Peter,
Congrats on your find.
There is a good thread here about the upward trend of Registered Magnum prices.
http://www.smith-wessonforum.com/ubb/Forum10/HTML/003593.html
The gun that recently sold at the Amoskeag auction was an 8.75" gun with the box and original registration certificate (I've attached a pic). Grant it, the gun is in mint condition but the 8.75" barrel is far from rare. Approximately 735 were made in that barrel length. The only barrel lengths that S&W produced more of were the 6.5 inchers at 1518, the 5 inchers at 869, and the 6 inchers at 839.
This gun sold at auction for $10,000. What's not common knowledge is that the buyer turned around and resold it to a collector the next day for $17,500. Yep 17.5K!. No fooling!
I would gladly pay $2K for the original certificate for either one of my guns. No one is really sure how many guns had certificates to begin with. S&W included a post card with the guns that the owner would have to fill out and send in to get a certificate. They were signed by DB Wesson and had all the particulars such as trigger pull both SA and DA as well as the distance the gun was sighted in at. The thing is police departments that ordered Registered Magnums never sent in for the certificates. A lot of regular folks never got around to sending in those post cards either. Probably less than half of all the Registered Magnums built were issued certificates and how many of those survived over the years? A Registered Magnum with the original certificate is a rare bird indeed.
Randy
Congrats on your find.
There is a good thread here about the upward trend of Registered Magnum prices.
http://www.smith-wessonforum.com/ubb/Forum10/HTML/003593.html
The gun that recently sold at the Amoskeag auction was an 8.75" gun with the box and original registration certificate (I've attached a pic). Grant it, the gun is in mint condition but the 8.75" barrel is far from rare. Approximately 735 were made in that barrel length. The only barrel lengths that S&W produced more of were the 6.5 inchers at 1518, the 5 inchers at 869, and the 6 inchers at 839.
This gun sold at auction for $10,000. What's not common knowledge is that the buyer turned around and resold it to a collector the next day for $17,500. Yep 17.5K!. No fooling!
I would gladly pay $2K for the original certificate for either one of my guns. No one is really sure how many guns had certificates to begin with. S&W included a post card with the guns that the owner would have to fill out and send in to get a certificate. They were signed by DB Wesson and had all the particulars such as trigger pull both SA and DA as well as the distance the gun was sighted in at. The thing is police departments that ordered Registered Magnums never sent in for the certificates. A lot of regular folks never got around to sending in those post cards either. Probably less than half of all the Registered Magnums built were issued certificates and how many of those survived over the years? A Registered Magnum with the original certificate is a rare bird indeed.
Randy
