coljimmy wrote on Sep 16
th, 2018 at 10:25pm:
It's a shame that the records burned and we cant decode the Letter/Figure and number "serial numbers, probably just lot numbers as the letters repeated themselves.
James H.
But the "circle of confusion" isn't large: at it's maximum, only 5 yrs, 1915 to 1920.
Furthermore, we know from the Congressional hearings on Moisin-Nagant production held in Dec 1917 that Westinghouse was frantic to complete their Russian order before the Bolshevik gov't made a separate peace treaty with the Germans...which they did a few months later. Given that urgency, how many workers would have been available to continue civilian production? Possibly a few, but doesn't seem very likely that wartime production of Favorites, or other Stevens models, would have been great. (By 1915, in fact, every US maker of arms & ammo was trying to cash-in on orders pouring in from Europe.) Considering all this, it seems logical that most of the pre-Savage 1915s would have been built between the end of the war & sometime in 1920.
When Stevens A&T was reorganized in 1916 into "J. Stevens," were there any public notices of suspended or curtailed production of the pre-war models, as many gunmakers did during WWII? Probably not, or it would have been previously reported by Grant or others.