What happened to the number 11 in S&W's model sequence?

A

aarondhgraham

New member
Basically, did S&W never use the number 11 or was there a S&W Model 11 that never made it to market?

It never dawned on me that there was a number missing until I started a list for a friend of mine.

Just curious if there is any historical lore here.

Where's Mike Irwin when we need him?

Aarond

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Model 11 is a M&P .38-200/.38 S&W, the commercial equivalent of the Lend Lease and Victory model revolvers we furnished the British in WWII.

BB says made 1938-1965 but of course only the 1957-1965 guns would have been cataloged and marked "Model 11."
 
They made them for overseas areas, mostly current or former British colonies or possessions whose police had been using .380 (".38/200") Webley Mk IV or surplus Enfield revolvers and had stocks of that ammunition.

Jim
 
They made them for overseas areas, mostly current or former British colonies or possessions...
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...however, IIRC it is believed that very few were actually sold, as the British military adopted the BHP around this time and started dumping their pre-existing WWII .38/200 S&W revolvers on the American commercial market and to random "Continental" European police agencies. Consequently, the potential market vanished overnight. There was little reason for a LE agency to order a factory-new S&W when they could probably buy 5 gently used ones from the British Army for the same price. :rolleyes:

Also, IIRC the gun never showed up in the normal S&W consumer catalog, only as a LE special-order item.
 
It just didn't make sense that they would skip a number outright.
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Actually, S&W has done this on a few occasions. Usually, a skipped model number was actually assigned to an experimental model that never made it into production. Examples of this include the models 47, 54, 55, and 62.

Likewise, there are some hand-ejectors which never received model numbers to begin with because they were discontinued before 1957. Probably the best example of this is the M&P in .32-20.
 
I may be wrong, but IIRC, some of those S&Ws went to the Hong Kong police. Still, by that time, revolvers were generally being phased out; the same fate befell the S&W 9mm revolvers. Still, a company has to meet customers' requirements at the time, and the Model 11 would not have cost any more than the Model 10.

Jim
 
"Where's Mike Irwin when we need him?"

Exploring brave new worlds of heat exhaustion, otherwise known as spending a week at my Mom's working on her barn of a Victorian.

Your regularly scheduled Mike Irwin will return Monday morning.
 
Okay, I'm all embarrassed now,,,

I read all of your posts with great interest,,,
Then I went back into my Standard Catalogue of Firearms.

I swear I looked in there before I posted this thread,,,
I didn't see a dang thing about the Model 11.

But this time when I went in it had magically appeared,,,
I blame those pesky Book Elves for this,,,
They invisibleized the paragraph.

Thanks for the interesting reading gentlemen.

Aarond

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