old Fred grabbed an action and stuck it in his locker, or on a shelf, to build his own gun. Then old Fred croaked, and no one found it for 2 years, who knows?

That's right. As far as anybody knows, the accepted/ship dates are reliable. It's just that guns weren't finished in serial number order. It might be that mine that shipped 2 years late went around to expositions and a world fair - it was B engraved and fancy walnut. But nothing recorded about expositions, and no entry for the engraving/other options.

You get what you get. More factory letters AND bringing the data here does help to refine dates. Don't get me wrong.. they do help. But it takes a number of them, and lettering "regular" guns is the most useful since special order guns are the most likely to ship late.

To confuse things even more, the later ledgers from 40's and on only record ship dates. Which means if they had a large backlog, the dates reported include the lag time before shipping. I always prefer the "Accepted from factory" date, because that's the actual "manufacture date".

Regarding the out of sequence serial numbers that pop from time to time, I have long wondered that, since 99s were assembled by hand, if the guy doing the assembly pick a receiver out of a box or bucket that wasn't quite "right", he'd put it into a box or bucket under his workstation and get to it when he got to it. Sometimes those boxes or buckets would get forgotten and when found, reworked, assembled, and "accepted".

That's my thought also. Or the rifle maybe failed quality assurance for some relatively minor reason, but it would take twice as much time to fix the fault on that rifle than it would to work a new gun. So management had them put on problem racks because total output was important to meet orders. Maybe had a few skilled guys that would work the "problem" racks as piecework for overtime or something.

Or bins, buckets, boxes of receivers went into storage after completion and pulled randomly to fill orders, as SOP, instead flowing straight into the production line. We assume that Savage production was linear when in fact I'll bet it wasn't.

Possible, but the pictures I've seen of the manufacturing/assembly shows racks of guns being moved as groups, not as a wall of racked parts or what not. Might have been different before the receivers got paired with stocks..

I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Components being made in batches and shuffled into the warehouse to be drawn to fill requests from the assembly dept. At that point manufacturing started flowing linearly once receivers were mated to barrels and stocks. Again just a guess.

One thing that's obvious to me is that Savage never heard of FIFO (first in first out) in terms of parts storage and finished product warehousing. Heck, we didn't adopt that until around 1980 where I worked.

That's right. As far as anybody knows, the accepted/ship dates are reliable. It's just that guns weren't finished in serial number order.[/quote]

And that’s the part I was referring to as unreliable. However it is assumed that guns were assembled from bins of parts then maybe it’s really a date of assembly that’s most important.

Yep. Using that 1920 ledger page from Cody:

If you randomly lettered a rifle on that page, you'd get an accepted date somewhere between July 2nd, 1920 and August 31, 1920 - an 8 week range in which they produced 3,600 rifles total in reality.

The same rifle on that page would fall into a shipping date range of July 21, 1920 to November 8, 1922 - a 120 week range.


The 8 week accepted by date range isn't bad - unless you're trying to identify the end of year. Being off by potentially 3,000 rifles is a chunk.


But having ANY data is far better than having none. Murray's early years before 1917 are off by a LOT, and we've found even the American Rifleman dates can be improved. So the more we get, the better date ranges we get.

I found that true while collecting data on the 99-H. The second version of the barrel band H started at around 340000 (1932). So far I have found 9 with receivers serialed between 187xxx and 235xxx that were assembled as this later version around 10 years later.