H&R .22 Sportsman Gun ID-Difference

TheOldVikingLocker

I hold an FFL License
I buy & Sell a fair number of H&R .22 Sportsman Revolvers.
Some Sportsman have "999" model on gun, some do not.
Looking at both guns side-by-side I cannot see any difference.
Can anyone up-date me on this.
TheOldVikingLocker

He Dog

bgoforth is the guy you want to talk with. Go to members at the top of the page, then on the memberspage, put in bgoforth in the search box. Drop him an e-mail with your question. Good guy, very knowledgeable.

b.goforth

h&r has a history of changing markings on their guns. on prewar model 999 sportsman most will have the the model name and model number. post war seem to be mostly just model name and late version 1979 on seem to have just the model number. and to make matters worse new england firearms came along made the model 999 sportsmans on the same machinery that h&r used. They used several different ways of marking their products in their 10 years of manufacturing the sportman.

i am at present doing an in depth study of h&r firearms and have found over three hundred different model name and numbers they have used between 1871 and 1986, many of them were model names or numbers for the same firearm. and many were very short lived. for instance in the 1979 catlog the model name "auto-ejection revolver" was revived for that year only for the model 999. the name 'sportsman' does not appear in the 1979 catalog.

i have come up with a working serial number list for the sportsman model 999 for 1932 until 1939 and ofcourse 1940 and later years of manufacture can be identified by the letter codes use in the serial number (this includes the limited production during wwII 1942-1944).
bill