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Stuff like this is part of why I check this site several times a day. There's always something interesting that I'd never noticed before.
My new 640 has one hole too. I started to check my 36 and remembered that it doesn't have a shroud. Pulled a Taurus snubnose out of the cabinet and it has a mark in the same place, but it's an X instead of a hole. Taroman's answer seems likely to me.
Those look more like bleed holes than locator holes. Are they actually blind or could there be a channel to the inside of the shroud around the barrel?
Here are similar holes in the extractor shrouds of a Model 686-6 and a 617-6.
They are not through holes, they are just very shallow holes, almost countersinks.
I have done a fair amount of CNC work, and I have never heard of an 'indexing spot'. They are not spot faces. Spot faces are flat features milled onto the surface of parts, usually castings, for a reference surface. They could possibly be the remnants of tooling holes that were machined away when the groove was cut, but for the life of me I can't figure out why tooling holes would be useful in that position.
I have lots of Smith and Wesson revolvers, some made on CNC equipment before the lock/mim parts era, and these two are the only ones that have these features in the groove of the extractor shroud. The 617 was made in 2003, the 686 was brand new last year. Clearly, S&W is not going to expend extra effort machining useless features into their parts, but I am a bit stymied as to what these features are.
As Driftwood says, they are NOT CNC indexing marks. I also have done CNC, and in a production setting the workpiece is not dismounted from a dedicated chuck/potchuck, then remounted elsewhere. Unless the intention was to waste money.
Very interesting. I noticed this marking on the inside of my M&P .40's slide. I know - it's not a revolver - but it is a S&W product. There are five or seven of these shallow holes in a double-column pattern. ::. I have thought about asking what they are, but never got around to it. I would bet that the holes in the revolvers serve the same identification purpose as on their autoloaders.
If I can learn something new that is gun related every day then life is grand. Seems the more I learn the more I discover that I have a lot more to learn.
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