Saturday, February 19, 2011

S&W Model 40 Centennial Part 1

 As of right now my Model 40 is not complete and I don't even have most of the gun on hand. All I have is a lonely cylinder sitting forlorn on my desk next to a cut down Galco and a hand full of Buffalo Bore 38 special +P rounds. This little project started when a good friend of mine and I decided we wanted matching 38s that we could customize side by side. We started out looking at some of the older case hardened Model 40s. That idea was rapidly scrapped when we started thinking about what kind of ammo we wanted to use and with the advances in modern ammunition we decided the current +P rounds would put more stress than desired on an original. So we started researching newer models designed to handle more powerful loads. The idea was again to find case hardened new manufacture Model 40s. Apparently we were about a year late and Smith and Wesson had stopped producing the case hardened models. As is goes in the gun world what you want is not all ways what you can get. We started browsing through gunbroker.com and called several gun shops we deal with but to no avail. We came across several used but none that were new and in the price range we wanted. This problem was not to hard to overcome, we settled with what was available. Two brand new blued Model 40s. Price wise the pair was right in the range we wanted and we were able to get an even better price because we bought two. Luckily S&W was also giving a $50 mail in rebate at the time. Bonus!

    
To be continued...

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