What's a "floating J" and is it significant to anything. Anyone have a picture? I googled and didn't find much.

Here's a thread with some info:

http://smith-wessonforum.com/s...info-sw-3-36-sb.html

It's not something that is unusual of affects value, just dates the guns.

Here goes my attempt at explanation:

It's a quirk of the serial number styles used by S&W on J frames in the late 1960s through early 1980s.

Early J frames produced in the 1950s through late 1960s just had numeric serials, running 1 through 700000-something.

In 1969, S&W decided they wanted the serials of J frames to begin with the letter J. So they started numbering J frames with serials beginning with J, and followed by numbers. They restarted at J1 and ran all the way through to J99999.

At that point, rather than adding a 6th digit, they decided to move the position of the letter J, and start over with a combination of 5 numbers and the letter J. After J99999, the serials switched to a format of 1J1. These ran to 1J9999 and then switched to 2J1 - 2J9999, then eventually 10J1-10J999, and eventually 100J1-100J99, and so on. All the way from 1J1 to 999J99.

Once these serial options ran out, S&W switched the position of the J back to the beginning of the serial, followed by now 6 digits. Since they had already used up to J99999 previously, they started with J100000, and ran up to J999999.

Once those combos ran out, S&W again "floated" the J and started numbering them as 1J10000. But a short time later in 1983, S&W gave up on these weird "floating J" serial number combinations, and switched J frames over to the standard 3-alpha and 4-numeric serial combos used on other S&W revolvers (e.g. AGK4312).

So during the period of 1969-1983, the "J" in J frame serial numbers "floated" position within the serials. It was sometimes at the beginning, and sometimes in the middle, of the string of either 5 or 6 numbers.


It doesn't make the J frame any more valuable. Just gives S&W collectors a shorthand way to reference J frames from that specific time period.

Usually a floating "j" with 5 numbers is 1971-72, floating "j" with 6 numbers is 1982-83. Floating "j" means s/n doesn't start with a "j". 1969-70 s/n started with "j" plus 5 other numbers. 1973-82 s/n started with "j" plus 6 other numbers. But I'm no expert.

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My model 49 s/n puts it late 1966, early 1967